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.
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.
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. Indeed, not enough of that goes on. But the "Moby Dick" example originally posted in the thread doesn't prove to me that the article in question was failing to inform (nor even that the critic had taken the point on NOR).
Charles