On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
You can have a neutral article that reads better than many of ours, though. Certainly we don't want to be using all kinds of fancy literary devices - we want to just state the facts, but we can do that without ending up with a sequence of disconnect sentences. A lot of the problems come from the fact that articles are often written one sentence at a time (after the initial creation, at least) - those sentences need to be better integrated.
Seconded.
People who know how to write will look at typical articles as a morass. I often have that reaction. Most Wikipedians are fact, detail, and policy oriented rather than working to make the literature aspect as compelling as possible.
Of our potential failings, I would rate this as somewhat less important than factual errors, lack of sufficient facts or details, lack of images, or policy violations such as OR in an article or NPOV failures. Our value as an encyclopedia is lessened if people don't like reading articles.
The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether there are images on the article. Prose quality comes in a moderate second to that.
From our goals as a project, the other potential failures are
important to us (and in making us a resource deserving of people's trust, to the extent they trust and use us).
It's generically true that we need more images, and higher quality images.
It's often easier or more attractive for literate people to critisise the writing, though. And they're not wrong.