Fiction is a very broad term. fictions can be used for rhetorical
purposes in serious discourse--fictional examples are a mainstay of
philosophical argument, dating back to Plato's cave, if not earlier.
For this hypothetical animal, I do not think there will be any
difficulty finding a citation that says that it is a fiction.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Surreptitiousness
<surreptitious.wikipedian(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
I freely admit I have an issue with fictional
categories. I find them
somewhat in the face of what categorisation was intended to do, or at
least my thoughts on what it was intended to do, which was to classify
as unambiguously and as relevantly as possible. I'm prompted into this
steam-letting by the discovery that Schrödinger's cat is categorised as
a fictional cat. I'm half tempted to slap a citation needed on that
one. It's an interesting conundrum which for me highlights the issues
with categorising fictional elements. It's a problem I guess we at the
comics project face more than some, although not as often as others. It
has been a battle avoiding category bloat on Batman especially. The
problem is where to stop. We have characters by nationality, which to
me seems absurd since you find Mandarin (comics) nestling in
Category:English people because his mother was English. Now
sidestepping the fact that a fictional character doesn't exist, let
alone have a mother, how can we know this character identifies as
English? Gosh darn it's a tricky beast. One day I'll write an essay on
the matter. Apologies for ranting. Now, can someone set up a bot which
will add or remove Schrödinger's cat to the fictional cat category every
other day please.
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