User:Generalissima/Academicism
Those who have been to college in the Post-Wiki era, the era where initial phobia and distrust of Wikipedia has largely washed into a tepid begrudging acceptance, may recall a familiar phrase by particularly hip and with-it professors, perhaps relayed while wearing sunglasses and skating into the classroom while donning a backwards baseball cap: "Don't use Wikipedia to research, but the sources it uses."
Every Wikipedia article doubles as an academic bibliography of the subject—when written correctly. Every article serves as a jumping off point for hurried scholars, students, and journalists across the world—when there's sources to jump off from. Sadly, most articles, even highly viewed ones, are not useful for this purpose.
When your average editor - and we're talking truly average here, so generally an IP editor or an account without so much as confirmed status - finds an article sparse, short, lacking, they do what many in our digital age do when they want to find information: Google it, find the first reliable-looking thing that pops up, and cite that for the article. For one or two cites, this is fine. Even the highest quality Featured Articles get cites from the most random of places: sometimes you just need someone who bothered to say something the other sources found obvious.
Where this becomes a problem is when entire articles are built from this framework. It's not just that it fails to represent academic sourcing on the topic; often, it fails to include any academic sourcing at all. The article becomes a twisting labyrinth of poor sourcing: local newspapers, magazines, online media websites which emphasize churning out articles over producing a quality product. Poor sources stifle research, and essentially require you to build the article from the ground up if you want to improve it beyond this sorry state. And this doesn't even get into how general search engines have been steadily eroding as a viable research tool in the wake of SEO and AI-generated content.
A case study: pop-culture[edit]
This problem is largely evaded in some subject areas (good luck writing a physics or medical article without touching a scholarly database at some point), but is completely endemic in others. The general, loosely defined realm of "pop culture" is especially egregious about this, even of articles considered high quality within the projects - and the worst part, is that it doesn't have to be this way.
This often comes as a surprise to non-academics, but academics will write about darn near anything. You, reader! Yes, you, the person reading this very essay as we speak. Load up Google Scholar and type in your favorite video game series. Your favorite movie. Your favorite internet meme from 10 years ago. Odds are, if what you're thinking of is at least a decade old, something came up. This is the beauty of academia: it's made up of the exact same population you, you, the person who spends their free time reading philosophical essays about writing articles on Wikipedia, hail from. That is to say, absolute nerds.
It is hilarious what kind of niche internet or pop culture articles you can write using almost exclusively academic sourcing. And as fun as it is to cite "Civic Meaning-Making in Riverdale: Anti-Fandom and Shipping Practices on Tumblr"[1], it's also good scholarly practice. Ten years from now, fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, random trivial mentions within various pop culture sources won't be a great jumping off point for further research. You know what will be a great jumping off point? Academic articles, dissertations, scholarly coverage et. al. These put things into context, add analysis and look at deep underlying trends that will be of interest to people a hundred years hence.
Sure, a modern fandom audience might be most interested in seeing detailed coverage of their favorite characters within a popular book or video game. But people will be far less interested in this as the fandom drifts from memory: do people read about historic works for their plot summary, or for the analysis of what they did? What was the work influenced by, what did it influence? How did the work reflect the attitudes of the time, and what can we glean from it today? These are questions essentially impossible to answer without high-quality scholarly sourcing: would you be satisfied reading an article about Hamlet based on what the London broadsides were saying about it following its performance at the Globe? And while nothing in the pop cultural sphere comes with an journal article, monograph, or academic conference on its day of release, a lot of it gets that over time.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Niche Academic Journals[edit]
The ten year test (or sometimes twenty year test, I don't make the rules), says to consider how people in the future will look at the article, and to write so as to neither confuse them with a lack of context, or bury them with more pointless factoids than they would ever realistically need. I think this is a great practice, and one that needs to be followed as closely and zealously as possible; in fact, I think we really ought to expand it to a hundred-year-test. The recentism essay gives fairly brief coverage of how the test relates to notability, but that might in truth be its most crucial application.
The General Notability Guidelines, hallowed be their name, state that for an article to be notable, it should be covered in "excellent sources" over a "sufficiently significant period of time". Both of these are left very vague, so as to not draw some arbitrary impenetrable line upon the community's consensus-building. But perhaps, at the very least for the purposes of notability-conferring, we ought to think a little bit more about what an excellent source is, and how future generations of Wikipedians will interpret excellent for whatever it is we're writing.