User:BreathingMeat

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Here's some of these: This user is a member of the Computer and Video Games WikiProject. Dr. Who This user has been a Doctor Who fan since the Third Doctor. 3rd This user is a Christian. This user is a cat lover. This user comes from New Zealand. This user drinks beer.

I am a Wikipedian from New Zealand.

I have recently started a webcomic called So Much Potential.

[edit] My applied opinion on Fancruft

I do not see any harm in there being Wikipedia pages for video games, episodes of TV shows or Pokemon species. Obviously they are of interest to someone or else they wouldn't have been created. There is a high awareness of most of these things, and because they have been deemed fit for publication or broadcast in most cases, they are therefore likely to be of sufficient notability and quality to warrant an entry in Wikipedia.

My problem begins when the content of these articles starts to spill into articles that are not about popular culture. The giant panda article, which periodically gets cleaned up, is a good example of this; this version of the article illustrates the problem in an extreme, but not uncommon, state. If it weren't for people cleaning out all of the cruft which ends up there, the bulk of the article would be a list of games and cartoons featuring pandas or panda-like creatures.

I think it's a case of trying to empathise with a prospective reader. If I came to Wikipedia looking for information on Cobras, I would be unlikely to be interested to know that there is a cobra-like Pokemon called Arbok. On the other hand, if I came to Wikipedia looking for information on Pokemon, Arbok would be of much more interest.

It's OK for there to be a section called "xxx in popular culture", but that is where the problems often start. Suddenly there is a licence for fans to promote their favourate song or film or whatever because it contains a reference to the subject of the article. This really does need to be reigned in. I think pop culture sections should be limited to discussion of trends in popular culture and be made up of proper prose rather than bullet points: "Giant pandas often appear in anime and similar media as helpless, lazy or obese characters, such as the Tarepanda. In Western media this theme is not reflected: Soo, for example, a character in the British puppet show The Sooty Show is rather prim and fussy." There should be no more than one well-selected example to illustrate each point.