On 5/16/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
On 5/16/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I think a fair number of people need to be kicked out of the project just for being lousy writers. (This is not a policy statement, just a statement of attitude and frustration.)
... The problem isn't "lousy writers", /per se/, but lousy writers who think they're God's gift to the written word.
Poor writing is what's most noticeable about our articles and it's not invariably because of people who aren't able to write, but often because of laziness. Someone'll make an edit that changes the flow of a paragraph but then won't bother to tidy up after themselves, so one paragraph ends up saying the same thing three times in different ways; or a sentence will contradict the sentence that comes after it. It would be good if we could somehow raise people's consciousness about the importance of narrative flow.
Sarah