On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing is taught.
It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which, admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good writing.
(And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed badness of high school writing).
The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school writing. -Phil
Phil, I hope when you say "writing" you mean something deeper than writing. Because I am convinced that the only people who care about the quality of writing on Wikipedia are a subset of those of us who write Wikipedia. Everyone else comes here for easily accessible and moderately reliable information, and doesn't care how badly-written it is, as long as its reasonably accurate and adequately laid-out.
RR