Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-04-25/Recent research


 * I often coach at edit-a-thons and am perennially annoyed that most have a theme of making new biographies. Twice wrong.  First, biographies are already, to my mind, a disproportionate fraction of articles.  Second, Wikipedia would be more improved by making existing articles, even biographies, better, than by adding more bad ones that few would read.  My guess is, it's done this way because new biographies attract more prospective editors, which reminds me of the old adage that small minds talk about people; mediocre minds talk about events, and great minds talk about ideas.  Better if we could find a way to stretch those minds to reach above pettiness and into mediocrity, and maybe even touch greatness occasionally.  Pleasant to see that some efforts in a fairly small, poorly covered, and lightly read branch of science have been modestly successful, and I wish this could become a trend. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:15, 26 April 2021 (UTC)
 * So, so true. Partly the emphasis on biographies I think reflects the emphasis on the gender gap, and using editathons to encourage specifically female editors, who are (rather patronizingly perhaps) assumed to want to write about women. Partly it has now become a habit. But there's no doubt new editors like to see a new article that is "theirs".  Johnbod (talk) 14:05, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I think part of the draw of bios (especially BLPs) is that they can feel like a lower level of technical expertise is needed (e.g. students are usually more comfortable writing a BLP than about some scientific topic) and the human angle is itself a draw in and of itself to participants. It's a pity because they're so much harder to write than other articles and can give new editors a negative experience. I'm actually in the process of organising a biography-writing editathon with my uni, but I'd like to follow it up with a editathons focused on non-bio articles. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 09:59, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * How does this compare to the rest of the encyclopedia? About 58% of assessed, non-list articles are marked as stubs. I'd be curious about the evidence that Limnology/Oceanography coverage suffers any more than any other topic area. czar  02:28, 26 April 2021 (UTC)