# Talk:Carl Diggler

This review is transcluded from Talk:Carl Diggler/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Mackensen (talk · contribs) 19:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Hello Brandt Luke Zorn (talk · contribs), thanks for your work on this article. I hope to have comments for you shortly. Best, Mackensen (talk) 19:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

I made a few copyedits and switched around one misplaced reference, but otherwise I find no fault with this article. I'm surprised that I never heard of Diggler during the campaign. Mackensen (talk) 20:47, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Since so much focus is placed on his primary predictions, I think there needs to be a full on section about his bad final prediction. People will inevitably look for such a section afterwards, assuming that the sections will be in chronological order. 
Such a section could include quotes of his final prediction, responses before and after the election from outside WaPo, as well as everything already in the final paragraph in the preceding section.
— trlkly 09:15, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Am I missing something, or is this just the product of an overenthusiastic fan community? It certainly seems appropriate for a fan wiki, but Wikipedia does not seem to be the right place and I don't see why it wouldn't be a sub-section of the article covering Chapo Trap House or the people portraying this character. I am not familiar enough with the subject matter to say so for sure and don't want to nominate for merger/deletion if I'm missing something, but if I am then the article needs to do a much better job of explaining what that might be. Can anyone fill me in? Thomas Craven (talk) 20:20, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Respectfully, as the writer, I disagree. In the first place, Diggler as a project is separate from Chapo Trap House and predates it. Diggler was a writing job for Felix and Virgil as part of their work for Cafe. Chapo is an independent project (they have their own LLC) started by Felix, Matt, and Will, with Virgil only joining later. Secondary sources about Diggler tend to omit Chapo or only mention it in passing. There's no reason to think of Diggler as a subordinate topic to Chapo, except that Diggler was created by some of the same people and that Diggler is less well-known—which is sort of like saying that The Terminal should be merged into Saving Private Ryan because The Terminal was made with some of the same people and is less well-known.
I appreciate the reasons that Diggler may not seem notable at a glance. First, everything about Diggler is very inside baseball, in that the object of his parody is the minutia and hyper-specific manner of newspaper punditry, already a pretty marginal topic in and of itself. Second, Diggler was really only around for the 2016 presidential campaign season as Felix & Virgil have stopped writing the character, so the Diggler project is already "over" (for now) and the page has thus become a historical topic.
The primary significance of Diggler—the stuff that justifies the existence of an article on the topic under Wikipedia policy—is that after the character garnered a minor following, he then broke through into serious Media Discourse when he challenged Nate Silver, attracting coverage in (among others) the Washington Post and the New Yorker—the kind of publications that are not only "reliable" for Wikipedia's purposes, but which are usually considered esteemed in the US. At a base level, the secondary commentary Diggler attracted in these sources sets a baseline level of notability that justifies the existence of the article. If Diggler had never become a brief object of media/election discourse, I wouldn't have made the article. But he did, so I did.
Personally, I think the most interesting thing about Diggler is that the character and the surrounding hubbub perfectly captured a time and a place in media discourse. I once came across the excellent Wikipedia article for Mr. Dooley, a fictional character in a newspaper column from the late 19th/early 20th century. I wouldn't directly compare the two in historical significance or literary value, but Diggler is in some ways a rougher, modern version for the digital age. Diggler's significance now is as a frozen-in-amber satirical/literary artifact of the 2016 presidential election, a character rendered in painstaking and absurd detail by two nerds who were paying way more attention to the quirks and ideologies of the pundit class than anyone else. —BLZ · talk 21:25, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
The Mr. Dooley comparison is interesting, but Dunne was widely read and tremendously influential. Mr. Dooley sketches spanned decades and were apparently read at Cabinet meetings as a measure of public opinion; that much is clear from skimming the entry. I've looked at this article a few times, and I'm still not clear if Carl Diggler was ever widely known? The Nate Silver section is especially confusing to me; Silver didn't consider himself to be participating in a contest with Diggler, did he? Did he even indicate awareness of the parody?
It boils down to an editorial decision where I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but I do think this kind of article is something Wikipedia has a long history of wrestling with. I would endorse editing it down to a more concise treatment. Put another way: I stumbled on to this entry wondering "Who is Carl Diggler and why is he such a big deal that he has his own Wikipedia article?" and I walk away from the article more or less still wondering the same. Just my 2c: consider a more succinct treatment written for a more general audience.  Thomas Craven (talk) 21:47, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough! I value the feedback. It's been almost two years since I wrote it and some of the paragraphs were added by others, so it could use a haircut. I also didn't intend to suggest that Diggler was as notable as Dooley, only to give some context for the rich tradition of fictional characters writing political columns.  —BLZ · talk 00:54, 24 July 2018 (UTC)