--- Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The question of whether "in popular culture" or "trivia" sections should be included in articles has been raised many times, and I don't want to hash over the whole debate again (My version of the discussions is something like: "Are they encyclopedic?" "Maybe not, but it's the only way some people can contribute. Also, it makes us more hip and up to date than EB." "Well, I think they are crap." "Well, we agree to disagree.")
I guess I would distinguish between "analysis" sections, and straight out "list of trivia" or "list of pop culture references" sections. With the latter, an alternative solution is to split out too-trivial stuff into a subarticle. We did this with [[NSA in fiction]], to avoid having things like --
* In the 1999 Highlander: The Raven episode The Rogue, Bert Myers claims to be from the NSA. * In the 2000 Nintendo 64 video game Perfect Dark, Trent Easton, the corrupt head of the agency, uses agents to do his dirty work.
cluttering up the main [[National Security Agency]] article.
I think it's a reasonable solution because A) no information is lost (which is otherwise something that upsets many); and B) the main article on the topic is better off for sticking to the important stuff.
Listing verifiable facts in an article like [[Space colonization in popular culture]] is not an NOR problem, IMO.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
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