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