[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[Thomas Dalton]

> You don't any more than you try and get literary masterpieces out of
>  scientific papers. Wikipedia aims to provide information in a very
>  concentrated form thus with the exception of "introduction to ..."
>  articles wikipedia articles are going to at best look like well strung
>  together factoids. If you look at the articles wikipedia is being
>  compared to they are from the 50s and 60s when encyclopedias tended to
>  argue a point of view.
>
>  NPOV and NOR  and citing sources require the text to be the way it is.
>  On top of that given a choice between being understandable and being
>  right wikipedians tend to chose being right. This is a natural result
>  of trying to be comprehensive while a non comprehensive work can skim
>  over the more complex parts of liquid crystals wikipedia doesn't.

You can have a neutral article that reads better than many of ours,
though. Certainly we don't want to be using all kinds of fancy
literary devices - we want to just state the facts, but we can do that
without ending up with a sequence of disconnect sentences. A lot of
the problems come from the fact that articles are often written one
sentence at a time (after the initial creation, at least) - those
sentences need to be better integrated.