Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)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