How to Deal With Changes to the List?
A few months after we started the site, I figured I’d better start keeping track of The List on Wikipedia. The nature of Wikipedia is to change, and sooner or later it would start to drift from the version of The List we keep here.
That day has come.
There have been some edits to the Wikipedia list over the past few months, one of which I can’t believe I didn’t catch earlier, and I’m looking to my fellow Tribunal writers to help me decide how to resolve them.
A couple of these are probably no-brainers, though it makes sense to set a precedent against future cases. One of them troubles me deeply, and I wonder if it reflects a single Wikipedia editor’s crusade to narrow the definition of sandwich.
I’ll list them in reverse chronological order.
Revision as of 13:32, 15 May 2015
Pimento Cheese Sandwich added.
Discuss in the comments if you’d like, but this is exactly the kind of thing I started monitoring the List for. When new sandwiches are added, we need to make sure our List is updated to reflect that, so that we can get them in the queue. I’m sure that several were added between the time we started the site last year and when I started monitoring the Wikipedia page.
If a new sandwich is added in a part of the alphabet we’ve already covered, we’ll need to decide how to handle that but I say we definitely update the schedule so that the Pimento cheese sandwich is covered in its appropriate time alphabetically
Revision as of 20:14, 14 May 2015
The editor added the following comment:
This is a list of generic popular sandwiches and has no room for specific sandwiches made only by specific restaurants (otherwise there would be reason to have entries for “Big Mac,” “Whopper,” etc.).
I was kind of looking forward to DIYing this one, since I’m not sure KFC even serves it anymore, but I tend to agree with the Wikipedia editor here. I wouldn’t mind removing it from our List, but I’m willing to listen to counter arguments. Please discuss this one in the comments.
Revision as of 19:27, 26 March 2015
There were multiple edits here, so maybe it was meant to be snuck past us, or maybe it was unintentional. It’s wrong and unnecessary either way. Is Hot Dog too generic? Then what about Barbecue? Are we not considering the sausage in a bun to be a sandwich? I could name half a dozen other examples on the List. Though I feel like we shouldn’t interfere in the Wikipedia list, I wish someone would add it back there. I’m pretty ticked off about this one and I feel strongly it should stay in our list.
Let’s talk about specific reactions to each of these edits, but let’s try to set general principles as well. What say you all?
The idea behind this site is to explore the nature of sandwichness by eating every sandwich on the Official en.wikipedia.org List of Sandwiches and then to post here about it, preferably with lots of pictures and also words. Sandwich words.
Hot Dog disappearing was almost certainly no accident. Thanks to some innocuous spring training article in some baseball publication, the whole “a hot dog isn’t a sandwich!?!?!” debate has been obnoxiously raging in my Twitter feed for months. I have no doubt that its removal from the list was intentional and malicious. I also have little doubt that were it to be re-added, it would start an annoying back-and-forth of it being constantly removed and re-added.
What if we just used our own list? We adopt the original list, monitor for additions and add them to our list accordingly, but ours would be protected from the foolish whims of hot dog deniers (and the Double Down deniers, although I have to say I pretty well agree with that one being removed, although that leads to the discussion of what’s a proprietary sandwich (ie Big Mac, Double Down) vs what’s not (Juicy Lucy? Primanti? Runza (aka bierock, and is that even a sandwich, which is a whole different discussion)?)) Also, has taco always been on there and I haven’t noticed? Because come on.
Taco showed up some time after we started, maybe around the new year? I could go look it up.
As for hot dog, I sure don’t want to mess with any Wikipedia edit wars but that’s some shameful shit. I’m OK with preserving it in our list but I want to figure out whether that will be the rule, or will we seek consensus on each removal.
Taco was added December 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_sandwiches&diff=637570605&oldid=637514554
I don’t see any reason to remove anything from the list as it was when we started.
Even if the Double Down was something dreamed up by KFC, and whether or not it’s a sandwich is sort of on the line, that’s gonna be some good Internet fun to cover. Not to mention the fact that at least one notable high-end restaurant (Joe Beef in Montreal) made one for a while. Though, it was slabs of foie gras and was mostly a joke.
e.g., though, someone added “Knuckle Sandwich” as an entry a few weeks ago. It was quickly removed, and it’s unlikely we’d have added it to our list to begin with, but I think we should have a process. If the process is me making one of these posts every so often and us hashing it out, I’m good with that.
I’m updating The List’s page with some new verbiage and I’m adding a footnote section to be updated from here forward on discrepancies between our List and Wikipedia’s, and how we are resolving them. Plus maybe a little editorial commentary. Take a look and let me know what you think. Also, Josh, don’t be offended by “angry baseball nerds” 🙂
Part of me thinks that trying to stick to the Wikipedia list as closely as possible is a good idea, as that was the original brief for this blog, kind of…but I haven’t looked at your updated list page yet. It sounds good. from what you said above. I say we keep the Double Down if just for the comedy value of your potential post on it, Jim.
Thanks Crit. I want to stick to the Wikipedia list too, but the issue is that it’s a living thing, essentially. So do we stick to the form of the list that existed when we started–which I can retrieve if necessary–or to the list as it is in the moment? If something that we already covered is deleted from the list, what then? In a sense it doesn’t matter too much as long as I get to eat many delicious sandwiches but at the same time we’re never going to be international sandwich moguls if we don’t have standards 🙂
OK, I compared the list of today to the list as of 6am on August 21, 2014, which is the day I registered this domain. Here is a list of major discrepancies including the ones already in play, but not including minor edits or vandalism or other entries that may have come and gone too quickly to notice.
So what do we think? I’m OK with the additions, mostly–taco is questionable but we are the Tribunal so we get to judge. We can write about tacos and say “look, tacos are great, but they’re not sandwiches, y’know?” What about the deletions though? Also, there are things that were added and removed between when we started and when I started keeping track, like “bread sandwich.” To be honest, I’m OK if we don’t cover that one.
Here’s my thought (sorry I’m late to this): What if we kept a list of what was added/deleted and around the time those sandwiches would be covered, we did posts about whether or not we think they should be on the list, and then could also cover them the normal way we do it if necessary? Of course, Jim, this would just make more work for you (since I think we all look to you to write about every sandwich every month, even as the rest of us slackasses only jump in as we see fit), but if you’re up for it, it could be a way to handle it. Basically, my feeling is that these kinds of discussions–is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a taco?–are great content for this site, and the list provides a good opportunity for us to ask those questions, and then answer them with our typical absolute authority. But I’d be open to doing that sort of thing in another fashion, too. What do y’all think?