Talk:Carl Diggler

Carl Diggler has been listed as one of the Social sciences and society good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: March 11, 2017. (Reviewed version).

This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Fictional characters This article is within the scope of WikiProject Fictional characters, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of fictional characters on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Fictional charactersWikipedia:WikiProject Fictional charactersTemplate:WikiProject Fictional charactersfictional character articles Comedy Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Comedy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of comedy on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComedyWikipedia:WikiProject ComedyTemplate:WikiProject ComedyComedy articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Blogging (inactive) This article is within the scope of WikiProject Blogging, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.BloggingWikipedia:WikiProject BloggingTemplate:WikiProject BloggingBlogging articles Journalism Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Journalism, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of journalism on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.JournalismWikipedia:WikiProject JournalismTemplate:WikiProject JournalismJournalism articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Podcasting Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Podcasting, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of notable podcasts and podcast-related information on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PodcastingWikipedia:WikiProject PodcastingTemplate:WikiProject Podcastingpodcasting articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

A fact from Carl Diggler appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 4 December 2016 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that fictional journalist Carl Diggler correctly predicted the results of more 2016 presidential primaries than Nate Silver's statistics blog FiveThirtyEight? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2016/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Carl Diggler.

This review is transcluded from Talk:Carl Diggler/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Mackensen (talk · contribs) 19:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	The article does a good job separating factual assertions from opinions, and in the latter case indicating whose they are.
	2c. it contains no original research.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	The use of blockquotes trips up Earwig but everything seems in order.
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.
	7. Overall assessment.

Hello Brandt Luke Zorn (talk · contribs), thanks for your work on this article. I hope to have comments for you shortly. Best, Mackensen (talk) 19:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• I made a few copyedits and switched around one misplaced reference, but otherwise I find no fault with this article. I'm surprised that I never heard of Diggler during the campaign. Mackensen (talk) 20:47, 11 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Since so much focus is placed on his primary predictions, I think there needs to be a full on section about his bad final prediction. People will inevitably look for such a section afterwards, assuming that the sections will be in chronological order.

Such a section could include quotes of his final prediction, responses before and after the election from outside WaPo, as well as everything already in the final paragraph in the preceding section.

— trlkly 09:15, 16 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Am I missing something, or is this just the product of an overenthusiastic fan community? It certainly seems appropriate for a fan wiki, but Wikipedia does not seem to be the right place and I don't see why it wouldn't be a sub-section of the article covering Chapo Trap House or the people portraying this character. I am not familiar enough with the subject matter to say so for sure and don't want to nominate for merger/deletion if I'm missing something, but if I am then the article needs to do a much better job of explaining what that might be. Can anyone fill me in? Thomas Craven (talk) 20:20, 23 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Respectfully, as the writer, I disagree. In the first place, Diggler as a project is separate from Chapo Trap House and predates it. Diggler was a writing job for Felix and Virgil as part of their work for Cafe. Chapo is an independent project (they have their own LLC) started by Felix, Matt, and Will, with Virgil only joining later. Secondary sources about Diggler tend to omit Chapo or only mention it in passing. There's no reason to think of Diggler as a subordinate topic to Chapo, except that Diggler was created by some of the same people and that Diggler is less well-known—which is sort of like saying that The Terminal should be merged into Saving Private Ryan because The Terminal was made with some of the same people and is less well-known.

I appreciate the reasons that Diggler may not seem notable at a glance. First, everything about Diggler is very inside baseball, in that the object of his parody is the minutia and hyper-specific manner of newspaper punditry, already a pretty marginal topic in and of itself. Second, Diggler was really only around for the 2016 presidential campaign season as Felix & Virgil have stopped writing the character, so the Diggler project is already "over" (for now) and the page has thus become a historical topic.

The primary significance of Diggler—the stuff that justifies the existence of an article on the topic under Wikipedia policy—is that after the character garnered a minor following, he then broke through into serious Media Discourse when he challenged Nate Silver, attracting coverage in (among others) the Washington Post and the New Yorker—the kind of publications that are not only "reliable" for Wikipedia's purposes, but which are usually considered esteemed in the US. At a base level, the secondary commentary Diggler attracted in these sources sets a baseline level of notability that justifies the existence of the article. If Diggler had never become a brief object of media/election discourse, I wouldn't have made the article. But he did, so I did.

Personally, I think the most interesting thing about Diggler is that the character and the surrounding hubbub perfectly captured a time and a place in media discourse. I once came across the excellent Wikipedia article for Mr. Dooley, a fictional character in a newspaper column from the late 19th/early 20th century. I wouldn't directly compare the two in historical significance or literary value, but Diggler is in some ways a rougher, modern version for the digital age. Diggler's significance now is as a frozen-in-amber satirical/literary artifact of the 2016 presidential election, a character rendered in painstaking and absurd detail by two nerds who were paying way more attention to the quirks and ideologies of the pundit class than anyone else. —BLZ · talk 21:25, 23 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Mr. Dooley comparison is interesting, but Dunne was widely read and tremendously influential. Mr. Dooley sketches spanned decades and were apparently read at Cabinet meetings as a measure of public opinion; that much is clear from skimming the entry. I've looked at this article a few times, and I'm still not clear if Carl Diggler was ever widely known? The Nate Silver section is especially confusing to me; Silver didn't consider himself to be participating in a contest with Diggler, did he? Did he even indicate awareness of the parody?

It boils down to an editorial decision where I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but I do think this kind of article is something Wikipedia has a long history of wrestling with. I would endorse editing it down to a more concise treatment. Put another way: I stumbled on to this entry wondering "Who is Carl Diggler and why is he such a big deal that he has his own Wikipedia article?" and I walk away from the article more or less still wondering the same. Just my 2c: consider a more succinct treatment written for a more general audience. Thomas Craven (talk) 21:47, 23 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough! I value the feedback. It's been almost two years since I wrote it and some of the paragraphs were added by others, so it could use a haircut. I also didn't intend to suggest that Diggler was as notable as Dooley, only to give some context for the rich tradition of fictional characters writing political columns. —BLZ · talk 00:54, 24 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]