phoebe ayers wrote:
FWIW, I taught a class about Wikipedia last year for freshman university students [and wrote a paper about it, which I need to get around to posting], and one of the things we did was compare WP articles to Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, a la the Nature study. Their overwhelming consensus was that Wikipedia tended to include more information (for nearly every topic we looked at), but that Britannica articles were almost always better written. Partially this was because Britannica articles tended to be shorter and have the information better integrated into the body of the article. Almost everyone complained that Wikipedia articles were often too long to be useful or readable.
I think this is partly because we're undertaking a more ambitious task. With our hierarchical organization (the "Main article: ..." thing) we're ideally creating articles that can be read at any desired level of detail, from the capsule summary to the several-page overview to the nearly-book-length treatment.
If you look outside Wikipedia for, say, biographies of famous people, you can find good biographies of almost any length you care to look for, from a capsule one-page summary to a multi-volume set of books. We want to incorporate a good portion of that range---maybe excluding the multi-volume tomes, but including enough detail so that the interested reader can read more than just a few pages on the subject. That's a bit harder than just writing a single relatively short article on the subject.
-Mark