Two cynicisms

[prog]

I think that "References in Fiction" sections are a blight on Wikipedia. I guess I can't reasonably write a manifesto calling for their systematic deletion, since they actually are useful in intent. But, once a topic's list of above-the-fold media references has been exhausted, the section proceeds to overflow with utterly unencyclopedic pointers to obscure anime, video games, and webcomics. Fancruft. And I am very hesistant to delete it because I don't want to catch fancrud.

Come to think of it I have never seen a line in an article's history log that read "Deleted unencyclopedic fancruft" or something similar. And for some reason this makes me want to start doing so.

---

Subscribed to nintendo_ds coz I wanna have a better handle on what-all's going on with my favorite video game system, and am reminded why I don't belong to more LJ communities. Too many posts have been sincere but foolish, mostly young people asking questions that are answerable with one word, that being either "eBay" or "Google". I don't actually say that, though, coz it would sound awfully snooty, so I just leave them be.

I normally love answering questions (and seeing questions answered well by others) but some questions are so broad and flat that you just know that the person hasn't even bothered with other of these two First Sources. The posters' evident youth makes it even less forgivable in my eyes, coz it's not like they have decades of life without Google to adapt away from.

Maybe they don't teach Google in school yet, the teachers being mostly old enough to have themselves been students pre-Web? This is my hypothesis.

Comments

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

I've seen "deleted fancruft" as a change comment in Wikipedia articles, but there's certainly a need for more. I'm not positive but I think I've seen a lot of this in the ever-growing family of articles related to the TV series Lost. The Lost articles have a small group of vigilant editors trying to keep them from being swamped in meaningless speculation, rehashes and assorted junk. I'm not sure they're winning, but they do try.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Not sure why there needs to be much about Lost on Wikipedia other than a pointer to Lostpedia.org.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

I think that the Wikipedia Lost articles predate Lostpedia, and the last time I checked they were better.

I don't think Wikipedia is supposed to skip documenting something if it's documented elsewhere; otherwise it would just turn into Yahoo and list all the other places where you can look stuff up. The question is how much detail to go into, and how much is appropriate for a general-purpose encyclopedia instead of a specialized Lost site.

I think there's too much there now, and it should be trimmed down, but the presence of Lostpedia shouldn't factor into it.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I'm right with you on the fancruft issue. I've done some such removal but it's always difficult to fight with the flood of eager fans.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

I know you probably didn't mean it as a real question, but since "teaching Google" is a good approximation of at least some of what I do all day, I will answer it anyway. :) Kids use Google without being taught, I assure you. But they get very mixed messages from their teachers (and librarians; we argue about this shit in my mixed-age library all the time) about whether Google is okay to use and when you should use it. On the one side is some teachers who say, "Never use it because everything on it is utter bollocks put there deliberately to confuse hapless high-schoolers!" And on the other side is the students' instinct to use it to answer EVERYTHING.

But when they do use it, they don't do so intelligently - and there, I think, is the problem. I've seen so many kids Google something general, click on the top two links (without, apparently, reading the blurb/exerpts critically at all), decide there's nothing helpful there, and give up. Teaching how to do that better is HARD, but it fascinates me (and it's pretty much crucial if librarians want to continue to exist as a profession), so I'm sure I'll be working on it more.

(I also have the beginnings of a theory about many kids (and adults, of course) not being inclined to help themselves - they want the answer from someone else. Kids will flail at me in a panic because one of the printers is down...um, I can't fix it instantly, so why don't you print to a different printer? Not sure why this is - do we not teach them enough self-confidence? Does our educational system not reward self-driven learning? Or are they just teenagers, so they need more reassurance, and they'll grow out of it?)

[prog.livejournal.com]

Boy, I would love to be part of a program of teaching how to use Google well. We should talk about it offline sometime if you want to pursue it further (not that I can promise the time for any personal involvment beyond conversation, at the moment). (I don't know how many people around here know about my background in education, specifically technology education for kids... for the most part it all happened before I moved to MA. I want to tie back into it again someday.)

"Don't use Google" makes me goggle; how incredibly ignorant. I immediately think of abstinence-based sex ed, but in a way it's even stupider than that because it's based on notions that are just factually incorrect at core.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

You're right, I didn't know you had a background in tech ed! That's very cool! I would love to sit down and talk about this more! But it will need to be in August, after I get back from a month in Ghana of (maybe? probably? who knows!) teaching high schoolers Word and Excel.

As for the "don't use Google" attitude, I exaggerated it somewhat for effect. It's a reaction to getting a lot of papers that use nothing *but* Google, and use it to find and cite some pretty questionable sources. It's not that they don't think anyone should use Google ever; it's more that they forbid students from using the free web on their papers with the exception of a few specific sites, to force them to get more comfortable with print resources. Which I get, and am not entirely opposed to...I just wish the "use one encyclopedia, one website, and two other print resources" formula could be a little less artificial.

[misuba.livejournal.com]

Maybe you just don't hear from the ones that are self-assured?

But anyway. It's kind of incredible that Google itself hasn't started some kind of organized education campaign in association with libraries.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, of course there are plenty of kids who solve their own problems (and I do see them doing it sometimes - I always want to hug the ones who go get their own paper and put it in the printer when the "fill tray" light comes on). I'm just also amazed by the number of smart kids who prefer me to solve problems for them that they ought to learn to solve themselves (eg., I said "Have you checked the catalog?" so many times in response to "Do you have...?" that I sounded like a broken record), and I think that's more true now than it used to be. *insert Grandpa Simpson voice here*

And you're right about a Google education campaign - that would be really cool!

[cnoocy]

I'll have to offer a contrary opinion on the fancruft issue. Most people won't find it useful, yes. But the Hobbit was overjoyed when she was working on materials on mythology for her students to have a list of places a given myth was referenced. That doesn't mean it's never excessive, or even that it necessarily needs to be part of the main article. (Though a separate "References to X" article would probably get deleted as non-notable for most values of X.) But the information is useful, and there would be people less well-served by Wikipedia were all such sections to disappear.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

"References to X" articles can succeed if they're big enough: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati_in_popular_culture for one example.

[cnoocy]

That's true, but I would worry that a movement to create them on a large scale would result in a lot of them being deleted when they would eventually be significantly expanded instead.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I don't think we actually disagree. The use that the Hobbit found is among the legitimate purposes for these sections that I had in mind. Noting references to things in actual popular culture is good. But noting references in obscure crap that few except for frothing fans could possibly care about is far less useful, and it seems that as soon as one fanboy does it with his favorite 27-reader webcomic or fan-subbed anime, a whole pageful of fans follow with their own favorite things.