Sure, go for it.
I don't see a problem. This is one of those tropes that doesn't make sense without some background on its real-life origin. The American Civil War has an extensive description of the real war before getting into the tropes instead of being about lost causes and brother against brother,then having a real-life section where it points out the popular idea of the war is based on a true sstory.
I'm not sure it needs as much information as is currently on the page. If that information is of use, it needs to be completely reorganised.
I think some content could be shipped off to Analysis.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This trope is for stories that use the bug as the basis for apocalyptic scenarios. As for extended details on the real-world facts that support or clash with the trope... that's what Useful Notes is for, right?
Millennium Bug seems as if it could do with some revision. The introduction comes off as a jumble of paragraphs with information in no particular order. There's a vast section about economics and computer science, which bisects a bit about what various pieces of technology were supposedly going to do. The amount of detail on how the concept applies to fiction is dwarfed by the amount of text which isn't.
I'd suggest trimming the opening section to focus on how the Bug is referenced in fiction, and what it was supposed to be capable of. Any relevant information relating to how the Bug came about can be moved to the Real Life section, or to a Useful Notes page on computer science if the site has one. Something like this:
Of course, planes, satellites and calculators didn't do that, much to the joy of aviators, astronomers and calculus students. Most of the actual problems were just cosmetic, such as programs displaying the year after "1999" as "19100"
, or desktop internal clocks resetting to 1st January 1981 as a crash-preventing exception. The media attention and panic involving the Bug was, however, an opportunity for writers to come up with doomsday stories. The Bug appears in many forms, ranging from realistic incarnations to sentient viruses and actual insects.
edited 9th Sep '12 8:48:58 AM by abloke