Wikipedia talk:"In popular culture" content

More guidance on "appearances in popular culture" and similar sections?

I think that further clarification and guidance in this area would solve some of the problems. "Appearances in popular culture" can be a coatrack / trivia magnet because it suggests that any appearance of the topic in popular culture justifies putting it into the article. So the heading can either be a coatrack/excuse/magnet, or it can just be a place to put stuff that would merit being in the article anyway. I think that there are a few metrics / ideas missing that would help in this area.

Perhaps one hidden in plain sight is that if there is a different main reason for appearance in an article it should not be listed under "appearances in popular culture" section. To use an obvious example to illustrate, a video that Britney Spears makes is technically an "appearance in popular culture" but it would not be put into a section named that.

Another is to recognize that if there are many instances of the article subject, and appearance is less meaningful. If the subject of the article is "Airplanes", there are millions of airplanes and billions of such appearances and so appearance of an airplane in popular culture is meaningless. But if there is only 1 of them, it becomes more meaningful. In the Wright Flyer article, depiction of it in a movie is more meaningful. But if they removed the Wright flyer from the museum, and used it in filming a movie, the actual participation of the one-and-only would be even more meaningful, but also merits being in the article somewhere else. The participation makes it a part of the plane's history.

Maybe one question for guidance would be: Would it merit being in the article even if the "popular culture" heading didn't exist? Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:23, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

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)