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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:13 PM 5/23/2008, phoebe ayers wrote:

> From personal experience with lots of nonfiction writing, I know that
>copyediting something to condense it -- to say the same thing in fewer
>and better-chosen words -- is quite difficult. But it seems like
>that's another aspect of quality we should really start focussing on
>more. A concise and precise article is a thing of beauty.

Spot on. Now, comes a writer and creates that thing of beauty, and it 
is concise and precise and all that. Took hours to boil it down to 
that. Oh, the writer didn't source it. The writer knew the subject 
very well and simply wrote about what the writer knows. And, the 
writer knows, anyone else who knows this subject will recognize the 
accuracy of this. I'm not talking about someone simply asserting their own POV.

Used to be, this article might sit there, unsourced for years. 
Nowadays, five minutes, speedy deletion tag. "Fails to assert 
notability." "No sources."

The ladder that built the project is being chopped away. There is 
possibly help coming: flagged revisions. Once we have a means of 
discriminating between checked and sourced and polished articles and 
those which are perhaps better called "submissions," we might be able 
to move beyond the whole deletionist/inclusionist madness. We might 
be able to stop stepping on the seeds that could be fostered and 
nourished with good editing. If we don't, somebody else will.