Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Culture glut

Fri Mar 11 21:12:17 UTC 2005

> Or it makes WP more attractive to readers because it has information
> that can't be gotten from other sources.

Well, that's the trade-off. What's useful to whom? This is why I
suggested this had to be a judgment call and that this was not a call
for attempting an articulation of hard-and-fast policy (which I think
would be not useful). The difficulty of course is also that some
people are very vested in their "trivia" for whatever reason (see the
Charles Darwin/Abraham Lincoln same birthday debate which went on for
months).

> 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.

I have nothing against writing sensibly on popular culture impacts and
effects. I'm just against such sections being representing such
influence as a *list*. Lists are not "content" in the same sense--they
are organizational systems, and can be very useful in some situations.
But a well-written set of paragraphs about changing attitudes and
impact is going to be far more appropriate for an encyclopedia.

> 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.)

Again, I'm interested in singling out the aspects which have had a
larger impact on culture or popular conception. John Travolta's
[[Broken Arrow]] doesn't seem to have done this, at least not in the
way that Stanley Kubrick's [[Dr. Strangelove]] did, or John Hersey's
[[Hiroshima]] which helped set the entire tone for our thinking about
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm somewhat uncomfortable
with creating a psychoanalytic theory of why WP editors add to these
lists (I tend to think it is just a well-meaning attempt to
contribute, rather than anything to do with the article in question),
but anyway it is somewhat irrevalent. The goal is to make a good
encyclopedia, not to satisfy the inner motivations of the
contributors, as I'm sure you'll agree. Of course this is an issue of
taste.

> 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.

As am I, honestly. I just think there are better ways to "do" culture,
but I'll admit it takes work and some specialized knowledge to do it.
With [[Nuclear weapon]] this is not insurmountable, as there are
scholarly works on the impact of them on culture and in politics, etc.
(i.e. Spencer Weart's wonderful and highly-recommended _Nuclear fear:
A history of images_, well-written and insightful!) But with most
topics I'm sure there aren't extensive literature on their culture
impacts and it'll become more a matter of opinion, which I think is
when it gets into really problematic territory.

FF