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This is an essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: "In popular culture" sections should be carefully maintained and should contain only properly sourced examples that are bona fide cultural references. When such sections grow too long, they may be split into subarticles, but this should be done with caution. |
Many articles about subjects with broad cultural impact have sections titled "In popular culture", "Cultural references", or "In fiction", which exclusively contain references to the subject in popular culture. When these sections become lengthy, some Wikipedians spin them off into separate articles to keep main articles short.
When properly written, such sections can positively distinguish Wikipedia from more traditional encyclopedias. They should be verifiable and their sources should establish their significance. Detailing a topic's impact upon popular culture can be a worthwhile contribution to an article, provided that the content is properly sourced and consistent with policies and guidelines, such as neutral point of view, no original research, and what Wikipedia is not.
When poorly written or poorly maintained, however, these sections can devolve into indiscriminate collectionsoftriviaorcruft. They should be carefully maintained, as they may attract trivial entries, especially if they are in list format.
The title "In popular culture" emerged in the early days of Wikipedia for this particular type of article content (along with "See also", "External links", etc.) and stuck here by the way of habit as the first title to effectively encompass it all: "in cinema", "in poetry", "in video games", ad infinitum. When these sections grew enormously, the phrase even made it into article titles: who would have thought that tunnels would attract enough interest to generate an entire article about tunnels in popular culture!
This title has some significant drawbacks:
For this reason some Wikipedians look for alternative titles, such as "Cultural influence"or"Cultural impact". "Legacy" is also used.
More restrictive alternative titles include "In media", "In creative works", "In fiction", and "In literature and the arts". These would, if followed to the letter, exclude entities named after the subject, for instance, and some other instances. Still, they can be a good choice, since an influence of the subject in question on broader aspects of culture, such as religionorsocial structure, is usually notable enough to deserve a separate section.
"In popular culture" sections should contain verifiable information with sources that establish its significance to the article's subject.[1] Exhaustive, indiscriminate lists are discouraged, as are passing references to the article subject. For example, it is appropriate if a city's article mentions films, books or television series in which the city is itself a prominent setting, and a musician's article may name television series or films in which the performer appeared. However, a Wikipedia article about a city with an "in popular culture" section should not contain examples of films which make a one sentence reference to the city in dialogue, or songs which mention the name of the city in one sentence.
When fictional characters are modeled after notable people or celebrities, they can be mentioned in the article about the person when the connection is identified in the primary source or attributed by a secondary source. Major monuments dedicated to a person or significant locations named after a subject can be included (but this should not lead to a listing of all 100 elementary schools named after a certain president).
Passing mentions of the subject in books, television or film dialogue, or song lyrics should be included only when the significance of that mention is itself demonstrated with secondary sources. For example, a brief reference in film dialogue may be appropriate if the subject responds to it in a public fashion—such as a celebrity or official quoted as expressing pleasure or displeasure at the reference. As well, a brief reference in film or TV dialogue may be appropriate if secondary sources (film critics) write about the significance of this reference to the city.
Although some references may be plainly verified by primary sources, this does not demonstrate the significance of the reference. Furthermore, when the primary source in question only presents the reference, interpretation of this may constitute original research where the reference itself is ambiguous.[2] If a cultural reference is genuinely significant it should be possible to find a reliable secondary source that supports that judgment. Quoting a respected expert attesting to the importance of a subject as a cultural influence is encouraged. Absence of these secondary sources should be seen as a sign of limited significance, not an invitation to draw inference from primary sources.
In determining whether a reference is encyclopedic, one helpful test can be to look at whether a person who is familiar with the topic only through the reference in question has the potential to learn something meaningful about the topic from that work alone. For example, if a movie or a television series has been filmed in a town, the viewer is seeing a concrete representation of what the town actually looks like at street level; but if the town is merely mentioned in a single line of dialogue, the viewer hasn't learned anything except that the place exists. Another good test is whether the item would be sufficiently useful to include in the article even if there were no special "in popular culture" type section.
When there are multiple copies of the subject item, references to it become less meaningful. For example, reference to a pickup truck in a movie is not a reason to include that reference in the Pickup truck article.
| An appropriate cultural reference is important in the cultural work and to the subject of the Wikipedia article. |  |
The three most common forms of unencyclopedic pop-culture trivia, even when not in list form, are:
The importance of the works it may be reasonable to mention in a pop-culture section should rise commensurately with the level of notability of the subject of the article in which the section appears. A nonfiction best-seller, or film that won major awards, about a historical figure is more likely to be encyclopedically relevant than a special issue of a magazine, or a one-hour TV documentary. The relative importance of or focus on the Wikipedia subject in the works should also rise with the article subject's notability. It may be relevant that a band who barely pass the WP:General notability guideline got to perform a few songs on a late-night talk show, but this will just be trivia in an article about a major recording artist. And in the case of the more obscure band, it would be much better to work into the main flow the article what effect their TV appearance had on their career.
An example of a source which provides both good and bad pop culture referencesisxkcd, a webcomic that deals with subjects from obscure mathematics to ball pits. Some appropriate and inappropriate examples of xkcd being mentioned in Wikipedia articles are as follows:
On the other hand, xkcd routinely mentions dozens of other subjects without the reference impacting popular perception of the subject. Examples here would, sadly, basically be nose-beans, but at any given time there will usually be a few on special:WhatLinksHere/xkcd.
When trying to decide if a pop culture reference is appropriate to an article, ask yourself the following:
If you cannot answer "yes" to at least one of these, you are probably just adding trivia. Get three or more, and you are probably adding genuinely encyclopedic content.
Information in a pop culture section should be presented in a logical and understandable way. Related items should be grouped together and the article should flow. Alphabetical, regional, date, media type and other forms of organization should be applied. Bulleted list format should be avoided when practical in favor of normal prose. Since it is easier to add bulleted points than it is to write in prose, having a pop culture section that uses bulleted points will tend to attract more trivia and cruft.
Sections or articles that list too many inappropriate popular culture or fiction references may be tagged with {{in popular culture}}, {{Cleanup section}}or{{Fiction trivia}}. In many cases an excessively long section can be trimmed by removing entries unlikely to have verifiable discussion of significance. Entries that make only passing reference to the subject can usually be removed.
Per Wikipedia's summary style guidelines, when "In popular culture" sections grow excessively long they are split into subarticles. This allows the main article to stay at a reasonable length and focus on the most essential aspects of its subject. The new article is usually called "X in popular culture", "Cultural references to X", "Cultural depictions of X", or "X in fiction". Many of these articles can be found in Category:Topics in popular culture. Advantages of such a split include:
Further addition of popular culture content can easily be discouraged with HTML comments in the areas of the article where cultural references are usually added, e.g. <!-- Please do not add cultural references to this section, and instead add them to the article [[TOPIC in popular culture]]. -->
Use caution in splitting out such articles:
The earliest known section for storing popular culture references, and titled "popular culture", was in the article Batman, in a diff from 21 December 2001byUser:CYD. Further research may yet uncover earlier instances; the first use may never be known due to lost data from the earliest days of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, usage was rare until sometime in 2004, after which it became more popular. The cause or nature of this increased popularity is still under research (see talk page August 2021).
Randall Munroe referenced the "In popular culture" section of Wikipedia articles in the July 7, 2008 xkcd comic.[6]
