Wikipedia talk:"In popular culture" content

Request for Opinions

A sentence I added to the "Popular Culture" section of the article on Zzyzx was removed by an editor; I personally think this was inappropriate. I would be interested in any comments (positive or negative) from editors interested in this topic. See Talk:Zzyzx,_California#Request_for_Comments. Finney1234 (talk) 14:43, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Marxist critics

This page is missing the context of who the critics of popular culture mostly are, which is the Marxist school of thinking, see Popular_culture#Criticism. Capitalism which generates popular culture is clearly unaligned with Marxism. Popular culture is thus a politically derived categorization that emphasizes the economic regime under which the media was created. Think about the term "popular", what else could it mean but the majority in a capitalist society. Whereas the "elite" (opposite of popular) are the minority the non-capitalists eg. Marxists. As a thought experiment, would the term "popular culture" even make sense in a communist society, would it mean the same thing? Most likely what we call popular culture would in a Communist society be labeled western or capitalist culture. Popular culture for them would be communist culture, for the people. -- GreenC 21:35, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

That sounds like a very specialized lens and viewpoint for viewing this very broad topic. North8000 (talk) 02:38, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Is it time to just ban “in popular culture” sections?

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab). InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC) InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

Two reasons

This topic contains two pretty good reasons (in addition to it being obvious to anyone with taste and discernment) why "In popular culture" sections need to be expunged before Wikipedia will ever be taken seriously. Number one: the "In popular culture" topic has its own, recursive, "In popular culture" section. I wondered whether it had the moment I saw the title of the topic. But that was a joke, in my head. I didn't really think it would. But it does: sigh. Number two: that xkcd send-up, which is mentioned in this topic, quite well satirizes the whole idea of "In popular culture". Just absurd. Get rid of it. It's fine to have topics about instances of frivolous popular culture that point to the serious things that they reference. But it's unspeakably dumb to point from serious topics to frivolous popular culture entries. 2601:600:A480:4C20:780D:67CF:DDDA:4E9D (talk) 06:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

This essay here gives us guidance how to treat popular culture content right, exactly so that we can avoid having articles like that in the satire. (Wish that would work for politics...) So both this essay and the satire example have their worth in my view. Isn't it quite snobbish to call for exclusion of such content in general to get Wikipedia taken "seriously", in a time where popular culture (which by definition is of interest to broad groups of society) gets increasing attention by scholars? Sure, there may be a systemic WP:BIAS towards such content as compared to more traditional encyclopedias, due to also broad groups of Wikipedia editors being interested in such topics. But, hey, such is the consequence of being a WP:VOLUNTEER project. And being the by far largest encyclopedia ever created, I suspect there is still more "traditional" content than in earlier encyclopedias, even though that stands beside popular culture related content. Daranios (talk) 11:48, 4 June 2024 (UTC)