Matt R wrote:
--- Brian M <brian1954(a)gmail.com> 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.
I enthusiastically agree, and I'm glad I'm not
the only one that has noticed
and been (mildy) irked by this phenomenon -- phew! Perhaps we could propose a
[[Wikipedia:*]] advice page cautioning against this trend?
I would strongly caution against a blanket purge. Take [[ununpentium]],
for instance - the popular culture stuff is most of the reason anyone would
look at it. At which point they learn *why* it got into popular culture, and
can learn about the [[island of stability]] and UFO nut [[Bob Lazar]]. It
adds a lot of interest to an otherwise almost cookie-cutter sciencecruft
article.
A lot of articles are not in fact very balanced. This happens. Better to
split off the trivia to another suitable article than just delete it
because you don't care. "The existence of this pisses me off" is not
in fact a reason to delete.
One example of how to handle this is [[Lilith]]. The ==Lilith in popular
culture== section was about to overwhelm the article, so it all got put
into [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]. The section says to see that article
because people kept putting trivia into it. Now [[Lilith]] is reasonably
balanced and the thousand uses of Lilith in popular culture are usefully
placed at a disambig.
In any case, nuclear weapons in popular culture is a huge and fascinating
sociological topic, for those of us old enough to remember the Cold War
and to try to get across what it felt like to those who aren't. It still
amazes me when I meet mature adults with kids who don't remember the Cold
War and just don't understand WTF I'm talking about.
- d.