On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
SlimVirgin wrote:
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Most of our articles are neither controversial, nor edited by many people, of course. There isn't much mileage in making points about the style of the most controversial 20,000 articles - if we had the other 99% under control we'd be doing a good job.
It's not just the most controversial this applies to. It's any article, project page, or section thereof that anyone's watching closely. One problem we had after we'd written the final draft of ATT as a summary of V and NOR is that some people believed the meaning of a few crucial sentences had been changed. They hadn't -- they had just been written differently -- but the change in writing led some people to feel sure there must have been a change in meaning too, so they opposed the proposal. This happens a lot with material that people care about. They guard it fiercely, even if that means preserving bad grammar, no flow, and words used incorrectly.
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
I'm not sure I see the difference. For example, the earlier point about cutlines/captions applies to any publication that uses them. Of the points raised today, which ones do you feel apply only to newspapers?
We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function.
Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For most of us, it can be a struggle.