[WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism

[Delirium]

Matthew Brown wrote:
> It feels to me that the arguments being made by those opposed to this
> content is that it's "out of scope for the article", and that putting
> this information in somehow violates our guidelines about undue
> weight, since nobody but a couple of academics cares about it and it's
> irrelevant.
> 
> I find both quite troubling.  "Undue weight" doesn't mean "Remove all
> academics from popular culture articles because fans don't care, and
> fans outnumber academics 10,000:1".

It's a judgment call, though, which despite being an academic myself I 
can see often going the other way. If there has been a journal article 
or two on a popular rock band, is this automatically worth citing in the 
article? I would say no. If there's a significant body of literature 
discussing the subject, then I'd consider that worth mentioning. But if 
there's only been a handful of isolated articles on the subject, they'd 
have to be pretty influential / widely cited articles to be worth 
summarizing without giving undue weight.

I mean, I've personally published journal articles about [[WarioWare]]. 
Do I think it's worth adding a section to that article summarizing my 
work? Well, no---in the scope of a general article on WarioWare, my 
handful of not particularly influential articles would be given rather 
undue weight to be mentioned.

-Mark