Wikipedia:Recentism
This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:Notability, and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not policies. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
This page in a nutshell: Some Wikipedia articles tend to focus on recent events. Wikipedia has been praised for the way it deals with current news breaks. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to be aware of balance and historical perspective. |
Recentism is a phenomenon on Wikipedia where an article has an inflated or imbalanced focus on recent events. It is writing without an aim toward a long-term, historical view. This can result in, among others:
- Articles overburdened with documenting breaking news reportsand controversy as it happens.
- Articles created on flimsy, transient merits.
- Articles deleted despite concerning notable trans-historical subject matter, because a recentist article has given only flimsy and transient details available in news reports without the accompanying historical perspective, and because editors proposing deletion don't bother to research.
- The muddling or diffusion of the timeless facets of a subject, previously recognized by Wikipedia consensus.
- breaking news sources.
- Impassioned discussions on talk pages that debate not just the notability of the recent event ("Is this topic of lasting importance?") but also where (if anywhere) it should receive coverage on Wikipedia. Often conducted in ignorance of the historical facts.
Recentism is a symptom of Wikipedia's dynamic and immediate
What to do about it
Allegations of recentism should prompt consideration of proportion, balance, and due weight. Material may need to be moved, deleted, or expanded. Certain articles might be merged or placed on the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion list. Conversely, an article might need to be split into multiple articles in order to achieve a balance not readily attainable within a single article. Sometimes in-depth information on current events is more appropriately added to Wikinews, which can be found here.
Over-use of recent material does not by itself mean that an article should be deleted, but the quick and contemporaneous passage of events may make any subject difficult to judge as actually notable enough for a permanent encyclopedia entry. Proper perspective requires maturity, judgment, and the passage of time
.Examples
News spikes
A news spike is a sudden mass interest in any current event, whereupon Wikipedians create and update articles on it, even if some readers later feel that the topic was not historically significant in any way. The result might be a well-written and well-documented
An event that occurs in a certain geographic region might come to dominate an entire article about that region. For example, in the aftermath of
Article imbalance
Subjects with a long history might be described in purely modern terms, even though they were actually more significant in the past than they are today. Even when the topics remain significant, articles can cover the subject as if the most recent events were the salient, defining traits. For large-scale topics, such as slavery, marriage, or war, the stress might be on simply the last few centuries, though the subject matter of the article might have a history of thousands of years.
This tendency towards article imbalance is enhanced by the availability of reliable sources, which is not uniform across different topics. This manifests both from the language a source is written in and the ease with which it can be accessed. Sources published in a medium that is both widely available and familiar to editors, such as a news website, are more likely to be used than those from esoteric or foreign-language publications regardless of their reliability. For example, a 2010 story on the
Thus, a political candidate's biography might become bloated with specific details related to a particular, recent election. Long passages in an athlete's or an actor's biography might be devoted to detailed coverage of a recent controversy. With celebrities, an article about a
Debate over recentism
Any disagreement over whether to remove an article might also be related to Wikipedia's ongoing inclusionism-versus-deletionism debate. (Deletionists tend to view Wikipedia as a traditional, rigorous encyclopedia. Inclusionists tend to see it as a compendium of all knowledge, with broader remit.) Many editors identify as mergists, separatists, or some other more nuanced position, and they may have their own thoughts on dealing with recent material.
Recentism as a negative
Recentism in one sense—established articles that are bloated with event-specific facts at the expense of longstanding content—is considered a Wikipedia fault, as discussed above under News Spikes.
The second sense of recentism—the creation of a glut of new articles on a recent event—can result in a slap-dash approach to the subject and a rambling, disorganized look to the encyclopedia.
Recentism as a positive
Journalism is a first rough draft of history.
In many cases, such content is a valuable preliminary stage in presenting information. Any encyclopedia goes through rough drafts; new Wikipedia articles are immediately published in what might be considered draft form: They can be—and are—improved in real time; these rapidly developing drafts may appear to be a clutter of news links and half-developed thoughts, but later, as the big picture emerges, the least relevant content ought to be—and often is—eliminated.
One example is the
Collaborative editing on Wikipedia has resulted in a massive encyclopedia of comprehensive and well-balanced articles on the many current events of the twenty-first century. This record will be valuable to those in the future who seek to understand the history of this time period. In other words: "If we don't make sense of it today, someone else will struggle to make sense of it tomorrow."
One of Wikipedia's strengths is the collation and sifting through of vast amounts of reporting on current events, producing encyclopedia-quality articles in real time about ongoing events or developing stories: natural disasters, political campaigns and elections, wars, product releases, assassinations.
Finally, Wikipedia articles are often developed via on-line references, which may be temporary in nature. But by documenting timely material with reliable sources at the outset, more permanent sources will hopefully be found and used later - and, with the original online sources linked from Wikipedia, they are much more likely to be picked up and archived by the Wayback Machine or other similar web archives before they disappear.
Recentism as recruitment
Search engines drive a large amount of traffic to Wikipedia's articles about what were at the moment recent events—for example, the death of
What might seem at the time to be an excessive amount of information on recent topics actually serves the purpose of drawing in new readers—and among them, potential new Wikipedians. Example: Wikipedia received positive coverage
Recentist articles as case studies
The related articles that are written during a "recentist news frenzy" provide an in-depth look for interested readers. For example, the Terri Schiavo piece and its companion articles at Category:Terri Schiavo case provide a case-study outlook into how the state and federal governments in the United States interact constitutionally, some insight into motivations for politicians to intervene in court cases, and nuances of end-of-life issues.
Suggestions for dealing with recentism
Consider the ten-year test or twenty-year test as a thought experiment that might be helpful, but keep in mind the policy
Will someone ten or twenty years from now be confused about how this article is written? In ten or twenty years will this addition still appear relevant? If I am devoting more time to it than other topics in the article, will it appear more relevant than what is already here?
For example, in 2020, devoting more space to the 2020 United States presidential election article than to the 2000 United States presidential election article might seem logical. Nevertheless, in the future, when neither event is fresh, readers will benefit from a similar level of detail in both articles.
Furthermore, detailed stand-alone articles and lists may no longer comply with the
After "recentist" articles have calmed down and the number of edits per day has dropped to a minimum, why not initiate comprehensive rewrites? Many articles can be condensed to keep only the most important information, the wider notable effects of an event, and links to related issues. Much of the timeline and the day-to-day updates collected in the "rough draft" stages can safely be excised. A number of the citations to breaking news reports written at the time of the event (especially those later
Use
Just wait and see. Remember
The Recentism tag
Some editors employ the Recentism tag {{Recentism}} at the top of articles to warn the reader that the content may be tilted toward recent perspectives. (Tagging is a subject of debate: Some think tags on articles make them ugly or caution readers that a tagged article is defective.)
The tag looks like this:
{{Recentism}}
and results in this:
This article appears to be slanted towards recent events. |
Of course this tag, like many others, should be employed only if editors cannot immediately rectify the problems themselves.
You can find a list of articles that have been tagged by going to
See also
Policies
- Wikipedia:Article titles
- § Deciding on an article title
- § Name changes
- Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons
- § Writing style
- § Avoid gossip and feedback loops
- § Subjects notable only for one event
- § Recently dead or probably dead
- Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
- § Balancing aspects
- Wikipedia:Verifiability
- § Accessibility
- § Verifiability does not guarantee inclusion
- Wikipedia:No original research
- § Primary, secondary and tertiary sources
- Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
- § Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion
- § Wikipedia is not a newspaper
- § Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary
- § Neologisms
Guidelines
- Wikipedia:As of
- Wikipedia:Content forking
- § Unacceptable types of forking
- § Article spinoffs: "Summary style" meta-articles and summary sections
- Wikipedia:Disambiguation
- § Is there a primary topic?
- § Naming the specific topic articles
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style
- § Retaining existing styles
- § Identity
- § Current
- Wikipedia:Notability
- § General notability guideline
- § Notable topics have attracted attention over a sufficiently significant period of time
- § Whether to create standalone pages
- Wikipedia:Notability (books)
- § Not-yet-published books
- Wikipedia:Notability (events)
- Wikipedia:Notability (films)
- § Future films, incomplete films, and undistributed films
- Wikipedia:Notability (music)
- § Unreleased material
- Wikipedia:Notability (people)
- § People notable for only one event
- Wikipedia:Notability (periodicals)
- § Not yet or newly published periodicals
- Wikipedia:Reliable sources
- § Age matters
- § Breaking news
- § Headlines
- Wikipedia:Reliable sources (medicine)
- § Respect secondary sources
- § Use up-to-date evidence
Essays
- Wikipedia:Build content to endure – essay discussing how to prevent content from degrading over time
- Wikipedia:Proseline – the nephew of recentism, proseline is the tendency to choppy writing, often containing dates, that ends up looking like a timeline
- Wikipedia:Systemic bias
- Wikipedia:Too soon
Articles
References
- ^ Gladstone, Brooke; Garfield, Bob (8 July 2005). "GET ME REWRITE: Transcript, Friday, July 08, 2005". On The Media. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
External links
- The Four Eras Of Wikipedia And Visualizing History Without Maps (includes graphs of years by number of references in Wikipedia)
- NPR audio/text - Coverage Rapid, And Often Wrong, In Tragedy's Early Hours