Talk:Political views of Generation Z

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Excessive reliance on primary polling and sources that don't mention Generation Z.

Too many of the sources here are primary cites to polls or to sources that only talk vaguely about "young people" without specifying Gen Z. We should try to replace them with sources that discuss Generation Z by name, since many more such sources are available now and since there's a significant risk of WP:OR / WP:SYNTH given that definitions of generations can vary. Aquillion (talk) 16:31, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Generation Z is simply a term for a group of people born between certain years. If a source polls people from that age range without explicitly mentioning "Generation Z", why should it matter? That just seems unnecessarily restrictive. BappleBusiness^[talk] 04:07, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Well, one problem is that many of the sources don't specifically focus on Gen Z as an age range (a lot of them just talk about "younger voters" or "people under 35" or other age ranges that can't meaningfully be described as mapping to Gen Z.) Another problem is that the definition of Gen Z is vague, so if an editor adds a poll that doesn't mention Gen Z, they're using their personal opinion to define it, which isn't acceptable. And the ultimate problem is that ultimately our job is to report how sources have characterized Gen Z, specifically, as a group. Using polls directly for that is already something to do with caution (since they're WP:PRIMARY sources; we can use them in some situations but shouldn't have sections that are nothing but primary sources.) Using a poll that has an age range that sort of corresponds to Gen Z, but which doesn't call it Gen Z, is getting to the point of performing WP:OR / WP:SYNTH; if it's true that those polls represent significant aspects of Gen Z then it should be easy to find sources saying such. Otherwise we run the risk of individual editors digging up random polls from any poll, anywhere, that has ever broken their results down by age, and pulling out whatever random aspects form those polls that they personally feel are important, then treating that as defining aspects of Gen Z - at that point it's definitely WP:OR. Here's how I would put it: If a poll mentions Gen Z by name, then we can include it as a primary source; and if a secondary source covering a poll describes the generational cohort in a way that unambiguously maps directly to Gen Z, then we can include that, too, even if they don't use Gen Z by name. But primary citations to polls that don't mention Gen Z strikes me as a hard no - that's inviting WP:OR / WP:SYNTH. There is a ton of secondary coverage about Gen Z's political beliefs now, so if someone is trying to make an argument using nothing but a primary source to a poll that doesn't mention Gen Z at all, that seems to me to be a red alarm that what they're trying to add probably doesn't have enough coverage to be WP:DUE to begin with. --Aquillion (talk) 21:46, 22 December 2022 (UTC)