Talk:Meme

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Meme should be pronounced miːm to rhyme with gene, not mɛm


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January 29, 2005 Peer review Reviewed
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Archive
Archives
*Archive 1 — up to September 2004
To-do: edit · history · watch · refresh
  • Merge Memetics ⇒ Meme.(maybe)
  • Supply missing citations to sources, preferably (and always in the case of direct quotations or attributions) with page references where they exist.
  • Remove all of the weasel words and provide sources for statements that contain "one can..." and "for example...".
  • Clean up grammar and sentence structure. Isn't this one resolved by now?
  • Prune the list of memes to include only salient examples of specific phenomena.
  • Quote from more artistic works themselves — books, films and popular media — for more direct examples to make it more easly comprehensible or illustrative, etc.
  • Incorporate scientific community criticism of the concept (ex. James Polichak's "Memes as Pseudoscience", a response to the article "Memes as Good Science". Also include input from the anthropological community such as Kuper, Sperber, Bloch.
  • Explain why culture is discrete, and hence analysable in memetic terms.
  • Address if intention does or does not make the development of ideas fundamentally different from random mutation.
  • Provide examples of applied memetic engineering, if any can be found, such as Godwin's Law or various propaganda/advertising efforts (André the Giant Has a Posse, etc.)
  • Clarify Darwin's ideas on social Darwinism; he himself was not a social Darwinist.
  • There seems to be a lack of coherence between the 'Origins of the concept' section and the subsection 'Etymology'. At least, a further clarification is needed.
  • Reference snowclones.
Priority 1 (top) 

Contents

[edit] Meme or Memetics?

To me there seems to be some disarray over what belongs in the Meme entry and what belongs in Memetics. Has anyone else noted this? Do the 'Meme-like concepts before Dawkins', 'Well-known memeticists' and 'Doubts about memetics' sections belong in Meme or Memetics?

On another note: Is the 30 long list 'Examples of memes' a bit overkill? Aren't 5-10 good examples enough to illustrate that every human idea is a meme? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Memespace (talk • contribs) 04:31, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pronuntiation

Since there's a "citation needed" on the pronuntiation of "meme", I'd like to add that on the Selfish Gene it is specified that it should be pronounced to rhyme with "cream". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.22.25.165 (talk) 23:41, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pseudo-science

Phoney. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.5.71 (talk) 12:16, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] POV

The article slangs God, chastity and Catholicism. Real sciences are not so specific. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.164.249.171 (talk) 13:43, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Don't use in Scrabble

I'm hesitant to edit such a large entry, but perhaps the fact that the word isn't in the Official Scrabble Dictionary (as of 2001) should be mentioned. You could lose a turn! —Preceding unsigned comment added by B0blee (talk • contribs) 22:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)