Ben Yates wrote:
I mean, hell: this is the one area where I'm actually an expert. I'm a technical writer. I've been to college for it.
I think the problem here isn't with writing skills; it's with reading skills.
Every good writer I know is a great reader. Most people are, by definition, average readers, and so I think they literally can't tell the difference between a mediocre article and a great one. When they make a change, they make it to the best of their ability, but those changes become more and more likely to look like a step backwards from an expert perspective.
As far as I can tell, this is a fundamental problem with our current model. I look forward to seeing how stable versioning gets implemented, as it could help bad writing a little. But it doesn't get rid of the fundamental problem, which is that most writing decisions get made based on the personal opinions of whomever shows up.
To fix that, I think we'd need to move to a model based more on either evidence or authority.
William