The current article about Raisin Bran is a disgrace, a minefield of "citation needed" templates.

Somebody tell me with a straight face that this article wouldn't be vastly improved by sitting down a team of PR personnel from Kellogg's, General Mills, and Ralcorp, and asking them to create the best possible, "neutral" point-of-view article about raisin bran. I challenge you.

This article wouldn't be vastly improved by sitting down a team of... oh dang, I started laughing. This is really hard!

Anyway, you're right, that really is pretty bad... Of course, anybody with taste and large amounts of cash has long since switched to the Post™ Great Grains family of breakfast cereal products. They don't have their own article, but Honey Bunches of Oats (T-H-L-K-D) does, and that's not so good either, TBH.

Meanwhile, the article on Fruity Pebbles (T-H-L-K-D) is quite extensive, containing this unintentionally hilarious description of their TV ad campaign:
I remember that Christmas... I think I got a box of Cheerios™ that year, but my memory isn't what it used to be.

Is that the one with Banana Nut Crunch and Blueberry Morning? If so, I'm glad to hear that other people here have such good taste.

I am bowled over by the comments in this thread.

The esteemed topic-starter here is the very same guy who's recently been preaching to me about all the "very intelligent" folk at WR, whose valuable "conversations" he lambasted me for "interrupting". But, IMHO, anyone who starts a thread about raisin bran deserves the username Raisin Brain.

Sorry that you can't wrap your brain around the fact that Kellogg's brand Raisin Bran alone accounts for about $115 million per year in sales. That's about 4 or 5 times the annual budget of the Wikimedia Foundation, so in terms of scale, this is important.

Dear lord,

When will middle school be in session again?
It cannot come too soon.

Those sound like names for SlimVirgin alternate accounts.

Yeah, but the photo looks unappetizing.

Ugh. Is that the before or after photo?

If anyone takes these articles to AFD, will the nominator be called a cereal killer?

I'll admit, it's a fairly trivial subject, even for a WR thread (although Greg is right about the sales figures - breakfast food is a huge business, even in Outer Mongolia.)

But let's not jump to conclusions, OK? Every once in a while, someone will post something about an entire category/class of articles that are simply not worth putting into an encyclopedia unless it can be done right. My point was that many of WP's articles about pre-processed breakfast cereals, and to some extent processed mass-market food products in general, are in terrible shape - structurally inconsistent, poorly written, full of largely-worthless trivia and nostalgia about old TV ad campaigns, and so on.

Most people are going to see these and think, why would someone put these articles in an encyclopedia? It might even dawn on many of those people that Wikipedia isn't really an encyclopedia at all, and this is a large part of why that is - at a certain level of "worthiness," information is all but dumped into articles in a haphazard fashion by whoever happens to come along. I suppose that's fine if you're into that sort of thing, but if WP is all we're going to have encyclopedia-wise in a few years, maybe not so much.

So sure, I think threads like this should be quite welcome - they're illustrative of a real problem that probably exists for all sorts of topics. I remember a while back, we were discussing articles about music synthesizers, for example... same basic problem there.

Good one!



Take the photo to IfD as a copyright infringement. (I assume the very distinctive look of the cereal is copyrightable. )