User:Hydrangeans/This and That

Maybe you have noticed that foos and fuus seem to be similar and have a lot to do with each other. Maybe you have even found a few sources comparing or connecting them. Maybe, filled with zeal, you write the article foos and fuus.

This is an essay inviting you to reconsider and not do that.

This and that
While the comparative method is very common in academic scholarship, it's much more precarious on Wikipedia, which aims to be encyclopedic, not analytical (instead, Wikipedia summarizes the analysis of others). When writing articles about fuus and foos, it's easy to slip into original research or an essay-like mode of writing as you end up synthesizing sources that talk about common themes in the subjects but don't necessarily talk about them comparatively or connectively.

It's also difficult to establish a scope for articles about foos and fuus. Is this about every interaction between them? Or about similarities and differences? What about fuus that are also foos? What about foos that used to be fuus but become foos instead? What about the phenomenon of people mixing up foos and fuus?

And why is all this being explained on this portmanteau page, rather than on foos and fuus?

Discrete topics better suit Wikipedia
Instead of writing about fuus and foos, consider if there is a way to write about a more discrete topic. If you are aware of some genuine comparative scholarship, see if it's due on the articles about the topics themselves. Or if you are mostly drawing on sources about the relationship between two entities or communities, instead of foos and fuus, consider fuu–foo relations as a less sprawling topic. Perhaps there is a particular event in which foos and fuus came together: could an article about that event be written instead?