Daniel Mayer wrote:
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 think this may be because writing those "easy" articles is actually
*harder*, even though they're more common in general encyclopedias. I
can write a pretty good article about any specific topic in computer
science, and many in philosophy, given my background knowledge and a bit
of research. But writing [[computer science]] or [[philosophy]] (or
even a sub-topic, like [[philosophy of mind]] or [[artificial
intelligence]]) is much, much harder.
Fortunately, we're not the only ones who find it so. Our general
articles are lacking compared to other encyclopedias, but none really
have well-respected ones. If you take an article in Britannica on a
general topic, like [[geology]] or [[biology]] or [[computer science]],
and show it to someone in the field, 90% of the time the person is going
to think it's a crappy article that misses the point in some important
way, or leaves out something crucial. Of course, if that person writes
what they think is a better summary (and many do, in the form of
textbooks), generally only some of the field will agree it's a better
summary, and a significant percentage will think *that* description
sucks too. It's very hard to do an NPOV description of such broad
topics that's at the same time readable as an intro...
-Mark