Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Popular Culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive 1

Contents

[edit] Improvements

Alright, this is starting to look like a real project! If you haven't noticed, I added a project infobox, assessment banner, and a new professional-looking userbox. Hope you don't mind, Father Goose, I edited your pic since it wasn't being used anywhere else, and removed the shadow cuz it didn't match the color of the banner. I think it was the best choice... colorful yet simple, and representative of this project. I've tested everything to make sure it all works, and after some bot gets done doing whatever it does, we can add an article stats table like you see on the other projects. I think thats it, now we just need to get out there and tag some articles... and please assess them when you do! Don't just leave them blank, please. On that note, if you're bored read another edition of As Wikipedia Turns. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 09:29, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

When placing the template, do we assess the article as a whole, or do we assess just the content that falls within the scope of our wikiproject? In some cases, these may be two different things. --NickPenguin(contribs) 11:37, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, thats a good question. Not real sure about that one. I would guess you should take the whole article into consideration. If the article is listed as a Good Article, yet the pop culture section needs improvement, then I wouldn't think you should tag it as a Start class article. Perhaps we should only tag articles that are completely dedicated to popular culture, and just list articles with small sections on the project page. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 21:09, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
That would be my preference, at least initially. In the long run, I think we should focus on trying to spin out medium-size and larger pop-culture sections so as to get them "out of the hair" of those that dislike them. Given that they can grow very large, this is generally the right thing to do per WP:SS anyway. Some articles (such as wedgie or Interweb) may be predominantly about the subject's pop-culture presence; these should not be split, and can be tagged with the project banner.
My initial thinking on quality assessment:
  • "Stub" is for very rudimentary, incomplete IPC lists
  • "Start" for reasonably complete lists
  • "B" for well-organized, well-written lists that have a prose lead giving an overview of the subject, with all facts properly cited (descriptions of primary sources can be treated as an implicit citation of the primary source -- but if it's a TV show, for instance, the specific episode(s) containing the references must be listed); also non-list articles meeting the same criteria
  • GA and/or "A"; as above, but get it as close to WP:WIAFL or WP:FACR standards as possible
--Father Goose (talk) 22:24, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
As regards our WP1.0 assessment page and category, is it possible to remove "trivia" from its name? We work on trivia-type information, but not trivia articles, as they should not exist.--Father Goose (talk) 22:31, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Well I suppose it is certainly possible, but it is the name of our project. If we wanted to remove the Trivia from our category and such, we probably would need to rename our entire project to reflect this change. And then move everything to the new name, otherwise, I'm pretty sure it has to match your project name. On another note, I already tagged all the pages listed for improvement. If anybody knows how we can get a bot to tag the entire category of "in popular culture" please do so because otherwise it will be a lot of tedious work. I also assesed the articles based on their importance. More general topics such as "pirates in pop culture" I gave higher importance than more specific articles such as "blackbeard in pop culture". The bot will update the stats every night, so its listing only one right now, but that will change. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 22:58, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Is the assessment category/page automatically derived from our project's name? In that case, I wouldn't change anything, but if it's manually-entered, I'd choose to remove "trivia" from the article assessment stuff for the reasons given above (it is a portion of our goals but, being a type of content and not a type of article, is not subject to assessment).--Father Goose (talk) 23:55, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree, Category:Articles with trivia sections does more than an adequate job of keeping track of articles with trivia sections, and we wouldn't need to duplicate those categories. We will likely only be assessing Foobar in popular culture type articles and articles with significantly long IPC lists. --NickPenguin(contribs) 01:59, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I really would suggest changing the name. Every other project has assessment categories which match their names. Changing the name of the assessment categories as far as I know (I haven't asked anyone) is possible. They are indeed manually entered, and placing your category in the WP1.0 assessment category automatically alerts the bot to scan the subcategories for pages. However, changing the name of the assessment category might create some confusion and would require changes to the project banner and everything else. As I said, every other project has categories matching their name. If our main focus is pop culture, I don't see why we shouldn't reflect this focus in the name anyway. I would be willing to do all the work all over again... I just don't see the point in changing the category if we aren't going to change the project name. I did a little reading, and projects merge and change names all the time, so I can easily change everything over to the new name. And since we haven't tagged that many articles yet, it would be MUCH easier to do it now, before we get in too deep. Also, if we're not going to be "Trivia" anymore I don't know if we should keep the same icon either. But thats just me. It seems the Penguin and the Goose are the founding members of this project, so I'm not going to go around changing anything unless these two guys are on board. But if you ask me, I say we either keep the "Trivia" or change the project name, that would make the most sense. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 03:12, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
This isn't a big deal to me (in fact, it seems trivial) but I don't like the "trivia" in the title anyway. As the discussions on this page show, "trivia" isn't an accurate term for the content dealt with. –Pomte 03:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, okay, I agree to a project name change, but I'd like to keep the "trivia salvage" task as part of the project. It may be dormant for now, but it's still an important task I hope will be revived. The AfDs get the most attention because of the urgency of a deletion discussion, but there are some really nice trivia sections out there that should never have been deleted. Amongst them are "Cultural references"-type sections (references made by the subject of the article to other cultural subjects, instead of references by other subjects to the article's subject). I'd say those are definitely in the "pop culture" scope.--Father Goose (talk) 07:23, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, there is already a project devoted to trivia anyway, regardless of whether or not they have the same goals as we do, they're already taking care of it. We really don't have enough members to be spreading our efforts so thin. I think focusing on "in pop culture" would be best, and hopefully we can attract new members through our banner. Do you think we should keep the trivial pursuit icon? I think it still says "pop culture" so I'd be willing to keep it... that and I'm lazy! Mmmkay, well if nobody else objects I'll take care of everything tomorrow... soon we will be WikiProject Popular Culture! Er... or WikiProject In Popular Culture? Dammit, I wish I didn't overthink everything. Thats what Wikipedia does to a person, you get so used to being nitpicked you start to nitpick yourself without thinking about it. Sigh... --ErgoSum88 (talk) 07:58, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Hahahaha.
You're doing it wrong!
But seriously, I think the Trivial Pursuit icon's still good for our purposes, and "WikiProject Popular Culture" is fine too.--Father Goose (talk) 09:38, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

lol, Thank you... someone slap me with a trout. Anyway, I guess nothing is going to change but our name. We can still do trivia improvment, and we're going to leave the references to trivia in our project goals and such. We're just going to concentrate on pop culture. BTW, I agree with you about the "list-class" articles, however, the option is still there to use it. If an article is never going to progess past a list (such as articles with "list" in the title) I think it should be used. Also, non-article pages such as categories and disambiguation pages can be tagged, and their importance should be listed as NA, in case anyone was wondering. Well, I have a GA review to attend to, so I'll take care of this later. Wish me luck! --ErgoSum88 (talk) 23:09, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

OK everything is done. I must say I like the new name. Regardless of our opinions about "trivia" I think we are better off without the word in our title. Pop culture is "trivial" enough without getting grouped with actual trivia. Speaking of trivia, it seems Aditya found an article named Kolkata trivia (aka Calcutta). I suppose they DO exist, although I can never seem to find them, considering they are HUGE targets for deletion. Although if you read the Kolkata article you will see all the same information adequately integrated. I don't think there is much we can do for it except try to think of a better name for it. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 09:32, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
The project banner can be adjusted in such a way as to add material indicating existence of a trivia section, quality of a trivia section, etc. It's not real easy, but it is doable. Regarding assessment, generally that's for the article as a whole. However, I know some projects rate only relative to content regarding their subject, so that's permittable as well. We just have to make clear somewhere what the specific parameters for the various assessment grades for this project are. John Carter (talk) 14:23, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Yeah I think I know what you're taking about. Project India has something like that, an optional parameter which produces an additional assessment class for Indian History. Instead of having a seperate banner for Project Indian history, they both use the same banner. Thanks for the info. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 17:07, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User:MiszaBot II

I beleive that the wikiproject is improving since you have a banner, an assessment drive, target articles for improvements and deletion notifications. Why not an automatic talkpage archiver?--Lenticel (talk) 00:05, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I personally dislike robot-archiving except for absurdly active pages. Not that I oppose it, I just prefer hand-archiving.--Father Goose (talk) 06:49, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Quality control

One of my biggest gripes about in pop cult sections and arts of the past is the veritable ad hoc adding of items with no order or sense - like 'oh jim blow was in a tv show and he looked like x' and added as the odd editor came along and had a thought about it, and then another would. The other thing is also the extraordinarily high rate of items that are in culture in the United States and possibley nowhere else in the planet but there would be no qualification of that as such - as a consequence I am about to put a section in the project page that addresses that - cheers SatuSuro 04:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

While you bring up some good points, for future reference, you might want to bring any major edits to the attention of project members before you go around editing their scopes and goals. It is generally considered bad form to make changes to project pages without discussing them first. Since the essence of a project is collaboration between a group of editors, changes or additions should not be made without group consensus. Also, adding phrases such as "...for this project to have any credibility it must address..." might be taken as an insult to project members.
That being said, you bring up some valid concerns. Yes, popular culture articles are US-centric, poorly thrown-together collections of lists with no organization or prose. This is one of the many problems with Wikipedia, articles like these lack any focus and generally are created by hundreds of people randomly adding their two cents. I agree with your edits, but I made some changes... no big deal and no harm done. I appreciate your interest and I invite you to add your name to the member list. Thanks! --ErgoSum88 (talk) 19:20, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

OK apologies for the edit before consult - point taken SatuSuro 10:16, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Duress code

Hi folks, I figured this was a pretty prominent plot device and there should be some refs out there for it, I reverted the pop culture bits removal and suggested 3 weeks was an adequate timespan to find some material or otherwise improve the section. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 06:57, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I've cut it down to just the one example: S5E04 of 24, where it's specifically labelled as one. Sceptre (talk) 17:45, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrote Wikipedia:"In popular culture" articles

Keeping in line with what I felt has been a large scale community consensus development on In popular culture articles and sections, I have significantly rewritten the essay Wikipedia:"In popular culture" articles. Please compare the new version with the old and make some comments. --NickPenguin(contribs) 15:40, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Similar project

Please also note: Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Core biographies/Cultural depictions of core biography figures. I think we should have a "see also" section on our project for theirs and perhaps on their project for ours? Best, --Le Grand Roi des CitrouillesTally-ho! 19:41, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] FAR

Scooby-Doo has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. Ultra! 15:08, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article improvement drive

Now that most of the X in popular culture type article have been tagged and given a rough assessment, the time has come to start sorting through what we've got and figure out what to do with it. There are more than a handful that would be best written as prose and merged back into the original. There are even a few that would good AfD candidates, but in most of those cases I think it would be better to merge/redirect.

With most of the articles, the big problem is that they need a major cleanup. Simple improvements include removing nonnotable and duplicate entries, grouping items by type, roughly organizing the article by importance/area of most influence, and reassessing the article on the quality and importance scales. More indepth improvements include expanding and improving lede sections, adding pictures, citations, wikilinking, eliminated maintenance tags, and converting lists into prose.

We should also work on getting more articles to GA status. Currently there are Black Swan emblems and popular culture and Cultural depictions of spiders as GAs, but Jayne Mansfield in popular culture is currently nominated for GA. Maybe we can pick a few top importance articles and turn them into really good examples of quality pop culture articles. Suggestions? --NickPenguin(contribs) 01:42, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Lions in popular culture looks like a promising GA or perhaps even FA. You might consider collaborating with Wikipedia:WikiProject Cats. I also suggest that you move this back to Cultural depictions of lions.--Lenticel (talk) 05:18, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
If you check my edit history for today, you'll notice that I went through practically the whole category making at least a few improvements to each article. Also, I came upon a source (Alain Boureau, Satan the Heretic: the Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiii + 255 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-226-06748-3.) that could maybe be used for Satan or Demonology in popuar culture topics. Best, --Le Grand Roi des CitrouillesTally-ho! 00:19, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
After adding project banners to all of the pages listed on the project front page, they are on my watchlist and when I logged in this evening I noticed my list was covered with your name! I've also noticed the Penguin doing lots of project work lately, and I think you both deserve a pat on the back for the effort you both have put into improving articles. If I ever get the time, I'll design a Pop Culture Barnstar and award it to you both. In the meantime, thanks for all the hard work and keep it up. --ErgoSum88 (talk) 01:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
A WPPC barnstar?--Lenticel (talk) 01:28, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
A barnstar is a great idea! Also, I'm not sure if we have any coverage on racism in popular culture, but here's a relevant source: James W. Loewen, "American Culture Typically Locates Racism in the South," Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of America Racism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 194-198. The section of the rather lengthy book discusses various films and their depiction or lack of therefore of "sundown" towns. He writes, "Take Grosse Pointe Blank, for example, a 1997 John Cussack vehicle. This film...fails to tell that Grosse Pointe was all-white on purpose throughout the era it depicts..." (pg 196), not exactly a valid criticism of the film in my opinion as it just doesn't seem what the film was about, but nevertheless the pages could be used as reliable secondary source reference on an article on Racism in popular culture. Best, --Le Grand Roi des CitrouillesTally-ho! 03:43, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] PRODs

A few articles were PRODed today. I removed the tag from some notable ones, but they will probably be listed soon:

Other less notable ones I left the PROD momentarily to see what others thought:

We should probably notify other wikiprojects etc. too. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:03, 9 June 2008 (UTC)