 | This is an essay on the problem with bigger articles. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Articles with broad topics are generally harder to improve, so it's better and easier to improve the less important ones first. |
The Broad Topic Theory states that:
| “ | The broader and more general a topic becomes, the less citations there are for that topic. | ” |
| — Sungodtemple | ||
Take care when reading broader articles; they generally have less citations.
Sources
edit- News: Most, if not all news, is about specific topics, such as terrorism, the flu, accidents, and things like that. Nothing 'general'.
- Info articles: They assume that you know the 'general' information and dive straight into specific things.
- Dictionaries: An exception. However, they are often too general, and don't really give you any citable information.
- Books: These are usually more comprehensive but don't have much verifiability, as the reader (and the author!) must buy the book in order to verify the facts, and so books are an uncommon source. The Wikipedia Library might help authors though...
- Primary sources: Only mainly used for specific topics, like some experience they went through. Not to mention that secondary sources are preferred.
- Journals: They mostly have new discoveries, which are nowadays in specialized topics, which doesn't help gathering information for general topics.
Implications
editThis is why most vital-1 articles are B or C class. Earth is a major exception, and this is mainly because most of the article is... statistics! Statistics are the easiest thing to cite; just look at a reliable source and see if they mention it. That simple. Other articles like Mathematics are so broad that even if you knew where to start and actually wrote the article with sections, it would be hard to cite because you can't go into much detail.
It is near impossible to make broad topic articles featured due to WP:DUEWEIGHT/WP:UNDUEWEIGHT, WP:REFERENCES, and WP:ARTICLESIZE.
As of March 21:
- Vital-1: 1 featured, 1 good (20%)
- Vital-2: 5 featured, 11 good (16%)
- Vital-3: 82 featured, 125 good, 2 A (21%)
- Vital-4: 392 featured, 609 good, 8 A (10%)
- Vital-5: 702 featured, 1410 good, 28 A (4%)
So what should you do? Skip the big topics, because they're just too hard. Work on the smaller topic ones.
This is quite the minority viewpoint. You may not want to listen to me...