Wikipedia:Recentism.html



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This page in a nutshell: Articles on Wikipedia have a tendency to focus on recent events. Wikipedia has been praised for the way it deals with current events. However, it may be appropriate to have some awareness of balance and historical perspective.

Recentism is the practice of some Wikipedians to edit articles without regard to long-term historical perspective, or to create new articles which inflate the importance and effect of a topic that has received recent media attention. Established articles may be overburdened with documenting controversy as it happens, new articles may be created on flimsy merits, and the relative emphasis on timeless facets of a subject which Wikipedia consensus had previously recognized may be muddled by this practice.

Recentism is not by itself an argument for article deletion — lack of attributability and notability are — but it may make it more difficult to judge whether notability actually exists. Maturity, judgment and the passage of time are sometimes required to provide proper perspective. Recentism is thus a symptom of Wikipedia's dynamic and immediate editorial process, and has both positive and negative aspects, as discussed below.

Allegations of recentism should prompt consideration of proportion, balance, and due weight. Material may need to be moved, removed, or added. Certain articles may need to be placed on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion for community consideration; conversely, new articles may need to be created to balance Wikipedia's coverage. Sometimes in-depth information on current events is more appropriately added to Wikinews.

Editors should also bear in mind that restrictive, arbitrary and subjective standards of notability, like this one, can be seen as the activism of a group of Wikipedians who take a certain position in the overall debate on what Wikipedia is or should be. This debate has been characterized as inclusionism versus Deletionism. Deletionists tend to want Wikipedia to be a traditional, rigorous encyclopedia that happens to be read online rather than in print. Inclusionists, generally, are not so tied to the traditional ideal and tend to want Wikipedia to be a compendium of all knowledge. Many editors self-identify as mergists, separatists, or some other more nuanced position, and may deal with recent material from a different perspective.

Examples

The following is a rough classification scheme based on actual examples from Wikipedia editing:

• News spikes
  • Articles about events that occurred prior to Wikipedia's creation in January 2001 may be poorly documented simply because there was never a "news spike" that led to the creation and elaboration of the article (see Wikipedia:Depth).
  • An event that occurs in a certain geographic region may come to dominate the entire article about the region. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the New Orleans, Louisiana article was inundated with day-by-day facts about the hurricane. An article on Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans was created to collect this quickly accumulating content.
  • When an event appears to be newsworthy and is covered by the media, Wikipedia editors create and update article(s) on it. Even when it turns out that the topic was not historically significant in any way, some Wikipedians keep updating it with the continued reporting that is being done on this largely non-historic topic. The result is a well-written and well-documented NPOV article on a topic that may hardly be remembered a month later (see Jennifer Wilbanks and the article's deletion debate).
  • Weather and disasters: sometimes extreme weather or disasters can inspire an article. Hurricane Katrina was a historic weather event, while 2006 United States heat wave and 2007 Western United States freeze may arguably be recentist documentations of summer and winter, respectively. It takes judgement to determine whether an article is documenting an historical weather event or merely describing "the hottest summer/coldest winter in recent memory."
• Article imbalance
  • Elections and politics: A political candidate's biography article may become bloated with specific details related to a particular election season despite that politician having a career outside that election.
  • Celebrity gossip recentism: Long passages in an NBA basketball player's biography or an actress's biography may be devoted to detailed coverage of a recent controversy whose text exceeds the number of words in the rest of the article combined. Detailed coverage may also occur in long, detailed articles about the (possibly non-notable) people focused on during a media circus.
  • Long-term Recentism: Subjects with a long history may be described in purely contemporary terms, even though they were actually more significant in the past than they are now. Even when they are still significant, or have grown in significance, articles can cover the subject as if the most recent events were the defining traits. For large scale topics, such as Slavery, Marriage, or War, a recent time scale can encompass centuries, though the subject matter of the article can have a history of millennia.

Debate over recentism

Recentism in the first sense—established articles that are bloated with event-specific facts at the expense of longstanding content—is usually considered one of Wikipedia's faults. But in many cases, the recentist content can be a valuable preliminary stage in gathering information. Any encyclopedia, even Britannica, goes through rough drafts; new Wikipedia articles are published while in draft and developed/improved in real time, so rapidly developing drafts may appear to be a clutter of news links and half-developed thoughts. Later, as the big picture emerges, the least relevant content ought to be and often is eliminated. When editing articles dealing with contemporary subjects, Wikipedians ought to carefully consider whether they are regurgitating media coverage of an issue, or actually adding information which will remain salient over time. Unneeded content may be eliminated later, but a cluttered approach to article development may degrade article quality and a coherent orientation may not always be salvageable.

The second sense of recentism—the creation of a glut of new articles on a recent event—is not entirely a negative. Inter-article relative emphasis may be skewed and a particular topic inflated (2006 Lebanon War is longer than George Washington, for example), but these new additions also have definite benefits explained below.

Benefits of recentist articles

Experience has shown that collaborative editing on wikipedia has resulted in the ability of Wikipedians to compile a (long tail) set of comprehensive and well-balanced articles on the many varied current events of the mid-to-late 2000s. This ability of Wikipedia to record and synthesize the events of the day may 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."

It is widely regarded as one of Wikipedia's strengths that it is able to collate and sift through 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. It would greatly weaken the encyclopedia project if article development about ongoing events were discouraged in a campaign against so-called "recentism".

Wikipedia articles are often developed from on-line references, which may be temporary in nature. Posted material may only be available for a short time, and by documenting timely material with references during this time, material with long term significance can be more easily located later. If temporary reference sources can thus be identified as important and put in a web archive for future reference before it is lost, this benefits the Wikipedia community directly, as well as the larger community it is intended to serve.

Recentism and Wikipedia's reach

As a growing phenomenon on the Web, Wikipedia is generally looking for ways to increase its relevance and breadth in comparison with other reference sites. One area in which Wikipedia excels is its ability to compile reference information on current events and news. Analysis of Wikipedia's incoming links shows that Google and other search engines drive a large amount of traffic to Wikipedia's articles on recent events (e.g. Ronald Reagan's death, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Pope John Paul II's death and succession, Terri Schiavo, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court of the United States, Hurricane Katrina, etc.). By having what may seem at the time to be an excessive amount of information on recent topics, the "Recentist" articles serve the purpose of drawing in new readers, and among them, potential new Wikipedians. Wikipedia received positive coverage on the American National Public Radio program On the Media about its quick response to the London bombings in July 2005.

Thus, while the Recentist articles manifestly do unbalance Wikipedia's coverage, and cast a poor light on the unencyclopedic nature of many of its other articles (which often ought to be in a better and more comprehensive state to begin with), the excessively detailed new articles also serve a valuable "honeypot" purpose in attracting readers and attention to Wikipedia.

Recentist articles as case studies

It has been suggested that the documentation that occurs during a "recentist news frenzy" provides an in-depth look that some may be interested in. For example, the Terri Schiavo article (and its sister articles at Category:Terri Schiavo) provide a case study outlook into how the state and federal governments legally interact, insight into motivations for politicians to intervene in court cases, and some nuances of end-of-life issues.

Suggestions for dealing with recentism

• The "ten-year test" is one simple thought experiment which may be helpful: "In ten years will this addition still appear relevant? If I am devoting more time to it than other topics on the page, will it appear more relevant than what is already here?" For example, in 2004 devoting more time on George W. Bush's page to the ongoing election rather than his previous one may have seemed logical. However, in ten years, when neither event is fresh, readers will benefit from a similar level of detail in both articles.
• Sometimes side articles like 2004 U.S. election voting controversies and 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities can be created to help to stabilize content on the main article, in this example, the U.S. presidential election, 2004 article. A compelling reason for creating side articles is that various editors will continue to add the same details of current events to the main article unless there is another place for the rapid influx of information to be recorded.
• After "recentist" articles have calmed down, the instigating news story has dropped from the Main Page and the front pages of newspapers, and the number of edits per day has dropped to a reasonable minimum, concerned Wikipedians ought to initiate comprehensive rewrites. Most articles can be condensed to keep only the most important information, the wider notable effects of an event, and links to major issues to which the article is related. Much of the timeline content and day-to-day updates with minor details can safely be excised.
• Add up-to-the-minute information to Wikinews. Unlike Wikipedia, the Wikinews project was founded to provide in-depth "news article"-like coverage of current events. Bear in mind, however, that Wikinews material cannot usually be incorporated into Wikipedia later, due to license incompatibility; also that the English Wikipedia has generally shown more success than the English Wikinews in covering current events.
• Some editors employ the recentism tag {{Recentism}} at the top of articles to warn the reader that the content may be imbalanced towards recent perspectives on the article topic. This practice is the subject of some internal debate, since some other wikipedians think putting tags on articles makes them ugly. The tag looks like this:

This article or section may be slanted towards recent events. Please try to keep recent events in historical perspective.

• Just wait and see. Editors writing today do not have an historical perspective on events that are going on today, and should not pretend to. It is perfectly fine to write about ongoing events with an eye towards benefiting future readers, but without attempting to prejudge what will be regarded as historically important ten (or 100) years from now.

See also

• Exceptionalism