George Herbert wrote:
On 11/29/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:28:49 -0800, "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
the vast majority of popular culture items have not been subjected to independent research and are not documentable other than the particular
item
of culture itself.
I quite agree. And this is, for me, a major problem, in that it sends all the wrong messages about original research.
In particular to the editors working on those articles.
I was wondering if it would be a positive step to strongly encourage the popular culture articles to move towards at least citing the (potentially unreliable) primary pop culture source for various factoids (for example, "Character did X" <ref episode XYZ>). Whether we treat those topics as having any reliable sources or not (by normal WP standards), referencing the primary source extensively would set a good example.
We've started doing this at the comic project, but it is taking us time to get there. We have a cite issue template. As you say, it's the first step on introducing a lot of editors to the concepts of sourcing, original research and point of view. We can say, okay, The Hulk lost his shoe laces, can you tell us in which issue this happened? You can, great, now, can you tell us why that's important? You can, that's great, now, can you tell us if you've seen anyone else say that? You can, that's great, now, we need to work out if this snippet is relevant at all to the coverage Wikipedia aims for, being a reference work aimed at a general audience. Why do you think a general audience would be interested? They wouldn't? Well, have you met the Marvel Wikia?