Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 207.
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Date: 2025-11-10 11:55:38+00:00
From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.206: draft wikipedia article on scholarly primitives: help & advice?
Greetings.
On 10 Nov 2025, at 7:09, David Zeitlyn wrote:
> Ive started a WP page on scholarly primitives
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Scholarly_primitives
>
> This has been flagged as being "written like a term
> paper
...with a reference to [1].
Ah, the joys of Wikipedia editing. The encyclopaedia article (Wikipedia or not)
is indeed a fairly specific written sub-genre, with no shortage of critics or
subeditors.
I think there exists a sense of what makes a ‘good’ Wikipedia article, or an
appropriate topic, which is stable but hard to articulate, hence the largely
apophatic definition in [1].
I'm no editor, but I have some scattered experience of creating, or being
adjacent to the creation of, Wikipedia pages. The first writing goal with an
article is simply getting it past the de facto gatekeepers – whom we might think
of as referees – who are probably looking first for notability and framing.
Improving and bulking out the article can happen later, in the article's life of
continuous revision.
Usually, the highly-anticipatable first criticism of any new article will be
that the topic is not 'notable' [2]. This is another rather indirectly defined
criticism, which is I think rebutted if it is clear when or why someone would
come to Wikipedia to learn about, in this case, ‘Scholarly primitives’. You may
have headed that criticism off with the mention of ‘800 hits’, but this is
essentially a demand for contextualisation.
I'm not completely sure what ‘written like a term paper’ means, but it might be
indicating that the editor is saying that the text reads as if it were a
response to the demand ‘write me 200 words on “Scholarly primitives”’, where the
intended reader/marker can be presumed to understand the idea, but wants to
check you've done your homework. This isn't hugely different from the text that
would service someone who had stumbled across the unfamiliar term in their
reading, and who is intrigued to know if this is something they should find out
more about, but to the extent that this is a different reader from the
reader/marker who has set an exercise, the text would address the reader's
implicit questions in a discernibly different way. Why is the reader reading
this? This is also, essentially, a demand about how context is displayed.
The other frequently-wielded criticism you are likely to run into in this
process is ‘WP:NOR’, for ‘no original research’, which is the idea that there
must be nothing novel in an article, not even a novel take on a topic. That's
summed up by the notion that ‘Wikipedia is a tertiary source’.
Wikipedia editors do also tend to obsess about first paragraphs. Where that
obsession takes place is on article talk pages, and as a general rule it's worth
browsing these, and their early archives, to get the tone of the relevant
bickering.
This isn't journalism, so the first paragraph isn't trying to hook the reader in
to the rest of the text; it is instead reassuring the reader that they've
arrived at the right page, that they can quickly get a plausible idea of the
topic, and that more details are forthcoming below. Unlike journalism, the
first paragraph may have done its job if it excuses the reader from reading the
rest of the text.
Looking, slightly at random, at the mature article on ‘Rhetoric’ [3], the first,
fairly heavily-linked, paragraph does a lot of contextualisation work, and
though it's not quite an abstract, it does some of the same work. While looking
at that page, I noticed the term ‘knight academy’ in a figure caption: I can
make a guess at what that is, but the link goes to a brief page which compactly
addressed the question in my head, while having the annotations at the top which
are characteristic of a page which has passed the gatekeepers, but is still
regarded as requiring further work.
----
Before writing down these reflections, it hadn't so forcefully struck me how
precisely distinct in genre is the Wikipedia article, nor the extent to which
the style is both consistent and hard to articulate. Given the huge scale of
Wikipedia, that consistency is astonishing, but it derives from a diffuse
consensus expressed in the vast and continuously changing style guides, made
concrete in the endless quibbling and lawyering on talk pages.
Best wishes,
Norman
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_academy
--
Norman Gray | https://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Lecturer — School of Physics and Astronomy
& Principal Engineer, Educational Tech — College of Science and Engineering
University of Glasgow, UK
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