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.