Wikipedia talk:Fancruft/Archive 2

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Minutiae and details

In my opinion, it is appropriate that parts of popular culture - long-running TV series etc - have articles. However, it is the minutiae - secondary and tertiary characters, background details, specific jokes - that can get tiresome. And that is not limited to popular books or movies - Minor characters in Atlas Shrugged used to be group of short articles devoted to each character.

Star Trek Encyclopedia I have read may have set a precedent for that amount of detail - if something was mentioned in a dialogue, it was included. Likewise embryonic B5 dictionary I have seen.

So, we could come into agreement into the extent of detail that is appropriate to general encyclopedia and what actually need their own articles. Of course, to devoted followers of a TV or comic book or book series everything - up to and including fanfic - may be important but it may not be appropriate here. Skysmith 11:42, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I think this level of detail is fine as long as it is verifiable. Why not? WP is not paper, and it is of interest to some. Other resources like star trek encyclopedia are not free, so there is a case for duplicating info here. Intrigue 20:52, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I also have no problem with Star Trek minutiae (or other fictional works). I looked at some editors user pages. A lot of people think that pages about their favorite TV shows are very important. I also see no harm (Wikipedia is not paper). Caveats:

• Every single article should clearly distinguish fiction from reality. I would not want to look up something like "shuttle" and find a description of a fictional device with no clear indication that I was reading about a fictional universe.
• I still suggesting getting rid of "Random page" to avoid reviewers getting the impression that all wikipedia has is sci fi minutiae. Morris 21:06, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

It would be great to have a tag to apply to this kind of stuff so that it would not show up on random. Intrigue 22:15, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That idea, I think, is mentioned so often that it merits a counterargument.

For one thing, there is the huge, POV and ungrateful task of having to decide what is and is not suitable for a random link. Then there's the inherent irony in the idea of censoring things from an unbiased selection of random articles. Any bias there is, is just the bias present in Wikipedia. We may claim that bias needs to be shifted through a link, for the benefit of our readers, but hold your horses for a moment—who are we kidding? Who am I to decide that Hackensack, New Jersey should not appear to a reader who selects a random article? What if I'm a Hackensack resident delighted to see it featured in Wikipedia? OK, so maybe we can afford not to delight all the Hackensack residents, but still—if we're talking about public image, then how about the big discussion on the "dirty" talk page that was recently featured on Talk:Main page? Users could get to anal sex through a random link—why risk exposing them to a possibly offensive article and harming our image, and simply slip in the tag that hides it from the random page function? No harm, no fuss, right?

This is, of course, a tendentious and logically unsubstantiated slippery slope argument, but the crux remains: exactly what do we consider suitable "random" articles?

If there's any proposal on the random page (and because I'm an annoying jerk, I'm just going to mention Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) again), I'd make it this: make the "random page" link visible only to registered contributors. This is most likely to be successful. I'm still not saying people aren't going to violently oppose this, on grounds of "dishonesty" and the possible reflection the removal could have on our image ("Wikipedia doesn't want you to know it's a fancruft barn!"), but it might have a chance. Oh, and have I mentioned that one page for proposals yet? What's it called again? Ouch! OK, I'll shut up about it... JRM 23:18, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

Thoughts

The fact that Wikipedia is the world's most comprehensive source of information on pop culture, even containing articles on minor characters from video games, is something we should be utterly proud of. Removing the random page link to hide this amazing richness from visitors makes no sense whatsoever.

What we should not be proud of, however, is the quality of many such articles; a large portion of the content in Wikipedia is extremely poorly written and organized. But removing the random page link to hide these articles would be an immensely bad idea too. Wikipedia is a wiki, and its success stems from the fact that visitors are able to edit articles. If the random, obscure articles become harder to find, they will be less likely to improve. There's no point in pretending that Wikipedia is a finished work.

-- Fredrik | talk 14:36, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. The random page link does not make it easier to find anything. I am pretty sure that even the most popular fictional universe (Star Trek? Tolkien?) does not take up even one percent of the article space. I actually agree that our wealth of information on those topic is to wikipedia's credit. However the random page link does not effectively show this richness to visitors. If you actually want to find an article about Klingons or Mordor, I suggest that removing the random page link will not make it any harder. Morris 15:35, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. We want to be taken seriously. Slashdotters and videogamers already know us well, but our aims are beyond them. We want to create a universal encyclopedia that appeals to a not-specialised audience, and I just can't see how we could favorably impress a random reader with the sort of hyper-specialised, comprehensible-to-hardcore-fan-only, trivial details that the randompage function often produces. Kosebamse 11:01, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't see how being a universal encyclopedia and omitting specialized information go together. Should we omit hyper-specialised, comprehensible-to-hardcore-fan-only details on, say, complex analysis? Is the distinguishing factor whether information is "trivial"? If so, I would like an elaboration on what constitutes triviality. Is information trivial when it is not interesting? I personally don't think 16th century Slovak poetry is the slightest bit interesting. Now, if you want more people to be impressed by our coverage of 16th century Slovak poetry, the solution is to go and write a few great articles about it (your help would be appreciated for Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias) instead of hiding other, valid content. Although I find anything that might be said about the subject trivial, I promise I won't say the result should be hidden from visitors by the time our coverage of 16th century Slovak poetry dwarfs our coverage of Nintendo characters ;) -- Fredrik | talk 11:28, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I am not talking about omitting information, but about presenting ourselves favorably to the general public. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any empirical studies about how Wikipedia is perceived by outsiders, so I have to rely on my conjectures. It is my impression that our content is strongly slanted towards pop culture with all its associated fancruftery, while other topics - let's say medicine, classical music, literature (non-Tolkien or sci-fi, that is), developing countries, etc. etc. - are sadly underdeveloped. If I were a casual visitor trying to find what all this is about, the randompage function would quite possibly make me believe that Wikipedia is in large parts a repository of obscure pop culture trivia, and that is not the impression that we want to leave with first-time visitors. Kosebamse 12:30, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I interviewed a few users (not editors or contributors) ...

I spoke to a few high school students who sometimes use wikipedia to do their research. Almost exclusively, they are interested in history of the United States, Western Europe, or adjacent portions of Asia. Some people had tried the random page button, but had no particular impression of the random pages that they got. When specifically asked what wikipedia is good for, the answer was always: history. When I specifically mentioned that wikipedia had more information on Middle Earth than on most countries in Eastern Europe, the response was some variation of "so what" or "who cares". One person pointed out that they might study Tolkien in English class in some future year.

My points (in response to various points above):

• An person using wikipedia as an encyclopedia, to find information is only going to know about the fancruft if he/she specifically looks for it, and wants to find it. (If someone starts looking up Tolkien and following the links, they can quickly find a lot of information. If they are looking for information about Russia in the time of Peter the Great, they are never going to even know that the fancruft is there.
• There is no harm being done by that fancruft. It does not give a bad impression of wikipedia, because only the guys who look at the special pages (recent changes, deletion, etc.) or the people who specifically want to read it even know that it's there.
• One exception are someone accidently coming across something, so I think that every (appropriate) article should be required to say "fictional universe" or something similar in the first sentence or two. The only other exception I can think of is the random page button. I suggested (above) either getting rid of it, or as an alternative weighing articles in some way, such as the number of editors who have contributed to the article or something like that. Morris 15:45, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

My conclusions from all this

Preliminary, as always, since this is a wiki. But reading all of the above, having been around VfD for a while, and having had some hands-on experience, I've reached the following conclusions:

1. There is less subjectivity involved in determining what "fancruft" is than most people opposed to the term itself want to believe. Fancruft is generally restricted to contemporary fictional subjects that admit few nontrivial facts. In theory, non-fiction, ancient fiction or structurally detailed fiction could be labeled fancruft, but in practice this doesn't happen. Nobody is likely to label the Stark-Heegner theorem, The Quatrain of Seven Steps, or Dream (Sandman) as nothing but fancruft on the grounds that these are too detailed and specialized to be of general interest or usefulness. People may not see why we need articles on them, but they will not argue that the existing ones should be deleted.
2. Even if the term is objective enough, there is no conclusive evidence that fancruft is bad for Wikipedia. Some people might feel that it is, but this is a personal opinion, not something they can back up with facts. Nobody has ever written out unambiguous standards for quality and argued that they are appropriate, but fancruft violates them. Nobody has ever demonstrated that more contributors leave Wikipedia over seeing the fancruft than there are contributors who think fancruft is harmless or even potentially beneficial. The "people will be upset after using the random link a few times" is a favorite straw man argument that has never left the realm of hypothesis, and is better dealt with by discussions on the feature itself.
3. As such, merely judging something to be "fancruft" is a poor reason in and of itself for arguing deletion. The current policy de facto allows any personal opinion to serve as a vote, but this makes it no less of an opinion, with no established grounds for convincing people deletion would be best for Wikipedia. And without the possibility of convincing people, consensus is only reachable in a group that happens to think the same way, for whatever reason. But we wouldn't be having this discussion if we all thought the same way about it.
4. The decision to delete is more motivated by the quality of an article at the time of deletion than by its topic. A bad article on a minor fictional character will be deleted because many do not want badly-written articles to be in Wikipedia if they can help it, and they assume there will never be enough motivated people (least of all themselves) to fix the problems. A bad article on a major topic will be rewritten. A bad article on a minor topic often is not, alas. Many people do not want to hear that the article might improve eventually. They want a solid guarantee that it will, or else they want it to look good now. Articles on fictional subjects and especially minor fictional subjects are commonly held to higher standards, whether we agree with this or not. In short: this is actually the question of what degree of eventualism we should apply.
5. It is counterproductive to argue with people that they cannot exclude things merely because they're fancruft. You cannot effectively challenge someone's personal opinion by calling it wrong. The productive way to proceed is to write the article to our standards. In particular, an article on a fictional subject must always mention that the subject is fictional, it must establish the context in which the subject exists, and it must establish why it warrants a separate article rather than being part of a larger existing article. Articles are not sacrosanct. If the information is not yet extensive enough to have its own article, the correct thing to do is merge and redirect.
6. Just as deletionists hunt for articles to delete, inclusionist should hunt for articles deletionists are likely to abhor. If you find such an article, follow the guidelines in the previous step. Actively try to find a good place for the information if a separate article is not warranted before it would get deleted. Merging is no longer an option if the article is nominated, because if it got deleted, the attribution would be lost, violating the GFDL. Be proactive. If you do get in a deletion debate, do not get high and mighty quoting the deletion policy to people and how all deletionists are evil, biased POV pushers. If there's anything that will rack up the deletion votes, it's getting people to associate an uncivil contributor with the article. And finally: make decisions on individual articles, do not act as if you're writing policy. Wiki decisions set far less precedent than people like to believe, and precedent can always be overridden in special cases.

That settles that, for now. So now on to importance... On second thought, I think I've had more than my share of WikiPhilosophy for now. :-) JRM 18:13, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

A thought to consider

Presented for your consideration. Note that I don't claim this to be what I actually believe, not so much because I don't believe it as because I'm, uh, a little frigging tired of being insulted for ever suggesting that anything ever falls under the rubric of "fancruft" or that maybe those of us using the term "fancruft" are not evil bigots for doing so. Here is, however, a simple formulation:

1. Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.
2. The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.
3. Fictions themselves, however, are real-world phenomena, and may deserve attention.
4. The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.

Discuss, or don't. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:50, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You forgot to add "or else". :-)

Incidentally, you can demand civility here. If you're civil about it. Don't automatically take every challenge of your opinion as an insult, but don't allow people to lash out at you either.

Now, on to the discussion. It's not going to be much of a discussion, because we're simply of different opinions in the matter. That happens.

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.

This is a charged statement; an opinion, and not a starting point. You explicate what this statement means below, but in itself we cannot deduce anything from it.

The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.

You're right. But this does not establish that they automatically do not deserve equal attention. Or even attention enough to be in Wikipedia. This is merely your opinion. A respected opinion, but still an opinion.

The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.

Possibly. That's more properly taken as part of the discussion on importance, because it's not restricted to fiction. Some people believe this applies to any topic. Some people believe it applies to no topic and that notability is overrated. It's not specific to fancruft. Sorry, "fiction". JRM 19:17, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

On the whole, I agree with Antaeus' points. My thoughts:

1. Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.

   Absolutely. It is possible that this is not explicitly stated in policy, because it is self-evident.

2. The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.

   Seems obvious.

3. Fictions themselves, however, are real-world phenomena, and may deserve attention.

   Or they may not. However, given that the "moral majority" of Wikipedians leans towards inclusionism, you will usually find it hard to justify exclusion of any particular work of fiction.

4. The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.

   Could not agree more. But that leaves the problem, whose real world are we talking about? The real world of the average slashdotter or videogamer is certainly not the same as that of an average encyclopedia reader, and that's the heart of our problem here. It makes me angry to see the biased views of our (technologically inclined and subculture-affiliated, to put it mildly) average editors dominate the overall direction of our content, but, sad and incomprehensible as it may be, all this anime-videogame-sci-fi-and-whatnot crap may be their real world after all, and that leaves us hardly any argument against inclusion. An unpleasant aspect of this is that, the more nerdy fancruft we get, the more nerds we may attract, and that possibility makes me serriously worry about our reputation in the real world. Kosebamse 21:46, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.

Absolutely. It is possible that this is not explicitly stated in policy, because it is self-evident.

Really? What is it, then? "Wikipedia is not a hoax library"? Sure. "Wikipedia is not a place for original research"? Obviously. "Wikipedia takes its topics from the real world"? Undoubtedly. "Wikipedia should reflect the biases, opinions and interests of the real world"? Certainly not. JRM 22:18, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

Kose, your outrage at our bias is understandable, and we do have things like Wikipedia:Bias. I think you're wrong when you conclude that having more nerd-inspired material will attract more nerds, though—as Wikipedia grows, we will also attract people from other fields. Concerns about our "reputation" are one thing, but only one thing. Does an encyclopedia need to define itself with concerns about how it looks like to the outside world? Are you aware how many people think we're off our rocker because we are free, and open for editing by all? Yet nobody of us would advocate abandoning that. Countering bias is not about appearing nice to the outside world; it's about intellectual honesty and completeness. (And raging at the "nerds" really isn't going to help much. They're not going to disappear because you vote to delete all their output, or something. :-) JRM 22:18, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

Countering bias is not about appearing nice to the outside world; it's about intellectual honesty and completeness. Methinks that our internal processes are good enough to handle bias in most cases, and intellectual honesty is certainly an important aspect. In an indirect way, however, the outside world plays a role: we always need more qualified editors to improve our content, and it's a bad idea to discourage them in any way (like presenting ourselves as the Internet's fancruft central). But I realize that there seems to be little empirical evidence to prove that crappy content harms our reputation or discourages potential editors, as obvious as this may be. Anyways, I'll stop shouting now and return to my real-world ivory tower. Real-world ivory tower, that looks like a nice metaphor for an ideal Wikipedia. Thanks fo your thoughts, and your patience. Kosebamse 07:49, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No, thanks for your input. I was actually far too snappy in my comeback—I guess that just shows I have some unresolved "issues" myself.

Too many people here just popped in to argue why fancruft is harmless/good and even why the word itself should be taboo. We also need people willing to argue that it's bad. However, after this whole discussion I'm convinced the whole fancruft debate is just an instance of much larger, general debates on quality standards in Wikipedia. I have a feeling that once we have settled those (if ever) the fancruft policies will follow more-or-less automatically. In particular, it may happen that some day the difference between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" (I use the terms loosely because they're convenient but labeling) may be at such odds that Wikipedia will fork, or a filter will be imposed (not the simple random link tag!) that establishes a quality threshold for the general public. In much the same way that it would allow us to vote on "approved" versions for public review, it might be that certain "fancruft" then gets no "approved" version at all, and disappears from the public radar, still available for "shadow" viewing and editing by those who want to. They could establish new filters and get the Encyclopedia Fancruftia (or the Wikimaginarium) just to their tastes. And there will always be hardcore editors who will only use the Encyclopedia Universalia, that has no filters at all (what we now call "Wikipedia"). As many have argued, filtering seems to be a better option than forking. Nobody wants to duplicate all that effort. With filtering, we could eventually eliminate VfD altogether, and just have a VfV (Votes for Versioning) with individual articles. Allowing everyone to create their own filters will alleviate a lot of the pain that comes with having "approved" versions (though there will still be heated debate, about the same as we now have for VfD, I'd wager. :-)

This is all pure speculation, however, and something for the very distant future. For now, we'll just have to make do with each other on all the articles. :-) JRM 09:23, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

This 'versioning' idea is really interesting, the slashdot approach really, inclusionsists could continue to read at -1, while deletionists could have level 5, which would only include what you would expect to find in a 19th century encyclopedia. Is anyone working on fleshing this out? Intrigue 10:13, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Geogre's Thoughts on Lost and Found Information

Because this page is getting quite long, and Geogre and I have a positive propensity for loquaciousness (as evidenced by this sentence :-) I've moved this discussion to its own page: /Geogre's thoughts. (A vanity title, I know, but if you know something better... :-) JRM 00:07, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)

Atlas Shrugged as a model middle way

While debates on fancruft tend to feature anti-fancruft types citing such egregious examples as the utterly insane and fanatical Category:Gundam_weaponry (87 articles on fictional weapons from a Japanese TV series), few people point to instances of fancruft managed _well_. Fans of Ayn Rand books are not exactly known for their moderation, but the Atlas Shrugged article and its associated pages are a veritable model of restraint compared to some articles on games and anime. The secret? Most of the non-encyclopediac content is in Wikibooks. Transwiking the gigantic collections of fan material seems to me an effective compromise between people who want maximum coverage and people who take the "Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not" page's admonition against creating a "general knowledge base" at its word. jdb ❋ (talk) 18:23, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"Fantatical" and its alternatives

Forgive the micro-revert, but I have two problems with changing "fanatical" to "fan". First of all, "fan" is not just a less offensive way of saying "fanatical". ("Fan" was once short for "fanatic" but that hasn't been true for decades.) I'm a fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar, but I'm not a fanatical fan -- I'm more likely to see something if she's in it, but I'll probably never see the Scoobie Doo movies.

Which brings me to my other issue: "fanatical" is not a POV word. It just means you feel strongly about something. It tends to have extreme connotations (assasins and terrorists are often spoke of as "fanatics") but it's also used to describe relatively harmless people ("Fanatical Star Wars fans stood in line for days to buy tickets to Episode VII, The Sith Return.") Whatever you think of Ayn Rand, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that many of her fans are "fanatical".

But if offending Randians is a big concern, there are plenty of synonyms of "fanatic" to choose from. Some less offensive, some more. But all more to the point than "fan". ---Isaac R 01:21, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

"First of all, "fan" is not just a less offensive way of saying "fanatical"." I know. It wasn't intended to be, either. Yes, I admit it! I was rewriting your material rather than rewording it! Bad me! :-)

"Which brings me to my other issue: "fanatical" is not a POV word. It just means you feel strongly about something." I must disagree. It doesn't "just" mean that, it implies a negative overzealousness. According to the AHD: "possessed with or motivated by excessive, irrational zeal". I am not disputing here that many fans are fanatical or that fanaticism is at the heart of much fancruft production— but the particular sentence in which it is used now implies that Atlas Shrugged has a fanatical following, and this is what caused so much fancruft articles to pop up, while it isn't even about that, but about how the fancruft articles have seen been cut down. The value judgement slipped in here makes it much less useful.

With that in mind, I've rewritten it outright. Is that better? Does it need a "fanatical" slipped in somewhere? :-) JRM · Talk 08:46, 2005 May 4 (UTC)

Actually, you didn't rewrite any material of mine, because I haven't contributed any to this article. I've just been doing small copy edits and kibitzing. Your rewrite has some strong points, but I can't say anything positive about the first two sentences: "There is not necessarily a dichotomy between having one article and as many as there are things to write on. Atlas Shrugged was among the earliest fan-covered fiction on Wikipedia." I have absolutely no idea what the first sentence is trying to say. The second sentence is a just a bit of trivia that doesn't really have anything to do with the subject. You've jumped through so many hoops trying to restate the concept in a neutral way, you've lost sight of the concept you're trying to describe.

I suggest bringing back the partial sentence these two seem to replace, "This is not to say that all fiction with fanatical followings must necessarily give rise to fancruft controversies..." Then maybe try to find a simple rewording that will make the sentence less offensive, such as replacing "fanatical" with "enthusiastic" or something similar. ---Isaac R 17:27, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Rewritten again. You are of course equally free to rewrite yourself, including but not limited to bringing back those sentences, if you're attached to them—I'm not going to revert it. I am not, by the way, trying to restate the concept (what concept?) in a neutral way. Eliminating "fanatical" is not the goal; it was, but then you reverted, so I'm looking for ways not to have to label edits as anything, because labeling isn't half as useful as saying how things are (or are perceived).

I've tried to make clear that on the one hand, we have (or can have) a squillion articles on a single topic, each a study in subtriviology, and on the other hand we can have a group of articles that summarize all those minutiae, and shunt off everything non-encyclopedic to outside Wikipedia. The reason I mention that Atlas Shrugged was among the earliest fan-covered fiction was not because I have a penchant for trivia myself, but to make clear that fancruft can evolve. Atlas Shrugged wasn't always the ten-article utopia it's made out to be, compared to the Japanese robot disaster. "Fanatical" is unimportant. Forget "fanatical". JRM · Talk 18:59, 2005 May 4 (UTC)

Or maybe just leave it be. It's always good to avoid offending people, but you're writing about "fancruft" which is a pretty cruel word. When you talk about something like that, it's pretty hard to be totally inoffensive and still say anything useful. ---Isaac R 17:27, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm trying to be informative, NPOV (even though it's not an article) and maybe offer ways to settle the problems behind fancruft other than "shoot everything that smacks of it on sight". Being "totally inoffensive" is not the goal, but just because it's a cruel word (and I think it's lost much of its cruelty already through regular use) doesn't mean the page describing it has to be cruel too. It doesn't have to be nice either, of course, which is why it doesn't read "but oh well, Wikipedia is not paper, so let's not use this bad word anymore and be on our way". Of course, more discussion on what we can (or should) do about fancruft is always nice. JRM · Talk 18:59, 2005 May 4 (UTC)