User:Generalissima/Academicism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.