George Herbert wrote:
On 11/29/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG
<guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:28:49 -0800, "George
Herbert"
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
the vast majority of popular culture items have
not been subjected to
independent research and are not documentable other than the particular
item
of culture itself.
I quite agree. And
this is, for me, a major problem, in that it sends
all the wrong messages about original research.
In particular to the editors working on those articles.
I was wondering if it would be a positive step to strongly encourage the
popular culture articles to move towards at least citing the (potentially
unreliable) primary pop culture source for various factoids (for example,
"Character did X" <ref episode XYZ>). Whether we treat those topics as
having any reliable sources or not (by normal WP standards), referencing the
primary source extensively would set a good example.
We've started doing this at the comic project, but it is taking us time
to get there. We have a cite issue template. As you say, it's the
first step on introducing a lot of editors to the concepts of sourcing,
original research and point of view. We can say, okay, The Hulk lost
his shoe laces, can you tell us in which issue this happened? You can,
great, now, can you tell us why that's important? You can, that's
great, now, can you tell us if you've seen anyone else say that? You
can, that's great, now, we need to work out if this snippet is relevant
at all to the coverage Wikipedia aims for, being a reference work aimed
at a general audience. Why do you think a general audience would be
interested? They wouldn't? Well, have you met the Marvel Wikia?
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