geni wrote:
On 12/15/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/15/05, Brian brian0918@gmail.com wrote:
Result: Average article size for Wikipedia: 6.80 KB; Britannica: 2.60 KB.
We badly need to tighten up our writing.
Remember The britanica guy haveing a go at us becuase our article on encyopedia was too short?
The "tightening up" is less about content than writing style. It's a special skill to take a piece of text and pare it down to its essentials by removing excess verbiage. Recently, I happened to look at the Wikijunior article on Chile. It's very badly written because it primarily fails to take into account that it's written for children. Apart from the evident political tone of the article I noted the seemingly innocent sentence, "In 1970, a man named Salvador Allende was elected." I have no factual dispute with this sentence. What, however, is the purpose of the phrase, "a man named"? The sentence would have read just as well without it
Tightened up writing meqans removing this kind of fluff.
Ec