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I suggest that each star or planet section include a brief paragraph of astronomical facts, so the fiction can be placed in context. Praemonitus (talk) 16:25, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Cleanup Proposal - Why bother with this page at all?[edit]
I've just now stumbled across this page and skimmed the discussion on cleanup. One thing I don't think I've seen mentioned - Why is this a separate Wikipedia page at all? Most other Wikipedia pages I've seen have an In Fiction or In Popular Culture section listing references like these. I in fact got to this page from Tau Ceti, where the In Fiction section redirects to "Tau Ceti in Fiction" which then redirects here.
Why not just move each system's section to its own page, and let the relevance of any given reference be decided by editors of that page? This would seemingly solve many of the problems and be a good compromise on a lot of the proposals being thrown around on this talk page for the past 15 or so years. 2607:FEA8:7B63:D00:555F:6BE4:810A:F617 (talk) 15:11, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) That is the precise opposite of what we should do. You may have noticed that the majority of those "in popular culture"/"in fiction" are absolutely atrocious pieces of junk. It's embarrassing, really. xkcd poked fun at this back in 2008. What we could (and, y'know, should) do is start enforcing Wikipedia's WP:Core content policies and remove the vast majority of this article for reasons including but not limited to misrepresenting sources and plagiarism. It's not like we cannot have high-quality articles on topics like these—Mars in fiction, Venus in fiction, and Sun in fiction are all WP:Featured articles—the decision has just been made not to in this particular instance. TompaDompa (talk) 15:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That cartoon portrays the very extremes of "In popular culture", which are usually removed. In most cases the In popular culture sections are "popular" additions and, on good pages, are well presented and relevant to the page topic. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whether or not that is true in the typical case—and I don't believe it is—moving the mess on this specific page to a bunch of others would not be an improvement. In my experience, the editors who maintain those articles are rather happy to have the garbage sequestered here, as it were. TompaDompa (talk) 15:57, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think having this giant article is kinda the reason a lot of this page is "garbage" - It's just so big and the format doesn't really incentivize keeping things organized. If the sections were on the much more frequently viewed and carefully edited pages for individual star systems it would be easier to keep a more organized and relevant list per-page. 2607:FEA8:7B63:D00:555F:6BE4:810A:F617 (talk) 18:18, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The reason it is in such a sorry state is that cleanup has been deferred and, unfortunately, reverted. Bringing this up to at least a decent standard of quality would not be difficult or even that time-consuming, it just needs to be done and not reverted. TompaDompa (talk) 18:29, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm late to the party here, I've retired from Wikipedia, just noticed the notification. In the last go-around, a "cleanup" was attempted here, consisting of deleting all but six lines of the article. Many readers objected to that. The article was restored, and the same editor then proceeded to make several hundred edits, each deleting a few lines, ending at the same point of no meaningful text left. I made an attempt at creating a "list" article in table format based on the previous contents of the page. The reaction was that it was a non-starter, every single line in the table would be deleted. I don't know what motivated them, but deletion was very evidently the intent - the entire contents here were considered offensive and the only solution was to remove everything. I gave up and walked away, and others ended up reverting the article to the status quo ante. Tarl N. (discuss) 02:15, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah. I see TompaDompa in this discussion was the original editor who wanted everything deleted. I'll walk away again. Tarl N. (discuss) 02:19, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Had I wanted it deleted I would have brought it to AfD rather than cleaning it up. What I wanted—and still want—is for the article to abide by Wikipedia's WP:Core content policies and guidelines such as MOS:POPCULT and be, y'know, a good article rather than an outright terrible one. I daresay that the approach I took has a proven track record of working, inasmuch as it has produced no fewer than three WP:Featured articles on similar topics and several additional WP:Good articles. TompaDompa (talk) 08:27, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am sorry to hear you retired. I hope you'll be back. That said, I've glanced at this mess of an article and I think it needs an AfD discussion - this is a terrible WP:NOTTVTROPES violation of mostly unferenced fancruft and OR :( Yes, we need to blow it up, and based on past experiences, I expect whatever TompaDompa was trying to do here was a good idea and it needs to be endorsed by the community discussion (at AfD probably, to also confirm there is no support for keeping the current version). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:20, 13 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]