phoebe ayers wrote:
FWIW, I taught a class about Wikipedia last year for freshman university students [and wrote a paper about it, which I need to get around to posting], and one of the things we did was compare WP articles to Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, a la the Nature study. Their overwhelming consensus was that Wikipedia tended to include more information (for nearly every topic we looked at), but that Britannica articles were almost always better written. Partially this was because Britannica articles tended to be shorter and have the information better integrated into the body of the article. Almost everyone complained that Wikipedia articles were often too long to be useful or readable.
Of course Britannica has the advantage of being able to copy edit after the facts are all in, or individual authors have a great deal of editorial control over single articles. If we could ever develop an acceptable system for evaluating articles, coherent writing should definitely be one of the criteria.
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.
Absolutely. Perhaps one of the most useful lessons from my long-ago high-school English classes was précis writing. In the early days of computers when electronic memory was at a premium, programmers learned to condense their efforts. Elegant solutions saved bytes. Poor writing quality may very well be the dark side of "Wikipedia is not paper."
Ec