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.