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'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.

[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?)

[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.