[WikiEN-l] listcruft

[The Cunctator]

On 7/15/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:41:22 +0300, "Jussi-Ville Heiskanen"
> <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Not so much a case in point, but a touchstone. Do *you* think we are
> >better or worse than Britannica for having "List of songs about
> >masturbation". Stand up and be counted...
>
>
> No, a case in point.  There is no encyclopaedic topic "songs about
> masturbation" because there is nothing about masturbation which has
> any logical connection with songs, and vice-versa (although I
> suppose one could stretch a point and say that, for example, Whitney
> Houston's "I will always love you" gives more pleasure to the
> performer than anybody watching).  The connection is an arbitrary
> one, and pretty much every entry in the list was also unsupported by
> references, because in the end what constitutes being *about*
> something, rather than simply mentioning it in the lyrics somewhere?
> I am all for setting up a sister project, triviapedia or whatever,
> for collecting such examples of word association gone mad, but
> there's no question in my mind that a neutral, verifiable
> encyclopaedia is not the place for them.

There is an immense amount of illogic in the above paragraph. Are you
claiming that songs about masturbation don't exist?

Or that it's impossible to tell what "Turning Japanese" and "Blister
in the Sun" are talking about?

C'mon.