[WikiEN-l] Why AFD just does not work

Fri Jun 16 18:23:11 UTC 2006

On 6/16/06, Cobb <sealclubbingfun at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >geni on Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:59:07 +0100, wrote:
>
> >It is a legit subject. The article can be cleaned up with the
> >liberal use of machete editing. It would be nice to have
> >something explaining why the fighting styles are mostly
> >rather stupid but I can live without that.
>
> A legit subject. So when has there ever been any actual
> lightsabre combat? Has military research made some
> significant breakthroughs without me noticing?

Legit fictional:
It's a major aspect of the Star Wars series, which are well past the
credible size of popularity where major subjects within the fictional
series are worth having articles about.  Fictional aspects are
perfectly reasonable to report on.

Legit real-world fan phenomenon:
Everyone who I know who ever laid hand on one of the toy lightsabers
said "Cool!" and waved it around a bunch.  Sufficiently popular fan
phenomenon.

Legit real-world martial art phenomenon:
There are a few people trying to replicate the movie fighting style at
a serious level.  While that sort of scares me, I have to admit that
when I was working at a big web company in the dot-com boom days, a
bunch of us used the toy lightsabers for stress relief, and my Kendo
experience and a coworkers Fencing experience came in handy.  We
weren't taking it all that seriously (other than wiping the floor with
the Java group as a point of honor, before returning to our duels),
but I can see where someone might.

Article cleanup:
An article on a subject which spans fiction into fandom into fans
trying to practice it for real needs to distinguish between those
boundaries clearly.  Failure to do so makes it a badly written
article, but badly written articles get cleaned up, not deleted, as a
point of stated policy.

-- 
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com