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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 23/05/2008, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/23/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > 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.
>
>
> It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to
>  lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of
>  an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is
>  missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the
>  structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone
>  on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task,
>  especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused
>  of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.

Couldn't agree more. Regrettably, I don't have a solution, though...