--- Brian M brian1954@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be deleted. It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. But when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes a major problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at all.
I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has noticed and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a [[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?
Seriously, how does one go about deleting these sections? Someone is going to insist that it is "removal of information" and, therefore, vandalism to remove them.
Yes, I can see that happening :( But just like questioning accuracy or neutrality of material, I think it's quite legitimate to question something's importance (relative to the topic) in an article. There's a trade-off at work here, something like:
* The benefit of the information provided;
versus
* The risk of bloating the article and making it less useful as a concise survey of a topic.
This is quite a different dynamic to VfD, because trivia parceled up in its own separate article is much less harmful to other content (some might even say harmless).
On a large scale, we can be guided by the balance that other people have thought workable, for example, themes that are covered in other encyclopedia articles, books, textbooks, surveys, etc. Ultimately, though, the best any of us can do is to make a heuristic judgement about how "trivial" such information is -- it might be controversial, but we can try and discuss things and arrive at consensus (yes, I'm an optimist...)
-- Matt
[[User:Matt Crypto]]
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
Matt R wrote:
--- Brian M brian1954@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be deleted. It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. But when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes a major problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at all.
I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has noticed and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a [[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?
I would strongly caution against a blanket purge. Take [[ununpentium]], for instance - the popular culture stuff is most of the reason anyone would look at it. At which point they learn *why* it got into popular culture, and can learn about the [[island of stability]] and UFO nut [[Bob Lazar]]. It adds a lot of interest to an otherwise almost cookie-cutter sciencecruft article.
A lot of articles are not in fact very balanced. This happens. Better to split off the trivia to another suitable article than just delete it because you don't care. "The existence of this pisses me off" is not in fact a reason to delete.
One example of how to handle this is [[Lilith]]. The ==Lilith in popular culture== section was about to overwhelm the article, so it all got put into [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]. The section says to see that article because people kept putting trivia into it. Now [[Lilith]] is reasonably balanced and the thousand uses of Lilith in popular culture are usefully placed at a disambig.
In any case, nuclear weapons in popular culture is a huge and fascinating sociological topic, for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War and to try to get across what it felt like to those who aren't. It still amazes me when I meet mature adults with kids who don't remember the Cold War and just don't understand WTF I'm talking about.
- d.
In any case, nuclear weapons in popular culture is a huge and fascinating sociological topic, for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War and to try to get across what it felt like to those who aren't. It still amazes me when I meet mature adults with kids who don't remember the Cold War and just don't understand WTF I'm talking about.
That's of course the hopeful point of the "In popular culture" section for that article. But does it currently accomplish that? I think not -- it is mostly a list of Hollywood movies. That's sort of my point: cultural impacts are important, but a list of movies or times something is used in video games is not a real metric of cultural impact and doesn't tell you anything new.
See [[philosopher's stone]] for another excellent example of something which COULD have an interesting section on how and why it is used in popular culture (notions of immortality, alchemy, mystery, secrecy!), but instead has a list of Japanese cartoons and video games which in some minor way feature something called a philosopher's stone.
FF