Wikipedia has a general, if somewhat fuzzy, policy against the inclusion of "fancruft" in articles. This is entirely fair; it's amazing how much vitally important information about Pokemon and Buffy The Vampire Slayer would appear in... well, pretty much every Wikipedia article... without such a policy.
As the terse TV Tropes entry on the subject mentions, the "In Fiction" and "In Popular Culture" sections in countless Wikipedia articles are focal infection points for the fancruft disease. And, as it also says, TV Tropes is where you should be putting that stuff anyway - if you can settle for somewhere other than Wikipedia as a repository for your invaluable creative output.
There are, however, some articles on Wikipedia where fancruft is pretty much the purpose of the exercise.
Like "Plot Hole".
As is so often the case, the Talk page for "Plot Hole" is at least as much fun as the article itself.
24 January 2008 at 6:51 pm
This is a somewhat off-tangent question regarding wikipedia - as someone who enjoys the odd foray on to (in to?) wikipedia (read: lost for hours at a time) it occured to me that after a while I would begin to reread certain articles. While there is the potential that the content of an article has changed substantially since my previous visit and that rereading the page would refresh or update my memory, when I have 20 other tabs open with other facinating topics, any help I could get to manage my "addiction" would be gratefully received.
My question then is: is there an application (i'm imagining a firefox extension) or a way on wikipedia to track my reading habits? is this a somewhat introverted and narcistic thing to want? do i require this much metadata about my life?
currently i am using Jeteye which is a very web2.0 fancy bookmark thing, but i still have to manually drag+drop each tab into the sidebar, and it is noticably freezing (for a good 10-20 seconds) now due to the size of my list.
You can see said list here. It's about 3 months worth of reading, and I'm sure you'll recognise a lot of the links from here ;) As far as I can work out the only way to organise it on this page is by view date, although it is displayed aphabetically in the jeteye firefox extension.
24 January 2008 at 11:41 pm
As a fan of BtVS I can understand how much fancruft could be written about, yet it saddens me that it isnt :P
Rob.
25 January 2008 at 2:29 am
Of course you realize that every time you post a link to TV Tropes you're destroying several hours of my life, right?
25 January 2008 at 6:01 am
I'm fairly certain the time destructive porperties of both TV Tropes and Wikipedia are integral elements of Dan's plan for global domination. I can only assume that this post, containing links to both TV Tropes and Wikipedia is a sign of how far his plot has advanced. I shudder to think of what will happen on the day he manages to link to all the massive time-sinks of the internet in a single cogent post.
25 January 2008 at 3:50 pm
OH what the? HEY! Where the HELL did the last 5 hours just go?
26 January 2008 at 7:43 am
"Real Life" comics had a genuine plot hole show up here.