On 10/9/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
I think Tony's point is that we need to recognise well written work entirely apart from the FA process.
This is it, really. Articles are making FA with mediocre writing, so there's no great head of pressure in the process to encourage people to polish the writing.
I'm sure you've all had enough of me pointing out errors of grammar, organisational problems such as omitting crucial facts from the opening paragraph, and just plain bad writing in Featured Articles that I've encountered on the front page. I recognise that my personal bias towards very short articles tends to make me perhaps unreasonably dismissive of the Featured Article process as a whole, but my criticism of the writing quality in those articles is soundly based.
I could go through Featured Articles and polish them; I'm not a great writer but I can get rid of the worst errors. There are great writers around, though.
Until recently, the opener of our article on Language was tantamount to a felonious act against English. It read in full:
"*Language* is a finite system of arbitrary symbolshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolcombined according to rules of grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar for the purpose of communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication. Individual languages use sounds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound, gestureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture, and other symbols to represent objects, conceptshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept, emotions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion, ideashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea, and thoughts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought."
This kind of writing might win a passing grade in an examination on theoretical linguistics, but it isn't really useful, or even very comprehensible, to the general reader.
The opener now reads:
"A *language* is a system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System of expression and communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication. Individual languages use sound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound, gesturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture, and other means to express and communicate conceptshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept, emotions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion, ideashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea, and thoughts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought. Expressions of a language are analysable into words http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word, whose meanings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning are usually conventional http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention. The word "language" is also used to refer to the common properties of languages."
That isn't perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. The gobbledygook has been elaborated a little, and some nuances have been expanded. But there's still some jargon, which is unacceptable in an opening section. For instance "whose meanings are usually conventional" means, in standard English, "with meanings usually established by prior agreement and practice".
Both version suffer from overwikification-nearly all of the sentences contain wikilinked words. I've spoken to a few people about Wikipedia and most of them report that a sentence with wikilinks is much harder to read than a sentence without. This matches my own experience.
Now unless we pick up on improvements in writing style and give them recognition at the highest level of Wikipedia, I don't see how we'll focus attention on the quality of the writing in Wikipedia. As I've suggested in an earlier email, writing quality is especially vulnerable to entropy. While the quantity and quality of information in an article tends to improve with editing over time by many people, the quality of writing tends to degrade under the same conditions.
Now look at the introduction of the article on the same subject in MSN Encarta. it shows how far we have to go to make a great encyclopedia.
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761570647/Language.html#s1
That is professional writing. It's not the best, but it's readable, jargon-free, and provides good coverage. Professional writers do it for money. We need to find a way to motivate great writers to write into this palimpsest, knowing that their work may well be slashed to pieces in days, or even hours. Putting the best writing each day on the front page would be the least we could do to show them that we value them just as surely as we need them.