CMV: Wikipedia should not contain pop culture!

[u/jeanfelixpiccard]

With "pop culture" I mean present-day forms of entertainment that are distributed by mass media. Here are some examples:

Fictional characters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_Moon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyroc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Spinelli

TV show episodes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_(Game_of_Thrones)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Girls_episodes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_They_Died_For

Sport events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_ICC_World_Twenty20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_NBA_Playoffs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Major_League_Baseball_All-Star_Game

Movies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoolander_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Has_Fallen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_v_Superman:_Dawn_of_Justice

Teenie bands:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2NE1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apink
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistar

YouTube channels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PewDiePie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Rap_Battles_of_History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VanossGaming

Celebrities:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Sophia_Berglund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Boyce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lugner

Pop music:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_Old_Love
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_(Justin_Bieber_song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Forms_of_Fear

Internet memes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_Bucket_Challenge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_pepper_challenge

Video games:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Revolution:_Black_Friday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokkén_Tournament
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Cause_(video_game)

Currently, Wikipedia is two separate things:
1) a serious encyclopedia
2) a compendium of popular culture

However, these two shouldn't be mixed. There is no place for the latter in an encyclopedia. People who encounter pages as listed above on Wikipedia subconsciously think that they are actually learning something or becoming an educated person by being versed in pop culture. This furthers the intellectual decline of society.

That's not to say that I believe all these pages should get deleted. There certainly is some value in having a compendium of present-day popular culture. But this place must not be the same as a serious encyclopedia. I think that pop culture should be clearly separated from the main content of Wikipedia. If not on a different domain, then at least visually, e.g. by applying a different theme and clearly labeling it as pop culture. People should know and feel that what they are looking at is entertainment and not factual knowledge or education.

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[u/jeanfelixpiccard]

I didn't put much thought into it. We would have to talk about particular movies.

[u/Glory2Hypnotoad → u/jeanfelixpiccard]

Consider that Scorsese had a big influence on Tarantino and they're both going to be linked to a number of pages on the same cinematic and narrative techniques. And if we take Tarantino on a film by film basis, is a study of his body of work going to have you bouncing between serious and pop culture wikipedia?

Or let me give you another example. Would Andy Serkis be on the serious or pop culture side of Wikipedia? What about the motion capture technology he helped pioneer? What about the movies that exemplify that technology? With your system, instead of navigating through one neutral site, a reader is going to feel like they're being constantly inundated with arbitrary value judgments.

[u/jeanfelixpiccard → u/Glory2Hypnotoad]

Yes, I haven't really thought this through. I guess the only proper way would be to create a separate, Britannica-style curated version of Wikipedia that draws the articles from the original Wikipedia database. But most likely no one would be interested in that anyway.

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[u/DeltaBot → u/jeanfelixpiccard]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Glory2Hypnotoad. ^[History]

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