On 12/17/05, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)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