Talk: Popular culture

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Moved from article

"Apparently an oxymoron, (from wikipedia), "Gnosticism has seen something of a resurgence in popular culture in recent years."

Please keep "Talk" on the "Talk" page.

I'd say esotericism of all kinds, including ideas from Gnosticism, has *definitely* become part of popular culture in recent years.

Popular culture and the Wikipedia

While I strongly agree with the "Popular culture and the Wikipedia" section in this article, I wonder if it belongs there:

1. it violates the Wikipedia:Avoid self-references guideline; and
2. it's probably POV (though it's a POV I certainly embrace).

Thoughts? • Benc • 20:52, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'd argue that this paragraph is not so much about the Wikipedia as about popular culture. Put it this way: what happens when you invite the general public to coauthor an encyclopedia? You get an encyclopedia that has a huge amount of popular culture in it. In other words, the Wikipedia is an inadvertent experiment that reveals (at least in a very approximate way) what a large fraction of people's minds is occupied with popular culture. I feel that this is interesting and is one of the things I've learned by working on the Wikipedia.

The section also makes the claim that the Wikipedia is actually better than other encyclopedias because it covers so much popular culture. This is perhaps a clearer violation of the bans on self-reference and on POV, and seems to me the most plausible candidate for deletion. Opus33 21:21, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

One of the niftiest edits I ever made to Wikipedia was when I was able to source the Chinese Wikipedia regarding an urban legend which had become attached to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The protestors had staged a hunger strike, which to Western observors had seemed to do them no harm; but it became believed by some in China that some protestors had starved to death. This had come to be reported as fact in the Chinese Wikipedia, (I don't know if it is still there). Anyway this made a nice addition to the English article. Fred Bauder 23:29, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

This is not mentioned in the article, but is an illustration of how popular culture and Wikipedia may interact. This can come in the guise of error which people insist on including or as in the above illustration a window into a particular popular culture. Fred Bauder 23:29, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

Definite article before "Wikipedia"

Hmm... I was certain that normal usage is that one says the Wikipedia. The analogue I had in mind was the Encylopedia Brittanica, right? Opus33 03:18, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)