On 12/17/05, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:

Uniform style?

...

The Nature article mentioned that some of the reviewers thought the Wikipedia articles were difficult to get through, even if they were accurate, but no mention was made of the Brittanica's writing style.

My guess is that the "difficulty" of an article is in direct proportion to the number of contributors.

As regards consistent style, IMHO, William Emigh and Susan Herring have one of the best pieces of research on Wikipedia that I've seen published. Using genre analysis techniques, they find that a sample of Wikipedia articles are (read: were at the time of the study) quite uniform and, statistically speaking, stylistically indistinguishable from a print encyclopedia.

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/wiki.pdf

-andrea