Here we want to highlight particular writing issues that arise from Wikipedia that causes articles to stall. These issues are ones that relate to the particular writing conventions of Wikipedia, both as an encyclopedia and as a distributed writing project.
Wikipedia articles are not essays, but rather have particular conventions of writing that differ greatly from other genres. However, many articles are still written in a style or form closer to an essay. In some cases, contributors may have already written something in another genre or situation, complete with good research, that they would like to put on Wikipedia but are unable (perhaps because of constraints on their time or a lack of understanding of the conventions) to convert them into Wikipedia form. Often these issues arise around class assignments as instructors face the inevitably uneven ability of students to mold the habits of essay-writing into encyclopedic conventions. Such essays are often better than no content and might actually provide an excellent basis in terms of content and citations, once issues of style, NPOV, original research, and organization are fixed.
These issues present a particular problem for the development of a Wikipedia article. If they make it through initial review, the amount of work required to rework the essay into a Wikipedia article can be tremendous. Sometimes, editors will do so on the sentence level while failing to address the larger organizational tasks that would need to be undertaken. Most importantly, such articles make it very difficult for other editors to contribute. Even well written essays tend not to leave open space for modification, since ideas are often tightly connected on a sentence level in such a way that doesn't easily account for moving or modifying content. The structure of such articles also usually discourages new or somewhat disconnected yet relevant information. Thus, some bold work needs to to be undertaken to pivot the article to a more appropriate and easily updated form. (For more on this, refer to the Not Essay teaching document. For a list of such articles, refer to the articles containing the essay-like tag.)
Gender in Horror Films: This article was written by a student in a writing course in 2012. Although the student worked extensively on the project and provided some useful content, the focus, organization, and tone of the article is essay-like. For nearly 10 years, the content remained about the same. The article was only able to move forward after some significant revamping of the table of contents, rewriting, and a few merges of similar articles (e.g., at this edit. After this intervention by a student, the article began to evolve extensively, looking quite different by 2023).
Art and World War II: This article was written in 2015 by an editor who may have been a student or just someone interested in the topic. Another editor came in to work on it a good bit in 2017, but the essay-like issues were so significant that progress was limited. A more significant reorganization and extensive rewriting was needed (performed by a student here) to get this on track to an informative and Wikipedia-appropriate article.
Human Rights Education: Although this one did not get tagged as being essay-like and appears to have been worked on significantly by experts, it has many of the same issues.
One fascinating aspect of Wikipedia is that an article can be built up over time as an amalgamation of the contributions of many editors. While this has many advantages, it can create problems related to the organization and coherence of the article. In particular, an article may stall if there is not a discussion about the structure and focus of an article or if no one comes in with bold edits bringing the article together into a coherent form. This is particularly common for big topics with lots of components, requiring different kinds of information and sources. For these articles, one can see the slow progression through by browsing through the history of the articles.
Public Speaking: This article has been worked on over time by a lot of editors, including a number of students, without significant direction of the content solidifying. The result is a surprisingly mixed and unorganized set of content, as of 2019. Getting this article into a more sensible shape took significant edits in 2019 and again in 2021.
Psychologist: Despite a significant amount of content, this article did not have a coherent organization and form as of 2017. Writers had added information a bit at a time, mostly working around what was there from previous editors. By 2022, the article still was not heading in a coherent direction, as an emerging focus on kinds of training led the article to splinter into country-specific information about psychiatry in different places.
Physiology: This one had also been written in parts, mostly with small edits fit into a history section. By 2018, it had largely stalled in this form. Part of the issue is that this should also be a branching article. A Foundations section was added in 2018, which helped the article move forward in a more coherent way. However, as one editor notes in the talk page, the article needs a more adequately broad view of the topic so as to direct future edits further.
Fantasy: Even focused on the artistic genre, this article could include a lot of different kinds of information. As of 2018, the content on this article was scattered, with a lot of disconnected pieces of information put together by different editors (the edit history is quite extensive). Part of the problem is that the organization is insufficiently clear to help direct kinds of information, but to address this, we'd need to make several bold edits that bring together all these diverse edits and help direct new ones. The article looks better as of 2022, in part because the article now connects out to its many sub articles that handle more specific information.
The initial writer (or writers) who composes or greatly expands an article has to make decisions about how to organize content. Doing so will set in place a structure that will become a major factor in guiding future editing. However, this structure might not be the most ideal for the topic or it might not fit the way that the article has evolved over time as others have contributed. Most contributors tend to work with the structure given to them, inserting content within existing forms rather than reshaping an article's structure. Thus, the original organization will often set the path for an article, directing its structure and even making or foreclosing space for kinds of content. Because organizational work requires more significant edits, it thus can cause some articles to stall.
Christian Prayer: While this is an obviously important topic, with a lot of content that could be included, by 2022, it had been taken over by sections on different types of prayer with little clear space for other kinds of information. The result was that contributors were placing information into the lead in an unclear way. This organization was set in place in part by the original structure in 2011, which focused mostly on types of prayer—the sections not under Types of Prayer remain largely about types of prayer. To move forward, sections need to be added to make space for other information about Christian prayer. (A similar example can be found in the Hobby article: Although quite a different topic, types of hobbies also monopolize the organization.)
Aid Effectiveness: As of 2018, this article had many issues, but the organization issues are the easiest to spot. Looking at the table of contents, there is not a clear structure that helps organize the information. Some sections are geared in inappropriate ways (for example, Why Effectiveness Matters takes a particular stance on the topic), many of the sections are too specific (dealing with particular events), and some potentially good section headings (such as Studies and Literature on Aid Effectiveness) are buried in other sections. Looking through the content more closely, the appropriate material is equally scattered through the article. Thus, for the article to move forward, a significant reorganization is needed.
Sleeping Beauty: This classic story has the extra challenge of figuring out how to handle all the variations of the story, particularly in terms of plot, without creating extra pages for each. A great deal of work was done here on the level of organization. In 2019, two versions were given their own sections, with a third section for variants. A student then reorganized the article with a more general plot section and a whole section with these variations organized together. Other editors found this solution only partially solved the problem of handling variations but created the extra problem of duplicate information between the general plot and the particular variations. They thus once again reorganized the variations in combination with the previous plot section, resulting in a cleaner article and more space for full plot details of each major variation. The student had also added an interpretation section in 2019, which editors subsequently fleshed out.
Although the idea is likely to be controversial, we want to highlight that sometimes too much subject matter expertise can cause an article to stall. For obvious reasons, articles are often created by one or more writers very familiar with a topic. However, the ability to synthesize material into an appropriate form for Wikipedia is a writing skill that does not necessarily coincide with expertise in a topic. This might even often be the case, given that Wikipedia is supposed to be accessible to a general audience. This problem is particularly relevant for articles on technical topics (as covered in a separate editing guideline) but also applies to many other specialized topics.
These articles are interesting for the way that they come into tension with the desire for expertise and sources discussed in the introduction as Problem #1. Clearly Wikipedia also needs editors who take the time to process advanced topics in a way that makes them more digestible, updatable, and accessible to a general audience of Wikipedia readers. However, the kind of time and intellectual effort it takes to do this work often exceeds the amount of time any nonexpert contributor is willing to put into Wikipedia, so there will be a natural dearth of potential editors to provide this mediating function.
Queer Theory: This article was stubbed (an agreed upon restart, in which most content is deleted) by editors in 2021, deleting an extensive set of material that can be seen at this link. There were a lot of problems with the previous article, but it referenced essential queer theory texts and covered many of the essential topics. The problem is that expertise in queer theory does not necessarily equal a clear capacity to write a clear Wikipedia article. From our perspective as academics familiar with such texts, the hope expressed by one of the editors who stubbed the article that "Hopefully an expert can come along and fix the article up" seems to miss the mark. Perhaps we do need an expert to wade through the information here, but we also need a good editor who can process this information into more easily accessible content. Instead, after stubbing the article, contributors will now have to start from scratch, unless they go back and recover the content from the previous version and do the hard work of making it suitable for Wikipedia.
Aid Effectivess: One way of understanding the set of issues in this article is that there is too much subject matter expertise, such that it is written too much from an expert perspective and not sufficiently geared towards a general Wikipedia readership.
Economics of Nuclear Power Plants: This is an incredibly extensive article on the costs of nuclear power plants. To make it into a better article, it needs the attention of a good editor and a clear discussion to gauge the degree of information that is appropriate, distill out the major aspects of the topic a bit more clearly, and help digest some of the material. Part of the excess expertise here is that the article remains mired in the details of the economics without clarifying the general points sufficiently through a clearer structure. Note that the article also seems to have an implicit agenda at this point, making it essay-like in that it introduces a problem (some researchers say nuclear power is not economically viable) and then attempts to address it.
When there is a lot of content in an article, it can be hard to see issues, determine the best solution, and actually implement them. Working with large pages or across multiple related pages requires extensive editing work, usually in engagement with the community or at least transparency with potential editors. This category could thus also be considered a community issue.
The point we want to emphasize is that these pages require particular kinds of editing, work that extends far beyond the work it took to compose them.
Illiad: At this point in 2022, this article had extensive content and sources, but a mix of issues that are more difficult to see than when an article has glaring issues (like being written like an essay or clear organizational problems). For instance, there are issues in original research in the themes section (as signaled by excessive quotations and direct citations of the text rather than sources analyzing the text), some content is out of place, and some content is excessively detailed or belongs in other articles (such as portions of The Gods section).
Resistor: This article has extensive, quite technical information. This creates additional issues often associated with technical articles (as covered in this helpful editing guideline). The extra difficulty of navigating technical expertise makes some tasks harder both in terms of rewriting and for navigating the community of experts who have worked on the article. For instance, from a navigational perspective, some of the headings here are unclear for the nonexpert (a nonexpert might not know immediately what information will be in Theory of Operation, Nonideal Properties, or Resistor Marking). In this case, another issue also becomes apparent: The Fixed Resistors and Variable Resistors sections have become more of an extensive list of types rather than an overview of what a fixed resistor or variable resistor is. To fix this issue, another article would be required explaining these in more detail with a more general explanation of those types left on this page.
Traditional Animation: This article appears to need a reorganization, since it is currently organized in two large sections on process and techniques. However, on closer examination, part of the issue is that much of the content here overlaps in unclear ways with content in Animation, Computer Animation, and a few other articles. There is also a conceptual issue: Traditional animation refers to two-dimensional animation techniques that are drawn by hand, but there are also two-dimensional techniques drawn by a computer. This article thus fits within the issues discussed in Conceptual Issues regarding related articles: The content needs to be more clearly sorted through the appropriate pages, but it also has other issues with organization and, ultimately, a lot of content to sort through.