It's that they are badly written. A confusing mishmash of random facts not shaped into a coherent whole. Others have written eloquently on this, and on why this might be the case. The puzzle, though, is: what can be done about it.
Encourage people to become better writers?
I admit that even though I have a FA (autism) I'm not a very good writer for an encyclopedia. Peer review and FAC are great except I don't know how much they help in this part (and the criticism is rather harsh sometimes for those who can't take it). I always have a tendency to write novel-like for these articles, but of course I don't because its an encyclopedia, so a lot of times its just a bunch of well structured, but unconnected facts...
Thanks, Ryan
[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org