Talk:Truthiness

Page needs to be moved to "Popularization of 'truthiness' by Steven Colbert"

This article is not about the word "truthiness", it is about the way Colbert popularized it. It should be moved to Popularization of 'truthiness' by Steven Colbert. NJGW (talk) 21:49, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I have to disagree. If people want to know about truthiness, this is what they're looking for, and moving this to a new page won't help matters. This isn't wiktionary, we don't just cover etymology & definition. Truthiness isn't notable enough to warrant two articles. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:55, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Let's imagine the scenario you suggest: Someone hears that Colbert uses the word (or hears him use it) and looks it up on Google to see if there's more information out there about it. They get pointed to the Wikipedia article about it, at which they finds out... Colbert uses the word. And the press has noticed. Great, the whole article reads like a huge trivia section exported from some other article. Let's at least give the article a title that explains what the reader will learn by reading it. "Truthiness" would then become either a redirect or maybe even a page that tries to find something encyclopedic to say about the word. NJGW (talk) 01:35, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Strongly disagree. This is a wikipedia Featured Article. You don't just move a featured article on a whim. That's like re-arranging the Bible just because you feel like it. You don't even present any argument on why it should be moved. Fippy Darkpaw (talk) 18:50, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

This isn't the Bible, and your suggestion that this is like the bible may lie at the root of your disagreement... or not. "This article is not about the word "truthiness"" sounds to me like a rational, and I haven't moved anything on a whim. NJGW (talk) 15:48, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If a user is looking for this page, they'll look for it by typing in "truthiness", therefor that's where the article belongs. --Clubjuggle ^T/C 20:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That's what redirects are for. Regardless, this article should be about its title. NJGW (talk) 15:48, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I emphasize with your desire for precision, but I oppose a move. I believe the article name fits what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize and understand for its topic. Cf. the Wikipedia:Naming conventions policy. (Incidentally, I respectfully disagree with Fippy Darkpaw's reasoning.) JonathanFreed (talk) 14:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much about precision as it is about having the proper topic. There is a word "truthiness", and it seems that word and its usage should be the topic of this article (or at the very least the first sentence of the article). Instead, the actual definition is pushed aside to claim that SC coined the phrase. How can you coin a word that already exists? NJGW (talk) 15:48, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You can't. But people add new meanings to existing words all the time. And if any meaning becomes the most popular usage, then we have to move the articles around to match that, because articles in the wikipedia are about a meaning, not a term.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:33, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think so. "Truthiness" is a term, not a meaning. I found it by typing the term "truthiness" in the search box. I don't know how to type meanings. I think the article gives undue weight to Colbert and ignores the long history of the word, e.g. on usenet, as a jocular synonym for "truth". Qemist (talk) 03:36, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Unnecessary Censorship

In the "Arianna Huffington" section, Colbert is quoted as saying, "F--- Them!" Under the impression that Wikipedia is uncensored, I changed it to, "Fuck them!" I then recieved an "automatic message" stating that the change had been "automatically reverted." I find this to be fucked up. --71.205.219.29 (talk) 07:45, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

That's because it's censored in the original source. Stating that he said "Fuck them" is original research. Powers ^T 16:28, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Original research? I didn't do any research at all! --71.205.219.29 (talk) 08:24, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Wp:Original research- Wolfkeeper 15:11, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Even worse. You assumed that the bleeped word was "fuck" but we can't simply assume that. Powers ^T 19:25, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Operation Iraqi Stephen

The one-para reference to Operation Iraqi Stephen needs to be quoted, some reference, link, something. --173.76.64.246 (talk) 20:56, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

"Truthy" and "falsy" in programming: pre-Colbert or post-Colbert?

As a non-American I'm wondering: do these terms actually pre-date Colbert's penning of the gut-truth definition or are they obvious references us foreigners couldn't possibly spot? In programming the adjectives "truthy" and "falsy" refer to values which evaluate to the booleans "true" and "false" (rather than the boolean values themselves). In JavaScript, for example, the numerical value "0" or the empty array "[]" would both be "falsy", other numerical values or non-empty arrays on the other hand would be "truthy". The terms are probably limited to dynamically typed languages, though some statically typed languages seem to allow using non-booleans as booleans (though this may be related to how booleans and boolean comparisons are implemented, so this may be very different). --- 78.35.107.83 (talk) 16:41, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Truthiness in particle physics

On a similar vein, I could swear we referenced "truthiness" as an alternative to "topness" in my particle physics class from older papers. Might anyone know more? SamuelRiv (talk) 20:39, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

File:Colbert-truthiness.jpg

FYI, File:Colbert-truthiness.jpg has been nominated for deletion. 76.65.128.132 (talk) 04:01, 17 January 2012 (UTC)