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