William Pietri schrieb:
better to have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
Haha. Ok, good point.
it's hard for me to tell the difference between an overlong article and a long one I just don't care much about.
I see your point here as well.
I spend a fair bit of professional time giving people advice. I have the most luck when I tell them in their terms how to advance their goals. To the extent their goals appear to be different, I think the trick is to reframe the conversation in terms of some shared higher-order goal.
For example, every writer wants to be read. So if we can help them see that Wikipedia's standards are ones that maximize readability, then we've found common ground. They won't (and probably shouldn't) follow Wikipedia standards just because they're Wikipedia standards. But they will follow them because (or at least, to the extent which) they make for better articles and a better encyclopedia.
William
Full agreement. Incidentally, I'm currently working on an advisory page related to issues of style and policy when "writing about one's favourite topic" (working title).