Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm, something that strikes me looking at those results is that on several categories Wikipedia seems to do worse on the "easy" topics but better on the "hard" ones. I don't know if I'm just imagining it, and it could just be a coincidence, but that seems like an interesting finding (were there any graphs in the article? one could probably construct a graph that demonstrated patterns like that).
This is sadly true and I'm part of the problem since I love to write about specific topics concerning geology yet have never added much to core geology-related articles such as [[geology]] or [[mineralogy]]. This also seems to be true for articles about specific species (we have many well-developed ones) vs articles about core biology-related topics (not many well-developed ones).
I've experienced that too - one of the things I'm planning to do on my next library sojourn to look at present-day encyclopedias' main articles on computer science and other of my areas, and draw up little outlines showing scope and size of their parts, as a way of learning by example about how to organize them. Our specific topics have plenty of raw material, so I think main article work is more about judicious wordsmithing than anything else.
Stan