[WikiEN-l] Culture glut

Fri Mar 11 14:30:41 UTC 2005

Brian M wrote:

>I agree with you completely, and most of these sections should be
>deleted.   It is one thing for Wikipedia to be the online Encyclopedia
>of Popular Culture with articles on every Pokemon character, TV
>episode, forgotten (or never known) song or CD, every obscure corner
>of every fictional universe, etc, etc, ad absurdum, ad nauseum.  But
>when all this starts bleeding into other articles, it becomes  a major
>problem and makes Wikipedia look like it has no sense of proportion at
>all.
>
Or it makes WP more attractive to readers because it has information
that can't be gotten from other sources.

Robert Collison's history makes mention of a decision by Britannica
(for the 9th edition?) to include topics like farming, metalworking,
and so forth, not because they thought they had suddenly become
"encyclopedic", but to try to sell EB to middle-class people that
didn't have so much of a need for complete coverage of Marcus Atilius
Regulus and medieval German literature. Even so, we now know that
EB simply failed to report on great swathes of their own culture.

Nuclear weapons are one of the areas where 20th-century geopolitics
has impinged on the general consciousness, and popular culture
references are a reflection of the fears they've come to engender
in ordinary people. Not only are the references themselves
manifestations of the artists' feelings, but the very urge to add
the references tells you something about the fears of WP editors.
(There's also a good argument to be made that the desire to delete
all the cultural references is a different kind of editorial response
to the same fears.)

So yeah, if a reference is trivial, maybe it doesn't need to be
there, but it would be good to exercise a light touch, keeping in
mind the breadth of our audience, and that many (probably most)
readers will be far more interested in the culture stuff than the
mathematical equations.

Stan