[Wikipedia-l] The shadows of Comic-Book Guy

[tarquin]

The more I find entried like [[SCSI voodoo]], the more I wonder what to 
do about them.

I've just added an opening paragraph, explaining
a) the context
b) the fact that it's obscure computing slang
c) the fact that the rest of the article is not to be taken *entirely* 
seriously

Jimbo recently said that one long-term goal of Wikipedia is the 
production of cheap paper encyclopedias for developing countries. This 
is something I would fully support -- it would be tremendous if what we 
do here reaches more than just the lucky few who have net access.

But now I keep having visions of kids in a school somewhere reading 
about SCSI voodoo and not realising it's tongue-in-cheek. (the same 
argument goes for slapping the words "fictional character" on many, many 
articles)

FOLDOC is a good source: it's a cleanly-written documentation.
Some entries from the Jargon File are good, but so many of them strike 
me as a microcommunity writing about itself -- it's not an encyclopedia, 
but a parody of one. I can even hear Comic-Book Guy's voice reading them.

Perhaps one step would be to merge all the articles on voodoo-inspired 
hacker lingo into just that: [[voodoo-inspired hacker slang]]. At least 
that would stand some chance of being more than disctionary entries: 
there would be potential for an overview of the linguistic trend, 
reasons, etc.
(suggestions for a better page name on a postcard ;)