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.

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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

[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.