Wikipedia:Avoid academic boosterism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- A voluntary guideline: remember, all "rules" may be ignored if they prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles on colleges, universities, and other academic institutions are especially prone to disregard the advice of Wikipedia:Avoid peacock terms. It is understandable, as many of the most committed editors of a university's article are affiliated with that university, that articles will often present institutions in a favorable light. But all Wikipedia articles should strive for neutrality. Remember that academia is not necessarily a competitive endeavor; your college or university may be very important to the production and dissemination of knowledge, to scholarship and teaching, without being "better" or more "prestigious" than many others. In the spirit of Wikipedia's guidelines to cite sources and avoid weasel words, then, editors of academic articles are invited to keep articles verifiable and avoid boosterism voluntarily.
Simple guidelines for avoiding academic boosterism include:
- Avoid vague terms of praise. Prestige and reputation, excellence and exclusivity are often used imprecisely, in order to create an impression of an institution's high quality which cannot be verified or falsified. A reader might be forgiven for concluding (as of December 2005) that Wikipedia reported only on universities in Lake Wobegon, where all universities are above average. Simply choose a more specific adjective, or remove the claim entirely.
- Do not bury the reader in facts. It is tempting to replace claims of prestige or academic excellence with a cascade of facts intended to generate the same impression (by, for example, listing all faculty members who have won awards). While this is a large improvement over the vague claim, remember that a university article's lead paragraph should be a quick summary of the most important facts about that institution. Move detailed listings of facts deeper into the body of the article.
- If you cite college and university rankings, be precise and honest. Claims that an institution "places highly" in rankings are just as vague as claims that it is "prestigious" and "excellent," and are more dishonest in that they seem to cite an authoritative source. Where possible, rankings should be reported as numeric values, with years and sources provided; and as they are such specific facts, they should not occupy an article's lead section.
- Boosterism is particularly unpalatable to some Wikipedians when describing institutions whose "elite" status is already widely acknowledged elsewhere. For instance: in an opening summary paragraph, simply noting that a university is "in the Ivy League" succinctly establishes that the university is prestigious. US readers know what's implied by "Ivy League," and the rest can follow the wikilink.
Examples of boosterism
- ... is consistently ranked as the best public university in the state and as one of the best public universities in the nation. (2nd line in the intro of a well known state university)
- No public or private university in the ___(region)_____ United States can match the breadth and quality of the university's research endeavors, or its USD$___ million (as of 2001) in annual federal research funding.
