The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
On 23/05/2008, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
Are featured articles are better written than other articles? If not, requiring it of new featured articles would be a good first step.
As with most things like this, we need to fully investigate the problem before we can come up with a meaningful solution.
2008/5/23 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
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.
2008/5/23 geni geniice@gmail.com:
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.
There's ways to do compact, terse writing well. e.g. The Economist (without the frequently-on-crack opinionation).
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.
There is that.
NPOV and NOR and citing sources require the text to be the way it is.
I don't think they do, actually. But that's why good writing takes conscious effort.
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.
Again, this is a matter of being aware of good writing as a desirable thing.
The "lots of dangling subclauses and qualifiers" style is endemic, but just getting all the detail in doesn't make it acceptable quality.
Being accurate is more important than being well-written, but that doesn't mean being well-written isn't important.
- d.
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.
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Seconded.
People who know how to write will look at typical articles as a morass. I often have that reaction. Most Wikipedians are fact, detail, and policy oriented rather than working to make the literature aspect as compelling as possible.
Of our potential failings, I would rate this as somewhat less important than factual errors, lack of sufficient facts or details, lack of images, or policy violations such as OR in an article or NPOV failures. Our value as an encyclopedia is lessened if people don't like reading articles.
The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether there are images on the article. Prose quality comes in a moderate second to that.
From our goals as a project, the other potential failures are
important to us (and in making us a resource deserving of people's trust, to the extent they trust and use us).
It's generically true that we need more images, and higher quality images.
It's often easier or more attractive for literate people to critisise the writing, though. And they're not wrong.
On 5/23/08, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether there are images on the article.
I agree. We need well-sized, interesting images (not thumbnails), and I would also say we need interesting cutlines (captions). In newspapers, cutlines are the second most-read items after the headlines, because people's eyes naturally gravitate to images. They're often a neglected feature of our articles.
2008/5/23 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
On 5/23/08, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether there are images on the article.
I agree. We need well-sized, interesting images (not thumbnails), and I would also say we need interesting cutlines (captions). In newspapers, cutlines are the second most-read items after the headlines, because people's eyes naturally gravitate to images. They're often a neglected feature of our articles.
Indeed. Making a caption good is useful, and such edits generally stand. And the need for images is why I went hogwild with the placeholders, though I've stopped since, even though they net us images, editors hate them *that much* ... Anyone think they can come up with better placeholder images?
- d.
George Herbert wrote:
People who know how to write will look at typical articles as a morass. I often have that reaction. Most Wikipedians are fact, detail, and policy oriented rather than working to make the literature aspect as compelling as possible.
Of our potential failings, I would rate this as somewhat less important than factual errors, lack of sufficient facts or details, lack of images, or policy violations such as OR in an article or NPOV failures. Our value as an encyclopedia is lessened if people don't like reading articles.
The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether there are images on the article. Prose quality comes in a moderate second to that.
From our goals as a project, the other potential failures are
important to us (and in making us a resource deserving of people's trust, to the extent they trust and use us).
It's generically true that we need more images, and higher quality images.
It's often easier or more attractive for literate people to critisise the writing, though. And they're not wrong.
Let's not confuse issues of accuracy with issues of style.
Images are a matter of style, and are often little more than a graphic representation of the 10-second sound byte.
AFAIK Melville did not include illustrations with his most famous novel. It is a thick novel, and the absence of illustrations was no impediment to its being read. Later publishers might have done so, particularly those who dumbed things down for an audience of children.
Ec
On 5/23/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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.
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Sarah
On 23/05/2008, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/23/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
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.
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Couldn't agree more. Regrettably, I don't have a solution, though...
2008/5/23 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Oh yeah. I didn't say it'd be easy, even if you can write :-)
- d.
SlimVirgin wrote:
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Most of our articles are neither controversial, nor edited by many people, of course. There isn't much mileage in making points about the style of the most controversial 20,000 articles - if we had the other 99% under control we'd be doing a good job.
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function. Indeed, not enough of that goes on. But the "Moby Dick" example originally posted in the thread doesn't prove to me that the article in question was failing to inform (nor even that the critic had taken the point on NOR).
Charles
2008/5/23 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
News magazine journalism might be a more useful comparison. The thing that strikes me about our famously good current event articles - e.g. on the Indian Ocean quake or the Virginia Tech massacre - is that they read like good articles from a news magazine and were in fact reasonably well written even while undergoing fast changes. Not immaculate essays, but good, readable and informative.
- d.
News magazine journalism might be a more useful comparison. The thing that strikes me about our famously good current event articles - e.g. on the Indian Ocean quake or the Virginia Tech massacre - is that they read like good articles from a news magazine and were in fact reasonably well written even while undergoing fast changes. Not immaculate essays, but good, readable and informative.
The credit for that could easily go to a single person who was keeping it all together as lots of people added new information as it came to light. Getting one or two articles right is easy (and if they happen to be the really noticeable ones, then great!), getting them all right is much harder.
On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
SlimVirgin wrote:
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Most of our articles are neither controversial, nor edited by many people, of course. There isn't much mileage in making points about the style of the most controversial 20,000 articles - if we had the other 99% under control we'd be doing a good job.
It's not just the most controversial this applies to. It's any article, project page, or section thereof that anyone's watching closely. One problem we had after we'd written the final draft of ATT as a summary of V and NOR is that some people believed the meaning of a few crucial sentences had been changed. They hadn't -- they had just been written differently -- but the change in writing led some people to feel sure there must have been a change in meaning too, so they opposed the proposal. This happens a lot with material that people care about. They guard it fiercely, even if that means preserving bad grammar, no flow, and words used incorrectly.
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
I'm not sure I see the difference. For example, the earlier point about cutlines/captions applies to any publication that uses them. Of the points raised today, which ones do you feel apply only to newspapers?
We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function.
Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For most of us, it can be a struggle.
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:09 PM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
[...] We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function.
Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For most of us, it can be a struggle.
And I think that people who have the background (professional or educational) to copyedit aren't the ones most attracted as contributors. And there's a huge ramp-up curve in learning all the other local style guide stuff, which is organized around content not style.
We're not copyeditor friendly.
That said, a few loud, outgoing copyeditors wandering randomly around dropping gems of rewrites here and there might have a wonderful effect. If anyone knows such people, either in the project or outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful thing. Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a great long term improvement.
2008/5/23 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
We're not copyeditor friendly.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That said, a few loud, outgoing copyeditors wandering randomly around dropping gems of rewrites here and there might have a wonderful effect.
Or *not*.
If anyone knows such people, either in the project or outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful thing. Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a great long term improvement.
The problem is, a copyeditor tends to value style over substance.
Whenever I go through an article that a copy editor has been through, I end up turning about half of the edits back.
The problem is that a copyeditor makes a sentence read well, but in some cases, the sentence is simply the best sentence that anyone knows how to write- it's awkward text, because it's a difficult concept. The copyeditor just sweeps in and 'simplifies' it. Enough copyediting and the article is no longer in anyway correct.
This actually happened recently. An editor swept into an article and removed as they saw it, unnecessary detail, and the article certainly read a lot better afterwards.
Trouble is, this 'unnecessary distinction' was in a BLP article, and they ended up giving the person a transmissible, potentially fatal illness, that was not necessarily curable, but that the reference said that they didn't have.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
The problem is that a copyeditor makes a sentence read well, but in some cases, the sentence is simply the best sentence that anyone knows how to write- it's awkward text, because it's a difficult concept. The copyeditor just sweeps in and 'simplifies' it. Enough copyediting and the article is no longer in anyway correct.
While this is in places true, if I put my copyeditor hat on and spend time looking at articles I am involved enough in to know what the heck is really going on (and be able to clearly tell what would be a factually incorrect rephrasing), there are huge improvements that can be made in the writing.
A very few ugly semantical things have to be that way due to complex underlying facts. In a vast majority of cases, it's just bad writing looking for an excuse.
It's reasonable to say that copyeditors need to be followed around by subject matter experts to catch such things. Saying that we shouldn't have them participate is unreasonable. On the whole, our writing is C- level from a college perspective. Our readers deserve better.
Reading the opinions masquerading as essays submitted by WikiProject Global Economics, I actually wouldn't put our writing so bad...
George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: On the whole, our writing is C- level from a college perspective. Our readers deserve better.
Ian Woollard wrote:
2008/5/23 George Herbert:
If anyone knows such people, either in the project or outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful thing. Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a great long term improvement.
The problem is, a copyeditor tends to value style over substance.
The reverse problem is no less valid.
Whenever I go through an article that a copy editor has been through, I end up turning about half of the edits back.
Hopefully you do so in the context of a dialogue with the copyeditor, where you take ample time to find a consensual balance between the two aspects of the article.
The problem is that a copyeditor makes a sentence read well, but in some cases, the sentence is simply the best sentence that anyone knows how to write- it's awkward text, because it's a difficult concept. The copyeditor just sweeps in and 'simplifies' it. Enough copyediting and the article is no longer in anyway correct.
That view involves a healthy dose of jumping to conclusions. Style and substance need to be viewed as complements, not opponents. Being a difficult concept is no excuse for bad writing. Books and periodicals with a credible popularization of difficult subjects do exist.
This actually happened recently. An editor swept into an article and removed as they saw it, unnecessary detail, and the article certainly read a lot better afterwards.
This may not have been a simple matter of copyediting
Trouble is, this 'unnecessary distinction' was in a BLP article, and they ended up giving the person a transmissible, potentially fatal illness, that was not necessarily curable, but that the reference said that they didn't have.
The illness would just serve to reduce the time during which the article could be considered a BLP. :-)
Ec
2008/5/24 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Ian Woollard wrote:
The problem is that a copyeditor makes a sentence read well, but in some cases, the sentence is simply the best sentence that anyone knows how to write- it's awkward text, because it's a difficult concept. The copyeditor just sweeps in and 'simplifies' it. Enough copyediting and the article is no longer in anyway correct.
That view involves a healthy dose of jumping to conclusions. Style and substance need to be viewed as complements, not opponents.
In many, even most cases, I agree. However there are some cases where they *are* opponents. In those cases copyeditors tend to sweep through and just damage the article.
Being a difficult concept is no excuse for bad writing.
Being a difficult concept is no excuse for bad copyediting. There's a difference between a difficult concept and bad writing a mile wide and a mile deep. And copy editors usually don't know the difference.
The illness would just serve to reduce the time during which the article could be considered a BLP. :-)
Which part of them not having that illness, and thus being around and able to sue, didn't you understand?
Ec
Ian Woollard wrote:
2008/5/24 Ray Saintonge
Being a difficult concept is no excuse for bad writing.
Being a difficult concept is no excuse for bad copyediting. There's a difference between a difficult concept and bad writing a mile wide and a mile deep. And copy editors usually don't know the difference.
You make it all sound so one-sided by starting with a hostile attitude toward copyeditors, assuming that most don't know the difference. I don't see anything about what you would do to bridge the gap.
The illness would just serve to reduce the time during which the article could be considered a BLP. :-)
Which part of them not having that illness, and thus being around and able to sue, didn't you understand?
Please don't take yourself so seriously.
Ec
2008/5/23 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com:
And I think that people who have the background (professional or educational) to copyedit aren't the ones most attracted as contributors.
Oh, I dunno. I've been an editor enough years to have a perpetually itchy red-pencil finger. Most of my Wikipedia edits these days are fixing articles on stuff I've just looked up ...
- d.
George Herbert wrote:
We're not copyeditor friendly.
That said, a few loud, outgoing copyeditors wandering randomly around dropping gems of rewrites here and there might have a wonderful effect. If anyone knows such people, either in the project or outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful thing. Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a great long term improvement.
That unfriendliness helps to insure that those gifted copyeditors will soon be out-going.
Keeping them around requires that the guardians of neutral correctness be willing to engage in a dialogue about how best to improve a page. Following the structure of a good sentence is not eased when a piece of text is interrupted by long and frequent in-line references.
Ec
SlimVirgin wrote:
On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
I'm not sure I see the difference. For example, the earlier point about cutlines/captions applies to any publication that uses them. Of the points raised today, which ones do you feel apply only to newspapers?
Let's look at a concrete example: [[Alexander Cordell]]. Do we really need the journalists' technique here: "Son of the Empire"; "In Love with Wales"; "Evocative Writing"? That's like a certain style of newspaper writing. But not right for WP tone, I believe.
We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function.
Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For most of us, it can be a struggle.
OK, go back to the quote at the start of the thread:
"Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."
How hard is it to do this?
"Ahab seeks one particular whale, Moby-Dick: a great white whale, of tremendous size and ferocity. Few whalers know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered it. In a previous meeting, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge."
That removes some redundancy, punctuates, watches the choice of words. And the end result is _not bad_. As a one para explanation of the book's main plot, it is really OK. Do we have to have the stuff about a traumatised psyche trying to restage the confrontation with the Other? Well, we could, given a reliable source. But anyway, this kind of copy editing can be regarded as routine.
Charles
On 5/24/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
SlimVirgin wrote:
On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.
I'm not sure I see the difference. For example, the earlier point about cutlines/captions applies to any publication that uses them. Of the points raised today, which ones do you feel apply only to newspapers?
Let's look at a concrete example: [[Alexander Cordell]]. Do we really need the journalists' technique here: "Son of the Empire"; "In Love with Wales"; "Evocative Writing"? That's like a certain style of newspaper writing. But not right for WP tone, I believe.
I agree that the headers there are not good, but I'd say the same if I saw them in a newspaper or magazine.
We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function.
Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For most of us, it can be a struggle.
OK, go back to the quote at the start of the thread:
"Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off Ahab's leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."
How hard is it to do this?
"Ahab seeks one particular whale, Moby-Dick: a great white whale, of tremendous size and ferocity. Few whalers know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered it. In a previous meeting, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge."
That removes some redundancy, punctuates, watches the choice of words.
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
- d.
On 5/24/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
I didn't mean that good prose should never be changed, but it would be nice to see it improved. Instead, what happens when you get an article to the point where the topic is well-covered and the writing flows well is that almost all edits to it after that are a deterioration. It's rare that an article continues to get better after being featured, for example, but not unusual for it to deteriorate unless it's watched closely. When I wrote that people should hesitate to edit good prose, I meant precisely that -- not that they shouldn't, but that they should ask themselves whether what they want to add or remove really does constitute improvement.
Sarah
SlimVirgin wrote:
It's rare that an article continues to get better after being featured, for example, but not unusual for it to deteriorate unless it's watched closely. When I wrote that people should hesitate to edit good prose, I meant precisely that -- not that they shouldn't, but that they should ask themselves whether what they want to add or remove really does constitute improvement.
Yes, but that's really a separate issue, I feel. Featured articles, only 0.1% of the articles, are almost by definition a "local maximum" for writing. If you wanted a better article, it might need to be changed around, not just pushed to the top of the slope. (The analogy is with trying to get to a higher mountain peak, from the one where you are now: you are going to have to descend before climbing.)
So I think David Gerard has a point; and FA, our star system for articles, is as usual, a bit misleading as to the general needs of the site. We do need factual content added, as a matter of course. We do not need edits reverted as uncultured in writing terms, when they offer content improvements. We do need, to go back to something Sarah brought up, to parse "major copy edit" as "reorganisation" + "copy edit as tarting up", and in that order.
Charles
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
On 5/24/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
I didn't mean that good prose should never be changed, but it would be nice to see it improved. Instead, what happens when you get an article to the point where the topic is well-covered and the writing flows well is that almost all edits to it after that are a deterioration. It's rare that an article continues to get better after being featured, for example, but not unusual for it to deteriorate unless it's watched closely. When I wrote that people should hesitate to edit good prose, I meant precisely that -- not that they shouldn't, but that they should ask themselves whether what they want to add or remove really does constitute improvement.
I'm speaking more of my own annoyance when I got an article to featured, it was well-written with good flow, and someone added some clunky, badly-written sentence that was ... entirely relevant. My initial urge to remove it as clunky was, IMO, just incorrect.
I don't see a problem with articles going through a cycle of well-written -> more details -> copyedited -> well-written. Of course, as Ian points out, domain knowledge is important in the copyeditor! (Or at least a talk page note "I've copyedited for flow and structure, please fix any important detail I may have messed up" - an express statement of non-OWNership.)
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
I don't see a problem with articles going through a cycle of well-written -> more details -> copyedited -> well-written. Of course, as Ian points out, domain knowledge is important in the copyeditor! (Or at least a talk page note "I've copyedited for flow and structure, please fix any important detail I may have messed up" - an express statement of non-OWNership.)
This would support the notion that we need more sophisticated algorithms for evaluating articles, style and content being only two of the more important qualities to be tracked.
Ec
On 5/24/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
On 5/24/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
I didn't mean that good prose should never be changed, but it would be nice to see it improved. Instead, what happens when you get an article to the point where the topic is well-covered and the writing flows well is that almost all edits to it after that are a deterioration. It's rare that an article continues to get better after being featured, for example, but not unusual for it to deteriorate unless it's watched closely. When I wrote that people should hesitate to edit good prose, I meant precisely that -- not that they shouldn't, but that they should ask themselves whether what they want to add or remove really does constitute improvement.
I'm speaking more of my own annoyance when I got an article to featured, it was well-written with good flow, and someone added some clunky, badly-written sentence that was ... entirely relevant. My initial urge to remove it as clunky was, IMO, just incorrect.
I don't see a problem with articles going through a cycle of well-written -> more details -> copyedited -> well-written. Of course, as Ian points out, domain knowledge is important in the copyeditor! (Or at least a talk page note "I've copyedited for flow and structure, please fix any important detail I may have messed up" - an express statement of non-OWNership.)
You're right, of course, but it makes it hard to attract good copyeditors and writers. If people spend a lot of time getting the structure of an article right, they're not going to want to keep doing it over and over like Sisyphus. Having said that, I feel I've noticed an improvement in general writing quality over the last year or so. I think the regular editors are beginning to pay more attention to it.
On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:49 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
- d.
This is quite correct. What is also frequently a concern is that material is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books that are not online. If the original addition is carefully worded to closely paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such that it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the nuances in the source, since the copyeditor does not have access to the source. I see this all the time in FACs, and it drives me crazy. I've stopped commenting on it, though.
RR
Relata Refero wrote:
What is also frequently a concern is that material is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books that are not online.
Material that is not online is just as valuable and important as material that is. If you doubt the material look it up.
If the original addition is carefully worded to closely paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such that it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the nuances in the source, since the copyeditor does not have access to the source.
"Closely paraphrase" and "sufficiently faithful" are points of view about a particular text. Close paraphrases intended to avoid a copyvio can change the meaning of a passage entirely. How do you presume that the copyeditor does not have access to the source? Whose nuance is correct?
Ec
On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Relata Refero wrote:
What is also frequently a concern is that material is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books
that
are not online.
Material that is not online is just as valuable and important as material that is. If you doubt the material look it up.
Umm, yes.
If the original addition is carefully worded to closely paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such
that
it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the nuances in the source, since the copyeditor does not have access to the source.
"Closely paraphrase" and "sufficiently faithful" are points of view about a particular text. Close paraphrases intended to avoid a copyvio can change the meaning of a passage entirely. How do you presume that the copyeditor does not have access to the source? Whose nuance is correct?
I'm not presuming, I'm basing it on actual incidents. And if you think that people routinely order $39.95 books or put in an interlibrary loan before doing a bit of copyediting....
The rest of what you say isn't really an objection, merely a general statement about Meaning. The bottomline is that a close paraphrase is sometimes necessary, and when its done, it needs to be done with reference to the source, and should not be copy-edited without the copy-editor also reading and assimilating the source. The latter happens all the time.
RR
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
The rest of what you say isn't really an objection, merely a general statement about Meaning. The bottomline is that a close paraphrase is sometimes necessary, and when its done, it needs to be done with reference to the source, and should not be copy-edited without the copy-editor also reading and assimilating the source. The latter happens all the time.
Relato, do you have an example of someone making an otherwise good copy edit that distorts what a source said?
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 2:32 AM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
The rest of what you say isn't really an objection, merely a general statement about Meaning. The bottomline is that a close paraphrase is sometimes necessary, and when its done, it needs to be done with
reference
to the source, and should not be copy-edited without the copy-editor
also
reading and assimilating the source. The latter happens all the time.
Relato, do you have an example of someone making an otherwise good copy edit that distorts what a source said?
Several! But I'm not putting them on the mailing list. That would indeed have a chilling effect, and would overly personalise - and trivialise - the issue. In case someone doesn't wish to believe its a problem, I'm definitely not going to wrangle over email whether a random example I pick changed meaning sufficiently to be a good example.
The point remains: do you think that close paraphrases are sometimes necessary? If so, do you think that such paraphrases can be, ont the average, re-written without reference to the source so that they do not alter meaning? These are not questions that require specific examples.
Relat*a* refero.
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
Several! But I'm not putting them on the mailing list. That would indeed have a chilling effect, and would overly personalise - and trivialise - the issue. In case someone doesn't wish to believe its a problem, I'm definitely not going to wrangle over email whether a random example I pick changed meaning sufficiently to be a good example.
The point remains: do you think that close paraphrases are sometimes necessary? If so, do you think that such paraphrases can be, ont the average, re-written without reference to the source so that they do not alter meaning? These are not questions that require specific examples.
A good copy editor should be able to change a text without changing the meaning. In very contentious articles, it's unfortunate that close paraphrasing (to the point of copying word for word) or quoting is often necessary throughout the entire text. It means those articles often look like lists of quotations, with no narrative flow at all.
I do think an example or two would be helpful.
Sarah
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 3:15 AM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
The point remains: do you think that close paraphrases are sometimes necessary? If so, do you think that such paraphrases can be, ont the average, re-written without reference to the source so that they do not alter meaning? These are not questions that require specific examples.
A good copy editor should be able to change a text without changing the meaning. In very contentious articles, it's unfortunate that close paraphrasing (to the point of copying word for word) or quoting is often necessary throughout the entire text. It means those articles often look like lists of quotations, with no narrative flow at all.
I know some such copy-editors, but they are far from being the norm, which explains my concern.
RR
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 3:15 AM, SlimVirgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/24/08, Relata Refero refero.relata@gmail.com wrote:
The point remains: do you think that close paraphrases are sometimes necessary? If so, do you think that such paraphrases can be, ont the average, re-written without reference to the source so that they do not alter meaning? These are not questions that require specific examples.
A good copy editor should be able to change a text without changing the meaning. In very contentious articles, it's unfortunate that close paraphrasing (to the point of copying word for word) or quoting is often necessary throughout the entire text. It means those articles often look like lists of quotations, with no narrative flow at all.
I know some such copy-editors, but they are far from being the norm, which explains my concern.
What I meant to add is that the "list of quotations" articles are impossible to copy edit, and even if you try, you'll be instantly reverted. As a result, our most contentious pieces are often nothing more than, "A said X, while B said Y, but C did not concur, adding that Z."
SlimVirgin wrote:
What I meant to add is that the "list of quotations" articles are impossible to copy edit, and even if you try, you'll be instantly reverted. As a result, our most contentious pieces are often nothing more than, "A said X, while B said Y, but C did not concur, adding that Z."
While such writing is pretty clearly acting as placeholder for a more mature treatment, it is still true to our basic principles. "Placeholder" is the best we can do, until solid academic discussions come along (and even those have to be slotted in as they merit it, not simply used to carpet-bomb dissent). And "holding the ring" in contentious areas, for the sake of NPOV, is how Wikipedia operates (feature not a bug).
No doubt, it is tempting to look at the topic hot-spots as indicative of any possible breakdown of model. But I really don't think anything quite so unrepresentative should be taken as central to the writing issue. I certainly don't think we should start muddling up the key content policies and the Manual of Style. Those are, and for good reason, functionally separate.
Charles
David Gerard wrote:
2008/5/24 SlimVirgin:
Yes, it's a big improvement, but in fairness, it's not a major copy edit. It really is quite difficult to turn an article from something disjointed and poorly written into a flowing narrative. It's especially frustrating when the works gets reverted, or more often chipped away bit by bit over the following weeks and months. When we see a well-written piece of prose, we should hesitate to wade in unless we're sure we can improve it, but very few people have that attitude, maybe because they think good writing is easy, or because they think it doesn't really matter.
Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
This seems like the opposite of Slim's complaint. She's not suggesting that new information be reverted or discouraged for the sake of writing flow. It's about those people who make later changes without paying attention to text flow. A careful writer can pay attention to text flow when adding new facts.
Ec
SlimVirgin wrote:
It's not just the most controversial this applies to. It's any article, project page, or section thereof that anyone's watching closely. One problem we had after we'd written the final draft of ATT as a summary of V and NOR is that some people believed the meaning of a few crucial sentences had been changed. They hadn't -- they had just been written differently -- but the change in writing led some people to feel sure there must have been a change in meaning too, so they opposed the proposal. This happens a lot with material that people care about. They guard it fiercely, even if that means preserving bad grammar, no flow, and words used incorrectly.
Policy pages are quite another matter. Changes of a single word in a law or policy can have a profound effect because it is very rare when two words will have identical connotations.
Ec
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
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.
Of course Britannica has the advantage of being able to copy edit after the facts are all in, or individual authors have a great deal of editorial control over single articles. If we could ever develop an acceptable system for evaluating articles, coherent writing should definitely be one of the criteria.
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.
Absolutely. Perhaps one of the most useful lessons from my long-ago high-school English classes was précis writing. In the early days of computers when electronic memory was at a premium, programmers learned to condense their efforts. Elegant solutions saved bytes. Poor writing quality may very well be the dark side of "Wikipedia is not paper."
Ec
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
Frankly, I don't think we should fix the "problem" that the post sees. We reflect the world that surrounds us, and academic writing is a lot stodgier than it was in the 1950s. Frankly, FAs waste enough time worrying about style, and nowhere near enough time on sourcing. We shouldn't encourage that.
RR
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 6:35 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly..." "a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "AhabÂ’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
If this was put in the Moby-Dick article, it would definitely be reverted immediately, with the edit summary reading something like: "No personal opinions, please".
Perhaps the article should be approaching this from the opposite angle -- the other works need to get their prose in order.
Noble Story
David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote: The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
_______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
At 10:15 AM 5/23/2008, Mark Nilrad wrote:
"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly..." "a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
If this was put in the Moby-Dick article, it would definitely be reverted immediately, with the edit summary reading something like: "No personal opinions, please".
I've got a lot to write on this, so I'm going to chop it up. Yes, Mark is right. That's what would be said. But are those personal opinions? Or are they a synthesized consensus judgement of those knowledgeable about the text?
An expert on Moby-Dick will write just like that! And it will not be a "personal opinion." In any case, any of this could be in the article if attributed to an expert or reliable source. Like one of those old encyclopedias. What the encyclopedia is then reporting is not the mere plot details of Moby-Dick, but what people have thought about it, and inferred from it, and that is part of human knowledge as well.
I think we've painted ourselves into a corner, and created a project where actual "writers" are not welcome, and where "editors" rule. In the rest of the world, writers are, as has been mentioned elsewhere here, hard to find, whereas editors are almost commodities. (Truly excellent editors are another matter, rare birds as well.) Writers without editors famously make bad books, but editors without writers make for boring books. And boring "knowledge" might as well be useless; inflict it too severely on children and they will grow up to be .... editors. That is, those who cut up and reject and mangle what others write. Call them deletionist editors, perhaps. True editors categorize information, repackage it and frame it to make it accurate, verifiable, and digestible, wasting little. Writers are frequently poor at that, on their own.
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
You can't. We (speaking corporately) have specifically designed our policies and guidelines so the error the author points out *cannot* be remedied without massive massive amounts of work.
His example contrasts
"Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off Ahab's leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."
with
"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly..." "a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
The latter fragments are certainly more interesting. But do you know what I feel instinctively as I read the latter? I feel alarm bells going off. Alarm bells which have names like NOR, NPOV, TONE, WP:PEACOCK, and so on. I can in my mind's eye see an editor adding a comment "Monomania is a specific psychological term; do we have a cite for applying it to Ahab or is this just a rhetorical flourish that should be removed per...?"
Yes, perhaps a particularly assiduous editor could track down apt citations (perhaps 3 or 4 cites could adequately armor the first quote, at least). But our current system is simply constructed so that one can only write such an article if one is willing to go to superhuman lengths in sourcing and defending it, or if one is willing to quite simply ignore policy and guideline in the interests of great prose and suffer the consequent assaults (such people seem to have a tendency to burn out. I have no idea why).
FAs can perhaps take the former route, but the rest of us? I am content to write articles whose prose is bland mediocrity but which I will not die the death of a thousand nights in the library, or of a thousand cuts.
-- gwern
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
- d.
You can't. We (speaking corporately) have specifically designed our policies and guidelines so the error the author points out *cannot* be remedied without massive massive amounts of work.
Here is my favorite/most depressing example of inspired prose losing out to prosaic phrasing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Noah%27s_Ark/Archive_5#biblical_proportion
That aside, I think one of the comments at the Chronicle of Higher Ed version of this story ( http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=468 ) gets it right:
"Heck, did they even read Moby Dick before writing their paper on it? If one's only view of writing is the Wikistyle, then how can one see that there are better, more creative, more interesting ways to craft a sentence?"
Bauerlein says: "The concern for bias probably underlies the neutrality style, but I wish I received a lot more biased, opinionated, argumentative, judgmental, stylish, and colorful papers." But there are many situations where the cut-and-dry approach of Wikipedia will serve students well. The world has quite enough people who take a biased, opinionated, argumentative, judgmental, stylish, and colorful approach (to writing, to politics, to their jobs, etc.). Even if English professors aren't pleased with the trend, I think we'll be better off if the next generation has a higher proportion of educated people who take the Wikipedia path to writing and argument. Surely there will still be plenty of clever and opinionated writers to write novels and waste ink on the New York Times op-ed pages.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, wrote:
The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-th...
(that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
How to fix this scalably?
You can't. We (speaking corporately) have specifically designed our policies and guidelines so the error the author points out *cannot* be remedied without massive massive amounts of work.
His example contrasts
"Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off Ahab's leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."
with
"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly..." "a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
The latter fragments are certainly more interesting. But do you know what I feel instinctively as I read the latter? I feel alarm bells going off. Alarm bells which have names like NOR, NPOV, TONE, WP:PEACOCK, and so on. I can in my mind's eye see an editor adding a comment "Monomania is a specific psychological term; do we have a cite for applying it to Ahab or is this just a rhetorical flourish that should be removed per...?"
Yes, perhaps a particularly assiduous editor could track down apt citations (perhaps 3 or 4 cites could adequately armor the first quote, at least). But our current system is simply constructed so that one can only write such an article if one is willing to go to superhuman lengths in sourcing and defending it, or if one is willing to quite simply ignore policy and guideline in the interests of great prose and suffer the consequent assaults (such people seem to have a tendency to burn out. I have no idea why).
FAs can perhaps take the former route, but the rest of us? I am content to write articles whose prose is bland mediocrity but which I will not die the death of a thousand nights in the library, or of a thousand cuts.
Different subject areas require different approaches to editing, and different styles. The detached style of a technical article about advanced mathematics may be suitable for that subject, but it turns people away from reading the great works of literature. Describing a metaphor is on a par with trying to explain a joke to the one person in the room who doesn't understand it.
Ec
At one level, the only thing necessary to improve Wikipedia's writing style is to make it a priority. We're good at those -- just look at the way we got rid of nonfree images.
The difficulty, of course, is that writing style is inherently a subjective issue. We're not nearly so good at those -- in the current, rule-bound climate, it's much easier to enforce objective standards.
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative writer/editors who could really make our content sing -- and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
So while there are good reasons for our tendency towards firmer and firmer policy -- there's no way a project that's as big as Wikipedia now is can get away with as much informal freewheelingness as it had when it was younger -- it's a trend which has to be intelligently resisted, lest the cure turn out to be worse than the disease (as of course there are signs that it already has).
I don't agree that copyediting is inordinately difficult. It's hard, to be sure, but then, doing research and selecting and accurately presenting facts are hard tasks, too. In one sense, copyediting Wikipedia is a highly desirable task, as it's one you can do from the comfort of your easy chair (just as much of Wikipedia used to be written), without all that tedious sourcing and referencing and second-guessing about notability. I know some people who are great at it, and it wouldn't take much to convince them to dig in and make massive improvements to any Wikipedia articles which could use it.
Isn't there a Wikiproject or something where people who like to copyedit can hook up with articles which have been requested for copyediting? If not, perhaps there should be.
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative... So while there are good reasons for our tendency towards firmer and firmer policy... it's a trend which has to be intelligently resisted[.]
One huge thing to watch out for is when our policies end up hurting our responsible contributors more than the vandals and trolls they're supposed to protect us from. If every new contributor is guilty until proven innocent of being a vandal, POV warrior, linkspammer, copyright violator, or non-notable vanity article pusher, we're going to turn off and drive away a lot of new contributors. (The only way to make it worse would be if the process for proving yourself innocent involved following -- to an absolute T -- a bunch of elaborate policies which new contributors aren't likely to be aware of.)
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative... So while there are good reasons for our tendency towards firmer and firmer policy... it's a trend which has to be intelligently resisted[.]
One huge thing to watch out for is when our policies end up hurting our responsible contributors more than the vandals and trolls they're supposed to protect us from. If every new contributor is guilty until proven innocent of being a vandal, POV warrior, linkspammer, copyright violator, or non-notable vanity article pusher, we're going to turn off and drive away a lot of new contributors. (The only way to make it worse would be if the process for proving yourself innocent involved following -- to an absolute T -- a bunch of elaborate policies which new contributors aren't likely to be aware of.)
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There is certainly a balance to be struck. On the one hand, we certainly don't want to tie everyone up in red tape, and unfortunately sometimes that does seem to happen. On the other, we certainly -do- want to stop POV pushers, copyright violators, non-notable vanity pushers, and spammers, and sometimes that doesn't seem to happen.
I don't think it's a question of more policy or less policy. I think it's a question of -better- policy, mostly, and determining what is most effective at its intended purpose with the least unintended consequences. Nothing is ever going to be 100%, but we can certainly do better. I think we'd do better to make gradual changes to policy and evaluate how they work, rather than the sudden, radical shifts we can see now.
I think another trouble spot is haphazard enforcement. It's hard to work with policy when it's impossible to know whether or not it'll be actually enforced in a given situation. On one hand, many are allowed to go on disrupting and trolling far too long after they should have been shown the door, or if necessary, helped to use it. On the other hand, yet again, we don't want to be too rigorous in enforcement to the point that the punishments are causing more harm than the crimes. In some areas, like civility, I sometimes think we're a little overly harsh. In other areas, like chronic NPOV, NOR, and V violators, we're not nearly harsh enough. Again, there's no perfect solution here. Purely mechanistic enforcement is not a great answer, and nor is purely subjective enforcement. It's that balance point that's hard to find.
On May 26, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Todd Allen wrote:
There is certainly a balance to be struck. On the one hand, we certainly don't want to tie everyone up in red tape, and unfortunately sometimes that does seem to happen. On the other, we certainly -do- want to stop POV pushers, copyright violators, non-notable vanity pushers, and spammers, and sometimes that doesn't seem to happen.
I don't think it's a question of more policy or less policy. I think it's a question of -better- policy, mostly, and determining what is most effective at its intended purpose with the least unintended consequences. Nothing is ever going to be 100%, but we can certainly do better. I think we'd do better to make gradual changes to policy and evaluate how they work, rather than the sudden, radical shifts we can see now.
I don't think that this is a problem that is solved via policy. Policy is a relatively ineffectual medium. It does very little on its own. Policy doesn't drive off POV pushers - communities of editors - often very localized ones - do. Policy ostensibly guides them in how they do this, but as often as not it doesn't - just like most articles aren't actually written by consulting WP:V, WP:NOR, and WP:NPOV, but are written by a community of editors with a decent idea of what a good article should look like.
Our policies are almost, but not entirely incidental to the actual work of improving the encyclopedia - they're certainly a second line of defense, consulted when the first line of defense - social control - fails.
In other words, what we need is not better policy, but rather better users who rely on thought and judgment that is informed by principles, not on rigid policy.
-Phil
Philip Sandifer wrote:
I don't think that this is a problem that is solved via policy. Policy is a relatively ineffectual medium. It does very little on its own. Policy doesn't drive off POV pushers - communities of editors - often very localized ones - do. Policy ostensibly guides them in how they do this, but as often as not it doesn't - just like most articles aren't actually written by consulting WP:V, WP:NOR, and WP:NPOV, but are written by a community of editors with a decent idea of what a good article should look like.
Our policies are almost, but not entirely incidental to the actual work of improving the encyclopedia - they're certainly a second line of defense, consulted when the first line of defense - social control
- fails.
In other words, what we need is not better policy, but rather better users who rely on thought and judgment that is informed by principles, not on rigid policy.
You know that policy has gone too far when the good guys are a bigger problem than the bad guys.
Ec
"Social control" can also be termed "mob rule". That term has previously been used to describe Wikipedia by outside sources.
Noble Story
Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote: On May 26, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Todd Allen wrote:
Our policies are almost, but not entirely incidental to the actual work of improving the encyclopedia - they're certainly a second line of defense, consulted when the first line of defense - social control - fails.
In other words, what we need is not better policy, but rather better users who rely on thought and judgment that is informed by principles, not on rigid policy.
-Phil
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On May 27, 2008, at 6:43 AM, Mark Nilrad wrote:
"Social control" can also be termed "mob rule". That term has previously been used to describe Wikipedia by outside sources.
Yes, and it's a fair accusation. But it's also necessarily going to be the case on a project as large as Wikipedia.
The problem should be understood as a problem of social engineering - how do we train our mobs to behave usefully?
Policy should be understood as the increasingly failed attempt to train our mobs via rigid control and stark delineation of what they can and can't do. It hasn't worked.
But this remains an engineering problem - perhaps, if I can be forgiven for using the term, the fundamental engineering problem of Web 2.0 - how does one engineer a community to behave in particular ways?
-Phil
At 10:16 PM 5/25/2008, Steve Summit wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative... So while there are good reasons for our tendency towards firmer and firmer policy... it's a trend which has to be intelligently resisted[.]
One huge thing to watch out for is when our policies end up hurting our responsible contributors more than the vandals and trolls they're supposed to protect us from. If every new contributor is guilty until proven innocent of being a vandal, POV warrior, linkspammer, copyright violator, or non-notable vanity article pusher, we're going to turn off and drive away a lot of new contributors.
More accurately, we've been driving such away for a few years now. I was not active enough to really see what was going on back in 05 and 06, and I only started up serious editing, getting involved in WP process, etc., in Sept. 07, and it had gotten pretty bad by then. My friend, now blocked, started up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia_Reform to look at what has been happening. That needs more attention. There are plenty of long-time editors who have left, often with bitter goodbye messages. But we also need to look at what happens in a more invisible way, to experts and writers who simply take the promise at face value: the sum of all human knowledge, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. They assume, as we normally do in the marketplace, that the fine print won't take away what the headline promises. And we could make that promise come true. Easily. No cost. And end up with a better encyclopedia, better organized, more reliable, all of that. There were already ways in existence that only take different approaches, not different software, but flagged revisions is a powerful new tool that would help. The true encyclopedic question, classically, was never "delete" or "keep," but, "where do we file this?" "Delete or keep" wasn't a knowledge question (knowledge never deletes, though it may categorize in a file of such low notability that it might get forgotten), it was a publication space question, made by editors, and writers weren't asked to write articles to be excluded.
The public, with wikipedia, is asked to contribute from their knowledge. Presumably they are human, and what they know is thus part of "all human knowledge." "Sum" has two meanings, arguably, "totality" and "summary," but, as used in our slogan, any court in a Consumer Fraud action (at least in Arizona, where I had to deal with the state on an issue once) would decide, I'm sure, that it meant, in this context, totality.
So we are deceiving people when we allow good-faith contributions to be simply deleted. But this isn't limited to AfD process. Our article process grew like Topsy, and, particularly where there is some controversy, the bulk of contributions, even if accurate and sourced, get overwritten with other contributions, instead of a full exploration of the topic being built. (This would *not* be on the top layer, it's not what you'd see when simply looking up a topic, but, when you want more detail, and especially when you want to edit an article, you'd have it at your fingertips.)
Real knowledge is built through accumulation and categorization. The category "notable" doesn't exist in real knowledge, as a practical matter, because in order to categorize something as non-notable, you have to notice it! "Notable" is a relationship between a person or process and topics of knowledge, it is not intrinsic to the topics; hence notability debates become a matter of whose opinion is better. Sure, we can set "objective" standards, but they are arbitrary underneath. (They can be very specific, so many peer-reviewed articles, so many Google hits, appearance in some specific reference, etc., so they can be "objectively applied," but I'm referring to the original standard. It is, helplessly, elitist in some form or other. What is important to "us" is more notable than what is important to "you." What is important to people with college degrees is more important than what is important to people without them. What is important to the de-facto dominant culture on Wikipedia is more important than what is important to someone from a different culture (that happens to speak English, and such people are all over the world now, plus fans are humans too, and "fancruft" is an aspect of human knowledge.)
Now, notability decisions still need to be made, because importance to a topic, and importance of the topic itself, is part of the categorization process. We don't put trivia in the top layer of a categorized encyclopedia, unless some decision is made that a piece of trivia is really so interesting that it belongs at the top for reasons of making articles attractive and fascinating as well as accurate.
Underneath all this is a basic problem that Wikipedia never faced and resolved. And I'll make that a topic of its own mail. This is already too long for this list (and *that* is, again, part of the problem!)
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative writer/editors who could really make our content sing -- and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
Here's another thing to watch out for: nowhere is it written that Wikipedia must be as stodgy and officious as a Real Encyclopedia. Yet the way some people denounce and carry on about anything that smells remotely like fun, you'd think this was up there as a fourth pillar of the triangle.
On the contrary, it is Okay to Have Fun. It's okay for us as editors, and it's okay for our readers, too. In fact, it's more than okay, it's downright better, if it motivates us as editors, and if it makes our product easier to read and more enjoyable for our readers.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't have Trivia sections -- isn't that a good enough reason for us *to* have them? :-)
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative writer/editors who could really make our content sing -- and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
Here's another thing to watch out for: nowhere is it written that Wikipedia must be as stodgy and officious as a Real Encyclopedia. Yet the way some people denounce and carry on about anything that smells remotely like fun, you'd think this was up there as a fourth pillar of the triangle.
One should always have fun at work, it's what makes the job livable! Certainly volunteer work should be no exception.
On the contrary, it is Okay to Have Fun. It's okay for us as editors, and it's okay for our readers, too. In fact, it's more than okay, it's downright better, if it motivates us as editors, and if it makes our product easier to read and more enjoyable for our readers.
It certainly is okay for us, as editors, to have a bit of fun. I've wished more than once I could just sit down and have a beer with someone who disagrees with me, and I'm sure we'd see our positions are near the same. It is also alright to have "entertaining" articles, like [[Ima Hogg]], so long as they are still presented factually and neutrally, and if of acceptable quality, to have these on the Main Page on April Fool's.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't have Trivia sections -- isn't that a good enough reason for us *to* have them? :-)
But you were doing so WELL up to this point! :) There are plenty of reasons not to have trivia sections. "Britannica doesn't have them" and "We should not have fun" are certainly at the bottom of that list. They are an attractive nuisance, encouraging the writing of unsourced garbage (99% of trivia sections I've found are entirely unsourced). They are poor for flow and organization. And realistically, if a fact is significant enough to go in the article, well then, it is significant enough to go -in the article-. If a factoid is so insignificant that it can't even be integrated into the prose, it should stay out altogether. And if it can be integrated into the prose, well then, why aren't we doing that rather than dumping it in a random junkpile? The same for "In popular culture"-let's leave "Hehheh it got mentioned 24 times on Family Guy" to IMDB.
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One can have fun without trivia sections, surely?
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I wrote:
Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well: though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees, it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative writer/editors who could really make our content sing -- and in more areas than just a more-readable writing style.
Here's another thing to watch out for: nowhere is it written that Wikipedia must be as stodgy and officious as a Real Encyclopedia. Yet the way some people denounce and carry on about anything that smells remotely like fun, you'd think this was up there as a fourth pillar of the triangle.
One should always have fun at work, it's what makes the job livable! Certainly volunteer work should be no exception.
On the contrary, it is Okay to Have Fun. It's okay for us as editors, and it's okay for our readers, too. In fact, it's more than okay, it's downright better, if it motivates us as editors, and if it makes our product easier to read and more enjoyable for our readers.
It certainly is okay for us, as editors, to have a bit of fun. I've wished more than once I could just sit down and have a beer with someone who disagrees with me, and I'm sure we'd see our positions are near the same. It is also alright to have "entertaining" articles, like [[Ima Hogg]], so long as they are still presented factually and neutrally, and if of acceptable quality, to have these on the Main Page on April Fool's.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica doesn't have Trivia sections -- isn't that a good enough reason for us *to* have them? :-)
But you were doing so WELL up to this point! :) There are plenty of reasons not to have trivia sections. "Britannica doesn't have them" and "We should not have fun" are certainly at the bottom of that list. They are an attractive nuisance, encouraging the writing of unsourced garbage (99% of trivia sections I've found are entirely unsourced). They are poor for flow and organization. And realistically, if a fact is significant enough to go in the article, well then, it is significant enough to go -in the article-. If a factoid is so insignificant that it can't even be integrated into the prose, it should stay out altogether. And if it can be integrated into the prose, well then, why aren't we doing that rather than dumping it in a random junkpile? The same for "In popular culture"-let's leave "Hehheh it got mentioned 24 times on Family Guy" to IMDB.
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-- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
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