[WikiEN-l] Sourcing "popular culture" items

Thu Nov 9 18:17:21 UTC 2006

A couple of questions here, because they're issues that are important  
elsewhere in popular culture sourcing...

On Nov 9, 2006, at 12:09 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
> I did not say that.  The point is, it is NOT verifiable.  It is  
> likely a
> copyvio, and the amount of information known about this woman from
> reliable third party sources is about as close to zero as you can get.
>

1) Are third party sources required here? The classic definition of  
NOR said that primary sources could be used so long as they were not  
used for "novel" claims. Surely the basics of this article are thus  
verifiable via the primary source of the show: her status as a  
contestant, when she lost, and a good chunk of her bio were all no  
doubt covered.

2) Does this cause problems with systemic bias, whereby American,  
Canadian, and British popular culture will all be far easier to write  
about than other countries due to the prevalence of English-language  
fandoms that generate sources?

3) Is the problem with the article that it is a crappy article that  
is not worth developing from its current state, or that at present  
the topic cannot be written about? I can see the former, but I'm  
honestly skeptical about the latter. And in the case of the former,  
perhaps we need to start coming up with solutions other than  
deletion. Something like, perhaps, deletion and replacement with a  
template along the lines of "This topic may well be notable, but past  
efforts to write articles on it have failed to meet basic standards  
of quality. Please help Wikipedia by starting a well-sourced, NPOV  
article on this topic."

> In the meantime, we have an article that is most likely a copyvio, and
> in any event contains a number of totally unverifiable sources.   
> And any
> movement to do something about this sort of nonsense is met with the
> view that people are out to censor pop culture or something like that.

As one of the people cautious about this, I (unsurprisingly) object  
to that claim. I think most of our popular culture articles are  
complete crap, to be sure. Well over 50% require some version of the  
{{cleanup fiction-as-fact}} tag, there's insane resistance within a  
given subject to paring back fancruft, and a complete lack of  
understanding of the idea that Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia,  
and that X, Y, and Z aspects of the article might be better suited to  
a fan encyclopedia. But the problems with these articles are too  
often attributed to the topics (non-notable, unverifiable, etc)  
instead of to the editors who fundamentally misunderstand the purpose  
of the articles.

The question then becomes how we can help editors who want to write  
good articles on these topics (and there are many) without letting  
articles like this one run amok. The answer has, it seems to me,  
manifestly shown itself NOT to be draconian sourcing policy that  
defies the common sense of anyone familiar with the topic and  
aggressive deletion.

The important question, to my mind, is this: how can we give good  
editors the tools they need to write good popular culture articles  
while actively discouraging and reducing crap articles?

Best,
Phil Sandifer
sandifer at english.ufl.edu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a  
boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

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