Talk:Black holes in fiction - Wikipedia

@Broc: The heavy focus on English-language works (or works by US/UK authors) is, I'm afraid, representative of the coverage found in sources on the overarching topic of this article: Black holes in fiction. Sources that specifically deal with this topic, even though they (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and so on) have a global scope as a whole, for whatever reason focus on English-language works when dealing with this particular topic. If we are to accurately reflect the overall body of secondary literature on the topic of black holes in fiction, we have to do likewise. I have nevertheless added a couple of examples from other parts of the world, but in order to do so I had to rely on sources not strictly speaking about the topic of black holes in fiction, which is to say that globalization has happened at the expense of adherence to WP:PROPORTION. TompaDompa (talk) 01:04, 7 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

@TompaDompa the main issue I see is that the reference works you used focus entirely on US and UK literature. The The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as an example, relegates the production from all other countries to an "International" section. While I agree that we are on the English Wikipedia, and thus a focus on English-language literature would not be unexpected, I see no coverage in the article of Australian, Canadian, Indian, or South African literature, all countries where English is an official language.

If the reference works you used are geographically biased, it doesn't mean that creating an unbiased article would not be possible. I looked up a couple sources in Italian (my native language) discussing the topic: [1][2] mention, for instance, the Japanese works Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and 2001 Nights. Broc (talk) 08:54, 7 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

That's my point: they don't focus entirely on US and UK literature. I've used these sources for several articles, and that's simply not the case. Taking The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as an example, the "Venus" entry used for the Venus in fiction article, far from relegat[ing] the production from all other countries to an "International" section, uses as its first five examples Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium exstaticum, Emanuel Swedenborg's De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari, George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes, and Achille Eyraud's Voyage à Venus. That's German (well, it's complicated...), Swedish, British, French, French. The relative focus varies from entry to entry, and I do occasionally wish they would cover works they do not (for instance: they cover literature a lot more than film, and they don't cover recent works as much as work from several decades ago), but it is nowhere near as bad as you make it out to be. In the case of the coverage of black holes, a fairly low number of works are mentioned, and they happen to be from the US and UK. I don't think it's for us to say that the selection of works covered by the sources is wrong—not all works are equally significant, and the people behind the sources are after all the experts. One way to try to globalize the article is to find additional sources that cover a broader range of works, which you've done, and that's good. Even so, I'm sure you'll agree that there's a pretty big difference in the authoritativeness of dedicated science fiction encyclopedias on the one hand and an article in Wired Italia or Scientificast (which appears to be a podcast? I'm not familiar with it, but I'm not sure it's even a WP:Reliable source) on the other. I would also note that those sources likewise cover US/UK works heavily, and to a large extent the same ones as the English-language sources, indicating that those are indeed the most important ones to the overarching topic. TompaDompa (talk) 11:03, 7 July 2024 (UTC)Reply