On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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