Wikipedia:WikiProject Popular culture

WikiProject Popular Culture aims to preserve "In popular culture" and "Trivia"-type information in Wikipedia in a manner that does not compromise Wikipedia's core principles or its quality.

Principles

 * Information is information. "Trivia", "In popular culture", and similar sections are often excised from Wikipedia. "In popular culture" articles were, at one time, deleted even more routinely.  We feel this is a case of a vocal minority overriding the interests of a scattered majority.  The prevalence of such sections demonstrates a broad interest in having such information on Wikipedia.
 * Every article its reader. The principles we embrace match those of the five laws of library science – in particular, "for every reader, his or her book" and "for every book, its reader".  Given that Wikipedia is not paper, there is no justification for deleting speciality-interest information from the encyclopedia because a subset of our readers do not share those interests.
 * We uphold Wikipedia's core content policies. All material in Wikipedia, "trivial" or not, must be verifiable, neutral, and well-organized.  Note that there is no overarching policy on how Wikipedia must be organized -- this is an organic principle, brought about by the collective effort of many thousands of Wikipedia editors.

Goals
We seek to:
 * Preserve compliant content. If material is verifiable, neutral, and well-organized, we feel deleting it is an inappropriate act -- an expression of personal distaste not in keeping with the goal of creating the world's best encyclopedia.
 * Make articles more compliant with core content policies. If we come across information that is unlikely to be verifiable, we shall delete it. If we see a fact could be moved to a more relevant section of an article (or a more relevant article), we will integrate it.  If we come across a large and disorganized "In popular culture" list, we will sort and subcategorize its entries and take other steps to improve its presentation.  If we can find sources for any trivia or pop-culture information (including primary sources, with some restrictions), we will add a citation to it.  Work of this sort can also be done via a related project, WikiProject Trivia Cleanup.
 * Work with others to forge sustainable "trivia" and "pop culture" practices and policies. We agree with other editors that Wikipedia's coverage of "trivia" and "pop culture" interrelations should not distract from our basic coverage of any given subject. However, it is not desirable to restrict our coverage to "basic information"; any information that is compliant with core policies and well-organized improves the value of Wikipedia overall.  We hope to establish a manner of organizing and presenting this content that is acceptable to the broad community of editors.

General summary of trivia and popular culture on Wikipedia
See the quick summary about trivia on this project's subpage.

Article improvement
This project is devoted to improving sections and articles that are solely focused on the pop-culture influence of subjects. These articles are like any other article, and they should describe the subject in a clear and informative way. The article should have a logical flow; related items should be grouped together, and unselective lists are discouraged. Alphabetical, regional, date and other forms of order should be applied. Where possible, lists should also be avoided in favour of prose. Some articles also need to present the subject with a more worldwide view.

Most of the articles covered by this WikiProject should be in Category:Topics in popular culture, Category:Fiction by topic, Category:Literature by topic or one of the subcategories. List "In popular culture" that need immediate attention for sourcing, better organization, introductory context, etc.:


 * Cultural depictions of Abraham Lincoln
 * Adolf Hitler in popular culture
 * Mental illness in fiction
 * 555 (telephone number)
 * Classical elements in popular culture
 * Satan in popular culture
 * Orangutans in popular culture
 * Nuclear weapons in popular culture
 * Augustus in popular culture
 * Nero in popular culture
 * This book has been suggested as a possible source for the above two articles; the link takes you to its listing in Worldcat, where you can search for a copy of it in your local or university library.
 * Pirates in popular culture
 * Climate change in popular culture
 * Adaptations of the Epic of Gilgamesh
 * Paradise Lost in popular culture
 * Illuminati in popular culture
 * Cultural influence of Star Trek - It's done in a much less list-y format and avoids the "in popular culture" title but it is similar content, it has some references but they probably need to be in-line citations to see how much is sourced and unsourced, I'm sure a lot more sourced info could be found. Could be a good place to start working.
 * Tropical cyclones in popular culture - A major effort has been put in to improve the references on this one, however several items are proving problematic (See the talk page).

Good article candidates
This section is for potential Good Articles that need some additional attention and surface editing.


 * Champagne in popular culture - expansion and sourcing
 * Che Guevara in popular culture - cleanup and sourcing
 * Cultural depictions of turtles and tortoises - sourcing, maybe some expansion
 * Zombie (fictional) - bigger intro, some surface errors

Category maintenance
Category:Topics in popular culture should be cleaned up and put into good order. Articles that should not be in the category can be removed, and articles should be grouped into categories based on topic, like science, art, music, people, fictional characters, etc.

Articles facing deletion
''Please list ongoing debates here. See WikiProject Deletion sorting/Popular culture for past debates.''

Articles facing deletion review
Please list ongoing reviews here.

Article alerts
If you want to be notified of updates to the following list as they happen, put WikiProject Popular culture/Article alerts on your watchlist.

Trivia cleanup
This project also encourages integrating "Trivia" sections and eliminating the backlog of articles in Category:Articles with trivia sections. See the related WikiProject Trivia Cleanup

Information salvage
List now-deleted trivia and popular culture sections here that could have been sourced, organized, and integrated more in compliance with Trivia sections. Try not to start battles over "trivia" in these articles; just improve their content in ways that hopefully can be considered uncontroversial.


 * | Kraft Dinner In popular culture or

Article statistics

 * WikiProject Popular Culture article assessment instructions page
 * List of project articles by quality
 * Log of project activity

Participants
Participating in the project is easy! Simply click the "edit" link above this section and add your name to the bottom of the list. It should look like this:  If you like, leave a short comment and then save the page and you are done. Welcome to the project. All you have to do is grab a shovel and start digging through pages that are part of the project scope.

Ways you can participate include:


 * 1) The list of project articles is a good place to start. Scroll to the bottom of the list and look for any articles which have not been assessed, or simply look in Category:Unassessed Popular Culture articles for articles which have not been assessed. Read the article, and then give the unassessed article an importance and quality rating by editing the talk page and adding assessment parameters to the project tag. If there are other projects already associated with the article, make sure all the assessments agree with each other and change the others if necessary. For more instructions on how to assess articles, please read the project assessment instructions page.
 * 2) You can improve these articles by making useful edits. See "In popular culture" articles for more information on how you can improve these articles.
 * 3) Also, if you know of any good popular culture articles that haven't been tagged, please add the project banner to their respective talk pages. Member consensus has dictated that only articles which are focused solely on cultural depictions of a subject should be tagged with the project banner. These kinds of articles are normally titled "Subject X in popular culture", "Cultural depictions of Subject X", "Adaptations of Subject X" or some variation thereof. Please assess the article when you tag them with the project banner, but if you're not sure, it's ok to leave the assessment fields blank. The project banner and other useful templates can be found at the bottom of this page.


 * Father Goose 22:50, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Nick Penguin ( contribs ) 23:58, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ned Scott 00:26, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * DGG (talk) 00:56, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * ··· 日本穣 ? · Talk to Nihonjoe 03:01, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ozmaweezer 12:33, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * John Carter 17:21, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * MattHucke(t) 15:21, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Law Lord 23:40, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Captain Impulse 02:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Stardust8212 15:58, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Moheroy 09:26, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Aditya (talk • contribs) 10:25, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Pomte 11:48, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Doc Rocktopus
 * ErgoSum88 (talk) 06:49, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Dorftrottel (vandalise) 19:01, April 11, 2008
 * Casliber
 * Durova Charge! 16:24, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
 * 23skidoo (talk) 02:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * SatuSuro 10:18, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Agree on the principle of verifiability (e.g. Lost in HL2E2) Sceptre (talk) 17:39, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Fractious Jell 23:22, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Icelilly (talk) 00:21, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Iamthejustice (talk) 20:34, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess since I created Girl Scout Cookies in popular culture, Pinnipeds in popular culture, and Otters in popular culture I should be on this list. Azoreg (talk) 20:21, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
 * --PhillieLWillie (was Alien joe)(Talk) 22:23, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Mr_pand [ talk | contributions ] 14:00, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Chris DHDR 19:02, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Secret Saturdays - enter my lair... ...and seek audience with thy colonel (or at least say hi to the Ice Climbers)
 * Sean (talk || contribs) 03:24, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * AWHS (talk) 10:44, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Zyrath (talk) 16:13, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Another Type of Zombie talk  13:17, 13 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Wahrmund (talk) 16:42, 16 April 2011 (UTC) We are the majority!
 * Teagrant (talk). 11 May 2011 at 2:49 pm. EST. – Drafting an article called "Geek girl", and MatthewVanitas kindly suggested posting to this group for advice. In addition to finding Reliable sources, I'd appreciate any rule-of-thumb tips for how to find "professional-quality" evidence of a phenomenon that's still in its early stages. Thanks.
 * TheoMorgan (talk) 21:12, 3 July 2011 (UTC) I completely agree with the principle. A very vocal, and overly fussy minority are deleting this information on a whim because it offends them, but the fact so many articles have it means it IS relevant. I've had trouble with my edit of the Heaton Norris article, because a certain set of editors seem determined to keep the article as dry and boring as possible.
 * Lx 121 (talk) 18:28, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
 *  Zappa  O  Mati   22:50, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
 * No hazmats (talk) 12:50, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * JudyCS (talk) 06:20, 28 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Amerikanskaya Stilyaga (talk) 12:30, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Dana Leigh Brand (talk) 16:17, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Qxukhgiels (talk) 21:30, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
 * RazingRazor (talk) 18:39, 7 March 2015 (UTC) Definitely agree with the principles and goals of this project. I'm convinced that the only reason this is even an issue is because a lot of people get intimidated by the editing process and never start. Shame, really.
 * AfroThundr3007730 (talk) 07:55, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * IllogicMink (talk) 06:49, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
 * --The Wrong Tea (talk) 16:28, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
 * SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  08:15, 14 June 2015 (UTC) (I clean up pop-culture sections, and have helped write guidelines and essays regarding them. I agree that this material, when very selective and properly sourced, is often of considerable encyclopedic value. That said, I cannot agree with the activistic wording of this WikiProject's rationale as of this writing, and would hope to see its tone moderated.)
 * Itherina (talk) 04:39, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
 *  D r e a m Focus  01:08, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Doctormomma (talk) 00:43, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
 * garriefisher (talk) 00:36, June 4, 2024 (UTC)

Resources
The resources below may contain scholarly, critical analysis on cultural topics, which can help to establish notability, provide real world context, and move articles beyond simple lists of primary sources.
 * The Journal of Popular Culture (subscription required)
 * The Popular Culture Studies Journal

Userboxen
These are userboxen showing your support for WPPC. Feel free to make and add your own creations.

Project notice
Articles within the scope of WPPC should be tagged with the template. For instructions on usage see WikiProject Popular Culture.

Barnstar
Users who make significant contributions to the project may be awarded the WPPC Barnstar. For instructions on usage see The Popular Culture Barnstar.