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