User:Uncle G/Cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing

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Shortcut WP:CARGO

Cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing is the process of simply listing a whole load of examples of, or occurrences in film and on television of, a particular concept or thing. There is a widespread belief that this process magically creates, after some mystical critical mass has been reached, an actual encyclopaedia article about that concept or thing. This belief possibly comes about from people seeing existing articles that are no more than lists of occurrences of a thing in film and on television, that editors have amassed over the years, and thinking as a consequence that (a) that is how encyclopaedia articles should look, and (b) that is how encyclopaedia articles are constructed. In other words: Bad articles are used as guidelines for new articles.

Some offending articles in the past have been

Fiction is not fact.

The representation of a concept, person, place, event, or thing in works of fiction, especially in works of comedy fiction, does not necessarily bear any resemblance at all to its existence in fact. Adding occurrences in fiction to an article about a factual thing does not necessarily improve that article. Indeed, the fictional representations may make it misleading. (This is not to say that we don't want to discuss plot devices. See Government Warehouse (AfD discussion), for example. But such discussion should not be misrepresented as discussion of anything other than a plot device or trope as it occurs in works of fiction. Contrast government warehouse, for example.)

Collecting raw data does not produce an analysis.

The raw data can be examples, that demonstrate the analysis. (There are some elephant jokes in elephant joke, for example.) But simply amassing huge piles of them doesn't make an analysis. What makes an analysis is finding the works of experts in the field who have done analyses of the raw data, and then condensing and summarizing their published analyses into the article. (Collecting raw data and then producing our own novel analyses of those data is, of course, original research that is forbidden here.)

Moving bad content into a separate standalone article does not get rid of the bad content.

It is in several ways a lazy way of addressing the problem. It is the encyclopaedist's equivalent to sweeping dirt under the rug. And as we have seen, the next stage of the cycle is a consensus to trim the standalone article and merge it back in.

having the boldness

to actually tackle the bad content in the original article in the first place.

Turning bad articles into good (or at least fair) articles often discourages or even stops this cargo cult article writing, as editors see what articles should actually look like, and how they should actually be written. The rate of addition of protologisms to

• History of Benzedrine, but the overwhelming amount of non-historical content was not touched. In 2020 an editor noted that History and culture of substituted amphetamines already existed, similarly split out of amphetamine
  in 2013, but again just swept the article to one side instead of boldly merging or redirecting, ironically placing it at what the decade before used to be its own subarticle.