[WikiEN-l] XKCD in Popular Culture

[Ian Woollard]

2008/7/12 David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>:
> "Stuff that people have made up" includes all of literature,
> philosophy, religion, music, the fine arts, architecture, artifacts,
> politics, and  human organisations in general. Everything except the
> physical and biological world. In other words, most of the
> encyclopedia.

No. Architecture isn't simply made up, it's *made*. As are artifacts,
and politics and human organisations. Philosophy, on balance isn't
simply made up, as it's supposed to reflect the real world.

I mean, everything is made up/invented/discovered, but if what it
represents is supposed to be real then it stays, otherwise it gets
moved to the other encyclopedia, whatever a good name would be.

> I gather the intended meaning was popular culture.

No. The arts, fiction and music. *Real* culture probably doesn't count
as it's real, but popular culture is more or less just fiction and
music.

> How do you intend to distinguish popular culture as distinct from high
> culture, or recognized academic culture?

Is it in, or intending to represent the real world, rather than, say,
fiction? Religion is supposed to be true. Academic culture is the way
academia actually works.

> Or do you mean it to exclude fiction altogether? On what justification
> can you exclude fiction, but not paintings or music?

No, no. They would move if they're on a fictitious subject, or unless
they are supposed to be essentially true (note that they don't have to
be correct, they just have to be claimed to be true, or thought at
some time to be true). Some paintings could be kept, but I expect they
would almost all move. In cases where they are borderline, they could
be in both places, it's not a problem.

And it's not an exclusion at all, it's a division. It's not
historically uncommon to divide encyclopedias up into sections.

> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.