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