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

[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.