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.").
But I had a recent thought about it. Wouldn't any discussions about the impact or prevalence of something in popular culture need to have been discussed by a secondary source first before it was allowed into an article under WP:NOR?
What I'm basically proposing is perhaps one way to deal with it (that a draconian, anti-"in popular culture" person like me would be happy with) would be to restrict such sections or articles to places where there exists a secondary source literature on the subject.
For example, [[Nuclear weapon in popular culture]] -- not the best article, admittedly, but there has been ample writing on the subject by scholars, including general appearance and trends of nuclear weapons motifs in popular culture, and even specific analysis of the apperance of nuclear weapons in cinema. Satisifies WP:NOR without any problem, in the hypothetical (exact contents still probably need some work).
But [[Space colonization in popular culture]] has no such sources listed. It is a more common article of this sort, based most likely on an overgrown "in popular culture" section of an article on space colonization. Does this constitute "original research" as laid out in WP:NOR?
Other articles of this sort include [[A-10 Thunderbolt II in popular culture]], [[Amateur radio in popular culture]], and [[Fullerenes in popular culture]], to pick a few at random. An article which *probably* wouldn't be NOR -- though it doesn't have any secondary sources of the sort I am talking about listed -- would be [[Heroin in popular culture]], a subject which I imagine people have probably written about extensively given the amount of literature and film which have be based on heroin-related topics.
Just a thought I had -- not a crusade in any sense -- that I thought I would float on here. I understand I'm a bit cranky on this subject, no doubt due to my personal feeling that an encyclopedia article on the [[Enola Gay]] should not be forced to referenced the fact that Krusty the Klown had an airplane called the "I'm-on-a-Rolla'-Gay" in one episode of "the Simpsons", but I am not trying to be a hard-ass on the subject, and recognize it is not the most pressing problem.
FF
On Feb 17, 2006, at 12:47 PM, Fastfission wrote:
But I had a recent thought about it. Wouldn't any discussions about the impact or prevalence of something in popular culture need to have been discussed by a secondary source first before it was allowed into an article under WP:NOR?
NOR has long been a bit slippery with fiction, both popular and literary. The problem is that by the most hardline interpretation of NOR, plot summaries of novels aren't allowed. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), bending NOR for fictional texts has led to things like the "in popular culture" sections. But unbending it is its own sort of problematic.
-Phil
On 2/17/06, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
NOR has long been a bit slippery with fiction, both popular and literary. The problem is that by the most hardline interpretation of NOR, plot summaries of novels aren't allowed.
Not QUITE true; paraphrasing other people's citeable plot summaries would be allowed.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), bending NOR for fictional texts has led to things like the "in popular culture" sections. But unbending it is its own sort of problematic.
Ugh, yes.
-Matt
On 17/02/06, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Feb 17, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Matt Brown wrote:
Not QUITE true; paraphrasing other people's citeable plot summaries would be allowed.
Indeed, but let's face it - the majority of novels do not have these.
Book reviews.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 17 Feb 2006, at 18:07, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 17/02/06, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Feb 17, 2006, at 1:01 PM, Matt Brown wrote:
Not QUITE true; paraphrasing other people's citeable plot summaries would be allowed.
Indeed, but let's face it - the majority of novels do not have these.
Book reviews.
I dont see summarising the plot of a novel is OR, no more than picking out the salient facts from a biography is.
Justinc
--- Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Feb 17, 2006, at 12:47 PM, Fastfission wrote:
But I had a recent thought about it. Wouldn't any discussions about the impact or prevalence of something in popular culture need to have been discussed by a secondary source first before it was allowed into an article under WP:NOR?
NOR has long been a bit slippery with fiction, both popular and literary. The problem is that by the most hardline interpretation of NOR, plot summaries of novels aren't allowed.
That would be a very hard-line interpretation of NOR indeed. A plot summary is very much like the everyday process of summarising a topic that goes on in Wikipedia all the time. To summarise, to summarise is not original research.
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
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Snowspinner wrote:
On Feb 17, 2006, at 12:47 PM, Fastfission wrote:
But I had a recent thought about it. Wouldn't any discussions about the impact or prevalence of something in popular culture need to have been discussed by a secondary source first before it was allowed into an article under WP:NOR?
NOR has long been a bit slippery with fiction, both popular and literary. The problem is that by the most hardline interpretation of NOR, plot summaries of novels aren't allowed. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), bending NOR for fictional texts has led to things like the "in popular culture" sections. But unbending it is its own sort of problematic.
How about computer and video games? What if no-one else has ever written about it? Should we not have articles on them?
On 2/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
How about computer and video games? What if no-one else has ever written about it? Should we not have articles on them?
I find it hard to believe there exists a shipped game that nobody wrote a word about, ever.
For one thing, there's the developers/manufacturers - ad copy, documentation.
Then there are things like magazine reviews, new product announcements in the press, etc.
There's online reviews and news for anything published after the late 80s or so.
The problem is that most of these sources are ephemeral and possibly hard to lay hands on.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
On 2/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
How about computer and video games? What if no-one else has ever written about it? Should we not have articles on them?
I find it hard to believe there exists a shipped game that nobody wrote a word about, ever.
Heh, if nobody ever wrote about it, I'd say that's a good definition of non-notable.
For one thing, there's the developers/manufacturers - ad copy, documentation.
Then there are things like magazine reviews, new product announcements in the press, etc.
There's online reviews and news for anything published after the late 80s or so.
The problem is that most of these sources are ephemeral and possibly hard to lay hands on.
I take that as a good reason to have WP - people with the ephemeral sources get the factual content out of their material and make it available to a wider audience. There are a number of WP articles that already have the most detailed information online anywhere, just by virtue of using print sources.
Stan
On Feb 18, 2006, at 3:18 AM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
How about computer and video games? What if no-one else has ever written about it? Should we not have articles on them?
The real killer, actually, is ironically academic works. Tons of major 20th century theorists in English haven't had secondary sources written that neatly summarize them. Plenty that use their thought for other ends or that disagree with them, but those are both problematic as sources for obvious reasons.
The NOR policy does provide for this sensibly, though - primary sources are acceptable sources, so long as you don't engage in "novel" interpretation of them.
The problem is that this often does allow for the "in popular culture" sections.
-Phil
Red text in diffs is too hard to read. Maybe something like a blue-purple would be better.
Red chould be used for minor specific changes, if there be a way to differentiate between different string lengths, but thats getting too much into the workings of the diff module...
SV PS: Dont bother me with comments about this belonging at mediazilla.
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I guess it's just a personal preference, I find red quite easy to read.
Mgm
On 2/18/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Red text in diffs is too hard to read. Maybe something like a blue-purple would be better.
Red chould be used for minor specific changes, if there be a way to differentiate between different string lengths, but thats getting too much into the workings of the diff module...
SV PS: Dont bother me with comments about this belonging at mediazilla.
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On 2/19/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Red text in diffs is too hard to read. Maybe something like a blue-purple would be better.
You should be able to change this by using a custom stylesheet: Edit your [[User:Stevertigo/monobook.css]], or create it if it doesn't exist (I'm presuming you're using Monobook as your skin).
Then add something like this:
span.diffchange { color: #9966FF; }
You can set the "color" [sic] attribute to whatever colour you want.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
Thanks, Steve. That of course works, though only when I log in. Since my password is a 147 byte Chinese character idiom, I often read up on things without actually logging in.
In that context I made the observance that red text on white was a bit displeasing to my eye, and I thought perhaps that others and their eyes might agree.
Editor:Stevertigo
--- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/19/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Red text in diffs is too hard to read. Maybe
something
like a blue-purple would be better.
You should be able to change this by using a custom stylesheet: Edit your [[User:Stevertigo/monobook.css]], or create it if it doesn't exist (I'm presuming you're using Monobook as your skin).
Then add something like this:
span.diffchange { color: #9966FF; }
You can set the "color" [sic] attribute to whatever colour you want.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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On 2/19/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Thanks, Steve. That of course works, though only when I log in. Since my password is a 147 byte Chinese character idiom, I often read up on things without actually logging in.
I don't know what web browser you're using, but most browsers let the user provide a custom stylesheet to be used on every web page they view. You could add the code there so it shows up even if you aren't logged in.
In that context I made the observance that red text on white was a bit displeasing to my eye, and I thought perhaps that others and their eyes might agree.
I don't know if it varies between Wikipedia skins, but I use Classic, and it shows differences as red text on green or yellow. This makes it hard to see minor changes like adding or removing a comma. I've set up my stylesheet to show the exact changes as red on white, while the paragraph containing the change is black text on green or black on yellow. Hard on the eyes, but it's instantly obvious what changed.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
Mark Wagner wrote:
I don't know if it varies between Wikipedia skins, but I use Classic, and it shows differences as red text on green or yellow. This makes it hard to see minor changes like adding or removing a comma. I've set up my stylesheet to show the exact changes as red on white, while the paragraph containing the change is black text on green or black on yellow. Hard on the eyes, but it's instantly obvious what changed.
I recently added the following line to my monobook.css:
span.diffchange { text-decoration: underline; }
It has made spotting minor changes much easier, especially in the case of whitespace-only edits.
On 2/18/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Red text in diffs is too hard to read. Maybe something like a blue-purple would be better.
Red chould be used for minor specific changes, if there be a way to differentiate between different string lengths, but thats getting too much into the workings of the diff module...
'''Support'''
What I would also like is a way of jumping from the diff code to the appropriate place in the actual text. When someone adds a chunk of text and formatting, I like to see if they've formatted correctly, appropriately etc. On longer articles it takes a while to find where the actual text appears below.
So it seems the software could generate anchors #Dif1, #Dif2 etc, and provide links to them next to the changes.
Steve
--- 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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On 2/17/06, 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.").
You start here talking about "in popular culture" *sections* but drift onto whole articles. IMHO, "X in popular culture" articles are fine, but what I hate seeing is well written and researched articles poluted by a bunch of "In Simpsons episode Y, Homer says "I'd like to eat an X"" type garbage.
I suspect the solution is to try and surreptitiously isolate these types of semi-welcome contributions. People get upset when their contributions are rejected. Instead, by quietly pushing them into a "X in popular culture" article, we can leave it up to reusers of Wikipedia material whether they want to take all these articles or not.
A similar problem exists in ever-growing lists. Take [[number sign]] as an example. Once, it probably had a concise list of terms that are used around the world, and was a useful reference for technical writers (such as myself - I was looking for a less culturally biased term than "hash" or "pound sign"). Since then it has been polluted by unsourced additions like "splat", "widget mark" and even, I quote, "Ken Moody, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, used to call it "chickenscratch"".
If anyone has any great ideas for how to deal with these situations, I'd like to hear them. The solution basically has to somehow effectively discourage future editors from adding their own favourite term, without slapping a rule in their face.
Cleaning out lists like this isn't even useful. Many people will probably just look at it and go "oh my god, they don't even have widget mark!!"
Steve
Fastfission 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.").
But I had a recent thought about it. Wouldn't any discussions about the impact or prevalence of something in popular culture need to have been discussed by a secondary source first before it was allowed into an article under WP:NOR?
Not exactly an original research issue, because the basic fact of a mention is so easily verified. What would be harder would be to answer the question of why - is the "Enola Gay" alluded to in a Simpsons episode because it's funny somehow, or because there is a subtle political dig, or because Groening's grandfather was in the ground crew and the episode originally aired on grandpa's birthday? That would need some research and a source.
A useful way to control the random references might be to require evidence of relevance. Lots of pop culture references aren't any deeper than random selection on the part of a scriptwriter desperately trying to think of a three syllable name. Mention of all the uses of a particular name is appropriate for disambig pages, but contentwise may be a coincidence rather than an "in popular culture" reference. So to put it all together, you should be able to prune popular culture references that don't actually have a source demonstrating relevance, or move them to disambig pages.
Stan