User:WhinyTheYounger/NOT proposal

Archived talk page

[[Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not/Archive 58#Proposal: Codifying not a resume/CV]]

• See also — this issue apparently coming up controversially in the Huberman article: Talk:Andrew D. Huberman/Archive 1#Lex Fridman tweet

RfC question

Question: Should the following lines be added to WP:PROMO section of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, and should the corresponding guidance in MOS:WORKS be appended for clarification accordingly?

Text to be added to WP:PROMO (excluding ref annotations):

6. Résumés or curricula vitae. Bibliographies and selected works in biographical articles should generally focus on highly impactful or otherwise noteworthy written pieces. Avoid listing works as if the article were a CV or résumé. For especially influential figures, separate bibliographic articles may be warranted.

Text to be appended to MOS:WORKS:

Lists of published works should be included for authors, illustrators, photographers and other artists. The individual items in the list do not have to be sufficiently notable to merit their own separate articles. Complete lists of works, appropriately sourced to reliable scholarship (WP:V), are encouraged, particularly when such lists are not already freely available on the internet. If the list has a separate article, a simplified version should also be provided in the main article. Works of non-artistic writers should be more carefully selected so as to not mirror a curriculum vitae or résumé; see WP:PROMO for more information.

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Reasoning

Support as proposer. This functionally codifies the widely used essay WP:RESUME. A brief summary of pros and cons as I see them, followed by more detailed reasoning:

• Advantages: (1) Clearer and more concise guidelines on how to treat publication lists, which are prone to promotionalism in BLPs; (2) in the long run, potentially improving the quality of BLPs by providing relatively broad standard for publication-related content (the obvious caveat being that having a policy prescribe X, of course, is very different than having X happen).
• Disadvantages: (1) Any policy addition/change runs the risk of unwarranted instruction creep; (2) could be deployed too aggressively against articles that have met GA and otherwise create busywork/fighting among editors trying to retroactively apply a new standard; (3) risk of leading to omission of works readers may find important.

The problem: Unlike for artists, there is not a clear standard for what sort of publications, works, speeches, etc. to include in bibliographies/lists of works for articles about nonartistic writers like academics, scientists, and columnists.

• Promotionalism: Bibliographies on BLPs are prone to promotionalist abuse because people love talking about themselves (cf. WP:PATENTS, an essay: Noting the existence of patents or patent applications is a common form of puffery for businesses). For academics and other aspiring "thought leaders" in particular, there's a lot of temptation to replicate one's CV — but WP:CV is not policy, and more clarity could be beneficial. But op-eds are not works of art.
• Recent example of the problem from an editor perspective: Talk:Harsh Vardhan Shringla#RfC: Are the tables of speeches encyclopedic content? — Inclusion of the proposed text above may help prevent similar RfCs by editors uncertain about removing large amounts of superfluous puffery in the form of, in this case, speeches. (And may make closing such an RfC quicker.)
• Article quality suffers: Highly impactful scholars' articles may still be cluttered by excessive listing of published works, and there exists mechanisms to direct readers to external databases of works (namely, Authority Control boxes). As a bibliography grows larger and larger, its utility decreases: readers are less likely to interact with the most substantive works among the wall of text. Those seeking to find a complete list of works, presumably much fewer than the casual readers, may also be better served by existing databases, many of which may be linked to via Authority Control boxes. This differs from the MOS standard for artists, which opts to include all published works: there are not widely used and well known databases for cataloging every artistic work in the same way that there are for e.g. journal articles and nonfiction books.

Current policy not ideal to address the problem: The most directly relevant policy is WP:NOT, specifically WP:PROMO section 4: Creating overly abundant links and references to autobiographical sources, such as your résumé or curriculum vitae, is unacceptable, but this technically only applies to linking to a CV or résumé itself.

• Many editors (myself included) often lean on the humorous essay WP:RESUME when it comes to promotional issues. PROMO Section 4 links to the essay, but given the disclaimer at the top — which in turn links to more than half a dozen individual policy pages — reference to this may be unclear for newer/COI editors. COI editors making edit requests related to a person's publications would benefit from a few sentences of relatively straightforward policy as opposed to a bevy of WP:ABC, WP:XYZ, etc., links and explanations typified in the above quote from WP:RESUME, and an editor helping them could point to the sentences rather than have to explain in more detail why the inclusion of 18 different op-eds is not a good idea.
• Obviously, it's not that current policy cannot be used to conclude that a mega-bibliography like the examples highlighted in the next section is problematic, but rather that current policy is not as clear and concise as it could be.

Selected examples of the problem

• Special:Diff/1067150117: a BLP article that had an extremely high number of publications (listing 49 journal articles, 26 book chapters, and 15 books), well over half the content of the page (and prompted me to consider writing this proposal). The subject of the article, Keith Dowding, is indeed highly cited in his field, but the article as it stood in the diff was patently ridiculous.
• Alexander Betts (political scientist)#Books
• William Baumol#Major publications
• Norman Geisler#Works
• John Rawls#Book chapters — an example of the problem independent of promotionalism. Is it really necessary to include e.g. the one-page "Author's Note"? For someone as influential as Rawls, inclusion of book chapters may be warranted in a separate bibliographic list article, but the utility in the article body itself is questionable, especially without further winnowing.
• Alan_Titchmarsh#Bibliography
• Milan Smith#Notable cases (Special:Diff/1084119637) a more unique but still applicable case — a U.S. 9th Circuit judge whose article lists an excessive number of opinions
• A good example is Karl Marx#Selected bibliography, a GA, which lists mostly works that have separate articles, with one exception. Not everyone is as notable as Marx, obviously, but this short of thing seems much more useful, rather than giving every single letter, opinion piece, and essay Marx ever wrote (because there's a lot).
• Richard Hess

References