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in popular culture
MOVED: this post has moved to my design blog
this is hilarious, but maybe only to wikipedia editors.
the xkcd comic number 446 published on monday lampoons wikipedia’s occasional inclusion of “In popular culture” sections on articles. Those lists of pop culture references is controversial. some editors — myself included — think those sections are not encyclopedic and should be removed with few exceptions. some editors however think the wikipedia can go beyond the print-style encyclopedia format and include additional content. further, they argue, the “In popular culture” content is interesting to readers.
since yesterday, however, a flurry of dispute has ensued on the policy page about these popular culture sections and primarily on its discussion page, concerning whether to mention the comic on the article itself. since the comic is an example of popular culture, and it’s inclusion as a popular culture reference on the policy concerning popular culture references, the whole thing is quite meta and predicted by the comment on the comic itself. when you hold the mouse over the comic, a hover text reads:
Someday the ‘in popular culture’ section will have its own article with an ‘in popular culture’ section. It will reference this title-text [In Popular Culture] referencing it, and the blogosphere will implode.
in addition, someone created a wikipedia article specifically about the cartoon, which caused a vigorous dispute about deleting that new article, and once deleted a vigorous debate about the deletion decision itself began. all in the last two days basically.
aside from the odd, self-referential nature of this, i think it does depict how quickly a change and discussion can occur in the wikipedia community and also how debate occurs. take a look at the policy article’s talk page, and the two deletion discussions so far as a taste of that. the deletion discussion structure has a particular form and etiquette. you might want to read a little more about the policy and how that works if you’re curious.
what do you think about “In popular culture” sections? I’m curious what you think, especially if you disagree with my take on them.
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10. July 2008 at 12:31 am :
I think part of what bothers me about them is what’s in them. If they were constrained to only include truly unique and notable references, basically well known and famous usages, then I would appreciate them more. But what I find instead is typically they have only trivial entries. They mention usage in passing. And once the section is started in an article it magnetizes more trivial examples. This is what I think the xkcd cartoon really points out.