On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
You don't any more than you try and get literary masterpieces out of scientific papers. Wikipedia aims to provide information in a very concentrated form thus with the exception of "introduction to ..." articles wikipedia articles are going to at best look like well strung together factoids. If you look at the articles wikipedia is being compared to they are from the 50s and 60s when encyclopedias tended to argue a point of view.
NPOV and NOR and citing sources require the text to be the way it is. On top of that given a choice between being understandable and being right wikipedians tend to chose being right. This is a natural result of trying to be comprehensive while a non comprehensive work can skim over the more complex parts of liquid crystals wikipedia doesn't.
You can have a neutral article that reads better than many of ours, though. Certainly we don't want to be using all kinds of fancy literary devices - we want to just state the facts, but we can do that without ending up with a sequence of disconnect sentences. A lot of the problems come from the fact that articles are often written one sentence at a time (after the initial creation, at least) - those sentences need to be better integrated.
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.
From personal experience with lots of nonfiction writing, I know that
copyediting something to condense it -- to say the same thing in fewer and better-chosen words -- is quite difficult. But it seems like that's another aspect of quality we should really start focussing on more. A concise and precise article is a thing of beauty.
-- phoebe