[WikiEN-l] "Exclusion" essay

[Stephen Bain]

On 7/21/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> I don't see how the "fancruft" we include is any more a "random
> collection of information" than the vast amounts of sportscruft,
> militarycruft, politiciancruft, and other sorts of subjectcruft that for
> some reason have an air of respectability about it that recent popular
> culture alone seems to lack. Who ever complains about how Wikipedia has
> articles for almost every ship that happened to participate in WWII, no
> matter how trivial its role? Or how there are articles about people
> whose sole claim to fame is an unspectacular one-year Senate position in
> Smallcounty, Iowa back in the 1820s?

(This has been said many times before by many others, so ignore if
this is familiar.)

The problem is the context in which the information is provided. Yes,
we have plenty of information on ships from World War II (that's
[[List of World War II ships]], for those of you playing at home) but
from what I've read they're all written in an appropriate
encyclopaedic style and tone.

Many of the popular culture articles which get labelled cruft are so
labelled because they don't have an encyclopaedic style or tone; the
context utilised is that of the fictional universe from which the
subject comes, rather than the Real World from which the encyclopaedia
comes.

As an example, take [[Bulbasaur]]: well-written, well-referenced,
indeed it is a featured article. It does an excellent job of staying
(almost exclusively) to a discussion of the role of that particular
Pokemon in the video games and in the cartoons. The lede evens uses
CNN and Time in order to assess the importance of the subject.

Many, many other articles (in all areas of pop culture, not just
Pokemon) are not written in such an encyclopaedic fashion, they are
written from a point of view within the fiction.

The Pokemon WikiProject, to its credit, maintains a page to try to
push articles into a format like the Bulbasaur article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_Adoption_Center/Style

Other WikiProjects on fictional subjects, take heed.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com