Wikipedia talk:Fancruft/Archive 1

message: Fair enough, but can you show me one place where the term fancruft is used in a non-pejorative sense? --Phil | Talk 12:40, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
:I've had a go at making this a little more even-handed. It surprised me to find that it was a Wikipedia neologism, but that's the Google indication anyway. Andrewa 10:30, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: How about, uh, every time I use it?  What you're asking for me is the impossible task of proving a negative, proving that I do not have any intent to insult when I use the term.  Just because pejorative meaning can be read into the term does not mean that you can assume bad faith and accuse everyone who uses it of having pejorative intent.  -- Antaeus Feldspar 05:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My simple advice is: If you can explain your vote without using such terms, do, and if you can't, don't vote. Just a suggestion. There are lots of other jobs to do. Andrewa 19:56, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My suggestion is that you stop assigning yourself the privilege of determining which terms can be used and which can't or who should stop voting because they don't do it your way.  -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:23, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: As I said, it was just a suggestion. No such privileges are assigned or claimed. I guess in hindsight there wasn't a lot of hope that the advice would be helpful to you, but as it's a public forum, I'm still hopeful it may help others. Peace! Andrewa 01:04, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Any non-pejorative uses? 

message: Has anybody ever tried to squeeze out any objective answer to these questions, no matter how incomplete? No, really. I'm interested. Forget about consensus for a moment—let's not try to get "policy" passed for now. I'd just like a philosophical discussion on one aspect of what Wikipedia is not, beyond people just shouting links to each other.
Why are people so strongly opposed to fancruft? What do we consider to be fancruft in the first place? (For the moment, I hope we can postpone the PC discussions on whether "fancruft" is a pejorative term or not—if you don't like it, read "expertism" instead, or something.) What unconvential aspects of Wikipedia, compared to traditional encyclopedias, play a role in its inclusion or exclusion?
Before proceeding, check egos and actual fan dedications at the door, please. No grudge matches and no proposed policy discussions in this section. Humor me. JRM 01:08, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)
: More to the point, why does it matter? Wikipedia already has plenty of relevant policy (and precident) regarding what should and shouldn't be included, without having to resort to the definition of fancruft. Use of the word fancruft just gets noses out of joint. Shane King 06:50, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
:: I don't dispute that, but if people are using this single word to apply a specific instance of that policy, I want to know why they're doing it and what it means. There's no use in pretending this value judgement doesn't or shouldn't exist, that people are fundamentally wrong in using it, and that we should all stick to established policy and precedent anyway (the latter is of course quite contentious, since we make policy and precedent ourselves).
:: I'm actually glad people are using it. Otherwise it just all boils down to "notability" again, and that's even more vague and ill-specified than "fancruft". At least with that, people are implying a more-or-less specific reason why they don't consider it notable. JRM 09:01, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)
:::There are plenty of reasons people could be giving when they vote delete on what they describe as "funcruft" that aren't "non-notable". There are dozens of inclusion criteria that don't boil down to notability. That's my complaint: by calling it fancruft they're just avoiding their obligation as described at the top of the vfd page of explaining their reasoning. Fancruft isn't a valid reason, since it's not listed anywhere as being a valid reason. I'm opposing any move to make it policy that it should become a reason, because it's an ill-defined word that is completely unneccesary. If we want to fix the "people vote fancruft and we don't know what it means" problem, we really should do it by discarding all votes that don't list a reason for keep/delete that can be referenced to policy. I'm not holding my breath though, most people seem to not care about policy and instead only care about their own deletionist or inclusionist ideas. Shane King 03:19, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)
:Good questions. I'll just deal with the two in the title for now, I think the question of why are people so strongly... is also a key, but I'd like to do some groundwork first.
:As to what is fancruft, I think in one way it depends on the user, like any term. At the risk of retreating into philocruft, the precise definition of terms is an Aristotelian concept. Aristotle didn't formalise this in any way, he rather assumed it could be done; Prescriptive linguistics and naive set theory both followed this lead, and both were finally abandoned following the work of Wittgenstein, Austin and Kripke in the mid 20th century. But just as the consequences of this to Mathematics, which started with Russell's demolition of Frege at the start of the 20th century, still haven't made it into the classroom (and may never do so), so the consequences for linguistics (and semantics in particular) haven't hit the public mind. Most people still think that defining a term in a prescriptive or legalistic way is a useful thing to do.
:As a final shot here, I think it's fascinating that the venerable OED was originally descriptive not prescriptive. This is perhaps especially relevant to we encyclopedists?
:Lewis Carroll was 'way ahead of us when he has Humpty Dumpty say When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. Communication is both imperfect and cooperative. So the question is, what do the users of this word intend it to mean, and is there any consensus among them?
:That makes your second question, is it bad for us, hard to answer. I would have to say sometimes.
:Wikipedia succeeds whenever someone finds the information they want, and fails whenever they look and don't find it. Whether the experience is positive in other ways, such as great-looking pages, is important too but secondary. The primary goal is to deliver the information.
:For this to happen, the information needs to be there (and  of course accurate) and they need to find it. It's the second problem that can make detail excessive, by making the desired information harder to find.  
:I think that's enough from me for a start. I hope this helps. Andrewa 18:50, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is fancruft, and is it bad for us? 

message: I don't see a clear line between literary criticism, and "fan cruft",
except for the "I know it when I see it" theory.
For example, I think that no one would object to an article discussing Romeo and Juliet (The well known play by Shakespeare).  If I was contributing to that article (which I have no plans to do) I certainly might include some background on the Capulet and Montague familes.
Why for some of us is that somehow more appropriate than an article about the various characters in Dragon Ball Z?
(To answer my own retorical question) because Shakespeare has somehow entered our Cultural literacy (in E.D. Hirsch's usage).  This is clearly a subjective question.  Notice also that I said "our" two sentences ago.  We don't all come from the same culture.  Maybe for some of us (in Japan perhaps)  Akira Toriyama is much more well known (and a part of the Cultural literacy than William Shakespeare.
Maybe for some of us things like a 'Get out of jail free card' and 'Do not collect two hundred dollars' have entered the culture.  For others, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards are more a part of the culture.
I also fail to see the negative consequences of leaving the fancruft in the wikipedia.  I don't think that it reflects poorly on the other articles.
Morris 03:22, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)
:Your observations are keen, and especially valuable in regards to the (supposed?) culture-neutral angle our encyclopedia adopts. (Itself of course subject to massive discussion, i.e. there's a de facto cultural bias anyway in our readers, so why not our writers...)
:However, if we consider Wikipedias in other cultures, I think this can't be the whole picture. Shakespeare is notable in all Wikipedias because he was notable in English literature, and English literature is itself a notable topic (of course, more directly, Shakespeare has been massively translated and has entered new cultures that way). Can we say the same for (still random example) Dragonball Z?
:Perhaps we can claim that has entered into cultural literacy if we consider a specific subculture, but of course that means anything goes, anything at all for which fans are sufficiently tight-knit to form a subculture. And in these days of massive online communication, fans meet up excessively easy.
:So, is it really that "fancruft" is just what you call things you're not interested in, and you should basically reformulate it into other terms (like "notability", another shibboleth)? Of course "notability" can be made "objective" more easily: just start counting interested people... JRM 09:22, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)
I agree entirely. There is a discussion on VfD currently in which nearly all the participants ridicule a comparison of Portia with Pokemon characters. But they are looking at it from a narrow perspective, I think. I'd venture to suggest that far, far more people interest themselves in Yu-Gi-Oh cards or the Simpsons than in Tale of the Tub, which it would be fair to say is probably not even particularly widely read.
There's a large element in yelling "fancruft" of "I'm not interested". But hey, we have articles on fairly minor areas of mathematics and science, which are not particularly expandable (or interesting to anyone but mathematicians or scientists), and yet if you tried to list them, with the reason "mathcruft", you'd get your arse kicked.
"Notability" is all too often a codeword for "I don't know what it is", when it isn't just a way of saying "I have no reason as such for not wanting this in, it just doesn't fit my idea of what should be in an encyclopaedia". The latter would at least be honest!Dr Zen 05:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  I don't see a clear line... 

message: I think the issue at stake here is whether we are neutral in the value we ascribe to different things. As long as the article complies with the other policies, I think it's fine to have articles on Japanese card games. I really don't think that the issue of respectability is one we should worry about. When we unpack that concept what we find is that we are worried that users will think less of us if we don't agree with them about what is important or interesting. Let the user beware if they press the random page link - they may get great literature, or they may get star trek trivia, or perhaps a small american town the no-one has ever heard of. If they didn't want to take that chance, they shouldn't have pressed 'random page'! Intrigue 03:10, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Neutrality

message: Here are twenty consecutive pages obtained using the randompage link, starting from the first that I received.
#Ashley (Power Rangers) - typical fancruft, does not explicitly mention that this is about fiction
#Thomas Kirk - biographical stub
#Thomas M. Reynolds - biographical stub
#Seven Persons, Alberta - geographical microstub 
#Lesseps class land battleship - typical fancruft, does not explicitly mention that this is about fiction
#Davis-Monthan Air Force Base - quite nice article of a more or less geographical nature
#List of anime - meta-fancruft
#Abdullah (Afghanistan) -  biographical stub
#Velocipede - stub
#Edward MacDowell - biographical article
#Maxi Mounds - biographical stub about a porn model noted "for her extraordinarily large breasts"
#Northern cities vowel shift - stub about a linguistic topic
#Second dealing - poker-related stub (fancruft?) Intrigue
#Mountains of the Moon - short geographical article
#Bridge of Sighs (Oxford) - geographical stub
#LVMH - article about a major international company
#William Broomfield - short biographical article
#Sound logo - stub
#Maternity - dictionary definition
#West Midland Bird Club - article about an ornithological society
Thus, we have:
*three fancruft articles, two of which do not even mention that they are about fiction
*one dictionary definition
*six biographies, including one porn star noted for extraordinarily large breasts (though not about fiction, this one seems to fit in the category of "small, specialised audience", therefore it is more like fancruft than like a valid article)
*four geographical articles/stubs 
*six other articles
If I were a casual reader, this selection would not leave a favorable impression. This is just not what I expect in an encyclopedia. Kosebamse 11:38, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  A random sample of randompages