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 5/23/08, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

George Herbert wrote: 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 23/05/2008, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Couldn't agree more. Regrettably, I don't have a solution, though...

SlimVirgin wrote: 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

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 Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:09 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 3:18 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Ian Woollard wrote: The reverse problem is no less valid. 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. 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 may not have been a simple matter of copyediting The illness would just serve to reduce the time during which the article could be considered a BLP. :-) Ec

Ian Woollard wrote: 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. Please don't take yourself so seriously. Ec

George Herbert wrote: 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

On 5/24/08, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I agree that the headers there are not good, but I'd say the same if I saw them in a newspaper or magazine. 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.

On 5/24/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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

2008/5/24 SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com>om>: 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.

On 5/24/08, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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.

Relata Refero wrote: Material that is not online is just as valuable and important as material that is. If you doubt the material look it up. "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 5/24/08, Relata Refero <refero.relata(a)gmail.com> wrote: Relato, do you have an example of someone making an otherwise good copy edit that distorts what a source said?

On 5/24/08, Relata Refero <refero.relata(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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 5/24/08, Relata Refero <refero.relata(a)gmail.com> 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."

David Gerard wrote: 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

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

Gwern Branwen wrote: 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

I wrote: 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 May 26, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Todd Allen 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. -Phil

"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(a)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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

At 10:16 PM 5/25/2008, Steve Summit wrote: 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!)

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 8:31 PM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: One should always have fun at work, it's what makes the job livable! Certainly volunteer work should be no exception. 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. 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. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.