[WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

Sat Jun 10 10:52:22 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 6/10/06, Jesse W <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>You would not see that in the Encyclopedia of Late 20th Century
>>American Television?  Really?  Or do you mean in any "general"
>>encyclopedia.  Because certainly, Wikipedia reaches the level of a
>>specialized encyclopedia in a number of areas, like television shows -
>>but (I hope), we don't go too much beyond that.
>>    
>>
>
>I still find it hard to imagine a specialised encyclopaedia listing
>all the couch gags in Simpsons episodes, or detailed plot summaries
>with "quotes" for every episode of Futurama or "Clerks: The Animated
>Series" etc etc. If someone can prove me wrong, go for it.
>
>Steve
>  
>
That's my beef with a lot of our pop culture articles, TBH. The quotes 
section should go to Wikiquote. If any quotes (I imagine Patrick Henry's 
"Give me liberty or give me death" would be a good example) are notable 
enough to be in an encyclopaedia, we should have some commentary on them 
and their impact. Plot summaries aren't that bad - at least they're 
prose. The worst ones, IMO, are pop culture references sections (last 
time I checked, [[Alan Turing]] is a good example of this) which don't 
add anything meaningful to the article and act as a magnet for info that 
most people won't care about at all (relativists who suggest that this 
is none of our business ought to note that we're an encyclopaedia - when 
we collect information, we ought to comment on it), and also trivia 
sections which serve the same purpose on pop culture articles (look at 
the article on [[House, M.D.]] before I trimmed the trivia section).

John