On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner(a)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