[WikiEN-l] Sourcing "popular culture" items

[Jimmy Wales]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Nov 9, 2006, at 12:09 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> I did not say that.  The point is, it is NOT verifiable.  It is  
>> likely a
>> copyvio, and the amount of information known about this woman from
>> reliable third party sources is about as close to zero as you can get.
>>
> 
> 1) Are third party sources required here? The classic definition of  
> NOR said that primary sources could be used so long as they were not  
> used for "novel" claims. Surely the basics of this article are thus  
> verifiable via the primary source of the show: her status as a  
> contestant, when she lost, and a good chunk of her bio were all no  
> doubt covered.

Perhaps, although caution is warranted here.  The bios of people on such 
shows are PR puffery at its worst.  Only the most basic facts can be 
considered true, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe is a good article about the 
phenomena with respect to wrestling, where the intermingling of reality 
and storyline is well known.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_McGee is a friend of mine, and her 
story should set off alarm bells for anyone writing about "reality 
television".  The mixing of fact and fiction is substantial in these 
shows, and generally speaking, the websites of such shows should be 
regarded in much the same way as websites of fictional shows.  The 
people appearing on the shows are characters in a storyline.

> 2) Does this cause problems with systemic bias, whereby American,  
> Canadian, and British popular culture will all be far easier to write  
> about than other countries due to the prevalence of English-language  
> fandoms that generate sources?

This is an interesting but separate question.  Will a high quality 
encyclopedia always be biased towards things that have high quality 
sources?  Yes, I hope so. :)

But, I think there is no reason to think that fandoms don't exist 
equally well in all cultures.

> 3) Is the problem with the article that it is a crappy article that  
> is not worth developing from its current state, or that at present  
> the topic cannot be written about? I can see the former, but I'm  
> honestly skeptical about the latter. And in the case of the former,  
> perhaps we need to start coming up with solutions other than  
> deletion. Something like, perhaps, deletion and replacement with a  
> template along the lines of "This topic may well be notable, but past  
> efforts to write articles on it have failed to meet basic standards  
> of quality. Please help Wikipedia by starting a well-sourced, NPOV  
> article on this topic."

I think there are cases of both.... topics where *in theory* we could 
have a good article, but due to the limited number of quality 
wikipedians, and the incredible number of POV fancrufters who want to 
write hagiography, we as a practical matter can't... AND topcis where, 
even in theory, we can't write a good bio, because there is frankly not 
enough information of any kind which can be trusted.

This one probably falls just barely in the camp of "We could easily have 
a stub, but nothing more, because we only know about 3 facts about this 
person which can be verified.  Her name.  That she appeared on this 
show. That she did not win.  Most of the rest of it is impossible to 
properly source.

> As one of the people cautious about this, I (unsurprisingly) object  
> to that claim. I think most of our popular culture articles are  
> complete crap, to be sure. Well over 50% require some version of the  
> {{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} tag, there's insane resistance within a  
> given subject to paring back fancruft, and a complete lack of  
> understanding of the idea that Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia,  
> and that X, Y, and Z aspects of the article might be better suited to  
> a fan encyclopedia. But the problems with these articles are too  
> often attributed to the topics (non-notable, unverifiable, etc)  
> instead of to the editors who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose  
> of the articles.

I would tend to agree with this, and if I said anything which suggested 
differently, I take it back. :)

Non-notable is a value judgment which I find to be problematic in many 
ways, although with WP:BIO, I think it is increasingly useful as a way 
to keep people from writing really problematic articles.  Non-verifiable 
generally can be relied upon to do the heavy lifting for us.

But there is an interaction.  If someone fundamentally misunderstands 
the purpose of the articles, and they try to write something about 
George W. Bush, we can deal with it.  If they try to write about obscure 
reality television characters, we can't very well deal with it... we end 
up with copyvios and fancruft hagiography.

> The important question, to my mind, is this: how can we give good  
> editors the tools they need to write good popular culture articles  
> while actively discouraging and reducing crap articles?

Yes.

--Jimbo