Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia
c't, the popular german magazine for computer engineering, just released a study they conducted of the three major digital encyclopedias in germany -- Brockhaus, Encarta, and (most recently) Wikipedia. They tested the encyclopedias on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content.
The content test was the most elaborate : first they divided content in three broad fields, Science, Society, and Culture. They further subdivided these into 22 total subject areas, and within each subject selected an easy, a moderate, and a difficult topic. They then searched for the best matching article (and supplementary content) in the encyclopedia.
Finally, they brought in experts in each broad field who rated the articles from 1 to 5, based on technical correctness and completeness of the texts, and on their comprehensibility. Once this was finished, the results were totalled at each level of conceptual difficulty, within each broad field, and across all 66 topics.
The net result: Wikipedia ran away with the top prize, a comfortable distance ahead of its stately predecessors. "Brockhaus Premium surpassed the competition from Redmond," the review reported, "but must however concede defeat to Wikipedia".
Happily, the full breakdown of the experts' ratings were published along with the article, so that each encyclopedia may benefit from the spot check.
A full translation will be available on meta presently : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia vs Brockhaus and Encarta
Grab a copy of the original at your local international-pubs shop, if you can.
Encyclopedias: Wikipedia vs. Brockhaus and Encarta (pg. 132)
Sj-
Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia
This is great and should help to combat some of the FUD about Wikipedia and wikis in general. Now imagine the result when we have a solid community-based peer review mechanism for every article, where every page is evaluated in different categories - accuracy, copyright status, comprehensiveness, images, neutrality, and so on - and where we can make a guarantee that it has passed all these criteria, and that every factual claim in the article has a source. Then newspapers, magazines, academics and anyone else can cite a specific certified version of a Wikipedia article and be sure that it's 1) accurate, 2) not a redirect to goatse.cx.
Let's not get cocky and keep that goal in mind. The road to credibility is long and requires constant innovation. The next review might very well include an article on [[Wikipedia:Cleanup]] or in [[Category:NPOV disputes]]. Unless we can then say, "this is the unstable version - check the stable one, which already has 10,000 articles", we're on the defensive again.
Regards,
Erik
On 02 Oct 2004 11:04:00 +0200, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
This is great and should help to combat some of the FUD about Wikipedia
< and wikis in general. Now imagine the result when ... newspapers, magazines,
academics and anyone else can cite a specific certified version of a Wikipedia article and be sure that it's 1) accurate, 2) not a redirect to goatse.cx.
For starters, we need a permanent link to the current revision.
Let's not get cocky and keep that goal in mind. The road to credibility is long and requires constant innovation. The next review might very well
Quite right. Both innovation and communication about what works and what doesn't. en: could learn something from the de: and zh: quality offensives, for instance... and everyone could learn from the cleanup processes involved in preparing snapshots for our distribution partners.
include an article on [[Wikipedia:Cleanup]] or in [[Category:NPOV disputes]]. Unless we can then say, "this is the unstable version - check the stable one, which already has 10,000 articles", we're on the defensive
Until we can actually provide a view of Wikipedia which never shows a link to an unstable or unedited page, we will be on the defensive about certain things. It is natural to desire a site that you can visit, or take your children to, without worrying that they will randomly end up on a talk page full of curse words and vitriol.
Wikipedia is still lacking in a great many departments; we have little reason to be cocky. c't may have been nice to Wikipedia because they are a tech mag and we were the underdog, but once we are actually seen as comparable to traditional encyclopedias, there will be ten times as many writers and researchers eager to tarnish our image.
By then we should have better tools for community review, better browsing options for readers, and support from widely respected groups in research and academia.
+sj+
Waou.
Could someone translate this properly please ?
Is it german language comparison or english one ?
What does c't mean ?
Anthere
Sj a écrit:
Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia
c't, the popular german magazine for computer engineering, just released a study they conducted of the three major digital encyclopedias in germany -- Brockhaus, Encarta, and (most recently) Wikipedia. They tested the encyclopedias on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content.
The content test was the most elaborate : first they divided content in three broad fields, Science, Society, and Culture. They further subdivided these into 22 total subject areas, and within each subject selected an easy, a moderate, and a difficult topic. They then searched for the best matching article (and supplementary content) in the encyclopedia.
Finally, they brought in experts in each broad field who rated the articles from 1 to 5, based on technical correctness and completeness of the texts, and on their comprehensibility. Once this was finished, the results were totalled at each level of conceptual difficulty, within each broad field, and across all 66 topics.
The net result: Wikipedia ran away with the top prize, a comfortable distance ahead of its stately predecessors. "Brockhaus Premium surpassed the competition from Redmond," the review reported, "but must however concede defeat to Wikipedia".
Happily, the full breakdown of the experts' ratings were published along with the article, so that each encyclopedia may benefit from the spot check.
A full translation will be available on meta presently : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia vs Brockhaus and Encarta
Grab a copy of the original at your local international-pubs shop, if you can.
Encyclopedias: Wikipedia vs. Brockhaus and Encarta (pg. 132)
On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 15:23:17 +0200, Anthere wrote:
Is it german language comparison or english one ?
German of course.
What does c't mean ?
The complete title is "c't Magazin für Computer Technik" What c and t mean should be obvious now ;-) It's not the first time they mention Wikipedia in an article, e.g. they already had an article about online- encyclopaedias AFAIR two years ago.
Regards, Lothar
oh, I read elsewhere it was german to german. Why did you sent it to this ml Sj ?
Sj a écrit:
Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia
c't, the popular german magazine for computer engineering, just released a study they conducted of the three major digital encyclopedias in germany -- Brockhaus, Encarta, and (most recently) Wikipedia. They tested the encyclopedias on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content.
The content test was the most elaborate : first they divided content in three broad fields, Science, Society, and Culture. They further subdivided these into 22 total subject areas, and within each subject selected an easy, a moderate, and a difficult topic. They then searched for the best matching article (and supplementary content) in the encyclopedia.
Finally, they brought in experts in each broad field who rated the articles from 1 to 5, based on technical correctness and completeness of the texts, and on their comprehensibility. Once this was finished, the results were totalled at each level of conceptual difficulty, within each broad field, and across all 66 topics.
The net result: Wikipedia ran away with the top prize, a comfortable distance ahead of its stately predecessors. "Brockhaus Premium surpassed the competition from Redmond," the review reported, "but must however concede defeat to Wikipedia".
Happily, the full breakdown of the experts' ratings were published along with the article, so that each encyclopedia may benefit from the spot check.
A full translation will be available on meta presently : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia vs Brockhaus and Encarta
Grab a copy of the original at your local international-pubs shop, if you can.
Encyclopedias: Wikipedia vs. Brockhaus and Encarta (pg. 132)
On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 15:39:58 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
oh, I read elsewhere it was german to german. Why did you sent it to this ml Sj ?
Yes, just german to german. Perhaps it will inspire other researchers to do serious comparisons in other languages as well. (and I meant to send it to wikipedia, wikien was an accident). --sj
Grab a copy of the original at your local international-pubs shop, if you can.
Encyclopedias: Wikipedia vs. Brockhaus and Encarta (pg. 132)
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 01:46:25 -0400 Sj 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
Brockhaus "must concede defeat" to Wikipedia
c't, the popular german magazine for computer engineering, just released a study they conducted of the three major digital encyclopedias in germany -- Brockhaus, Encarta, and (most recently) Wikipedia. They tested the encyclopedias on breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, ease of searching, and quality of multimedia content.
The content test was the most elaborate : first they divided content in three broad fields, Science, Society, and Culture. They further subdivided these into 22 total subject areas, and within each subject selected an easy, a moderate, and a difficult topic. They then searched for the best matching article (and supplementary content) in the encyclopedia.
Finally, they brought in experts in each broad field who rated the articles from 1 to 5, based on technical correctness and completeness of the texts, and on their comprehensibility. Once this was finished, the results were totalled at each level of conceptual difficulty, within each broad field, and across all 66 topics.
I'd be interested to see this list of 66 topics and what scores the three candidates got. Also - did they use the German or the English Wikipedia?
Andre Engels
On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 20:41:12 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
I'd be interested to see this list of 66 topics and what scores the three candidates got. Also - did they use the German or the English Wikipedia?
German Wikipedia as already said.
Here's the list (replicated by hand). The words are kept in German. You should switch to a non-proportional font.
The first number in the table is the number of characters, the second number the qualitiy (1 is not good, 5 is best, 0 means not existant).
EP: Encarta Pro BH: Brockhaus WP: Wikipedia
========================================================== Scientific area ==========================================================
Philosophy Sprachspiele (easy) EP 4004/3 BH 10831/4 WP 1198/3
kathegorischer Imperativ (medium) EP 3929/4 BH 564/3 WP 7415/5
transzendentale Apperzeption (hard) EP 430/2 BH 311/3 WP 5178/3
Mathematics Asymtote (easy) EP 2093/3 BH 796/3 WP 2365/5 Fibonacci-Zahlen (medium) EP 2446/3 BH 2678/4 WP 3510/4 Banachraum (hard) EP 0/3 * here I'm not sure how a non-existant article can be "average" BH 1348/2 WP 6911/5
Physics Trägheitsmoment (easy) EP 127/1 BH 939/4 WP 4996/5 Mößbauer-Effekt (medium) EP 2123/2 BH 2970/4 WP 632/3 Bose-Einstein-Kondensation (hard) EP 2567/3 BH 8072/5 WP 2997/4
Chemistry Massenwirkungsgesetz (easy) EP 2390/4 BH 870/2 WP 1335/5 polyaromatische Kohlenwasserstoffe (medium) EP 3400/5 BH 632/1 WP 457/2 FTIR-Spektroskopie (hard) EP 1131/1 BH 909/3 WP 715/5
Psychology Rorschachtest (easy) EP 847/5 BH 662/5 WP 811/2 Elektrakomplex (medium) EP 2358/4 BH 320/4 WP 790/2 Hawthorne-Effekt (hard) EP 951/4 BH 791/4 WP 1347/4
Biology Gnu (easy) EP 1826/5 BH 661/2 WP 3903/3 genetischer Fingerabdruck (medium) EP 4493/3 BH 13630/5 WP 4837/2 t-RNS (hard) EP 1073/1 BH 886/2 WP 762/4
Computer Science Algorithmus (easy) EP 7476/3 BH 15441/5 WP 15417/5 Kryptographie (medium) EP 20636/4 BH 16072/5 WP 7494/5 Backus-Naur-Form (hard) EP 0/0 BH 4666/5 WP 9350/5
Medicine Hyperventilation (easy) EP 482/4 BH 587/4 WP 2073/5 Fontanelle (medium) EP 348/3 BH 519/2 WP 0/0 * exist now Amygdala (hard) EP 230/3 BH 0/0 WP 376/2
Geography/geology Grundmoräne (easy) EP 618/5 BH 172/3 WP 949/2 Black Somker (medium) EP 3005/5 BH 342/4 WP 2600/5 Epeirophorese (Kontinentalverschiebung) (hard) EP 0/0 * only exists with the german word BH 2325/5 WP 0/5 * number of characters missing, the * article exist
Electronics Dolby Digital (easy) EP 0/0 BH 2025/5 WP 865/4 DVB-T (medium) EP 2130/2 BH 807/3 WP 10824/5 photonische Netze (hard) EP 0/0 BH 3997/4 WP 0/0
========================================================== Social area ==========================================================
Current events Hartz-Reform (easy) * strange definition of easy - even * the bureaucrats don't understand it * completely ;-) EP 3499/1 BH 1837/3 WP 17765/5 Yukos/Jukos (medium) EP 0/0 BH 829/3 WP 5720/5 3. Golfkrieg (insbesondere sunnitisches Dreieck) (hard) EP 70338/5 * wow BH 7766/2 WP 30838/4
World history Boxeraufstand (easy) EP 9134/4 BH 7572/4 WP 9479/2 McCarthy (medium) EP 3192/4 BH 448/2 WP 3124/3 Philipp Scheidemann (Weimarer Republik) (hard) EP 2334/4 BH 2388/5 WP 3390/3
Politics Horst Köhler (easy) EP 3887/4 BH 592/2 WP 9086/5 Vietcong (medium) EP 17103/4 BH 36219/5 WP 24768/2 Plebiszit (hard) EP 7179/5 BH 856/3 WP 7111/3
Economy Bruttosozialprodukt (easy) EP 517/3 BH 5440/5 WP 1208/1 Stagflation (medium) EP 0/0 BH 5380/5 WP 1890/3 Leverage-Effekt (hard) EP 0/0 BH 473/3 WP 744/5
Religion Augustinus (easy) EP 9534/4 BH 12879/5 WP 9002/4 Pantokrator (medium) EP 446/4 BH 251/4 WP 352/4 Monophysiten (hard) EP 1600/4 BH 1438/5 WP 2811/4
Sport Rochade (easy) EP 1108/4 BH 209/2 WP 1635/5 Eishockey: Abseitsregel (medium) EP 397/4 BH 0/0 WP 505/5 Pauschenpferd (hard) EP 0/0 BH 379/5 WP 307/4
Eating/drinking Ouzo (easy) EP 210/4 BH 41/3 WP 612/5 Schupfnudeln (medium) EP 0/0 BH 0/0 WP 704/5 Kapaun (hard) EP 0/0 BH 428/3 WP 1547/5
========================================================== Cultural area ==========================================================
Educating art (?)/architecture Bauhaus (easy) EP 8882/4 BH 3959/3 WP 9191/5 dorisches Kapitell (medium) EP 3257/4 BH 1225/3 WP 263/4 Sfumato (hard) EP 847/3 BH 1344/3 WP 506/3
Literature Alexandriner (easy) EP 1216/5 BH 399/3 WP 745/4 Ulysses (medium) EP 4561/5 BH 817/3 WP 1438/3 Albert Vigoleis Thelen (hard) EP 2748/5 BH 337/3 WP 679/4
Music Maultrommel (easy) EP 960/5 BH 883/4 WP 546/2 wohltemperiertes Klavier (medium) EP 799/3 BH 0/0 WP 3146/4 Quartsext-Akkord (hard) EP 510/3 BH 121/5 WP 470/3
Movie/theatre Brüder Lumière (easy) EP 4294/3 BH 3619/4 WP 0/0 Katharsis (medium) EP 5439/5 BH 5245/2 WP 838/4 Pina Bausch (hard) EP 1359/3 BH 1759/4 WP 1480/3
Myths/sagas/fairy tales Charybdis (easy) EP 2193/4 BH 2136/5 WP 855/2 Leprechaun (medium) EP 0/0 BH 0/0 WP 788/5 Yggdrasil (hard) EP 562/4 BH 768/4 WP 877/3
Now I need a new keyboard.
Regards, Lothar
On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 21:55:29 +0200, Lothar Kimmeringer wikipedia@kimmeringer.de wrote:
Here's the list (replicated by hand). The words are kept in German. You should switch to a non-proportional font.
The first number in the table is the number of characters, the second number the qualitiy (1 is not good, 5 is best, 0 means not existant).
EP: Encarta Pro BH: Brockhaus WP: Wikipedia
<snip; like I'm going to quote that lot back to the list!>
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).
Maybe the tendency to write about interesting subjects leads people to go in depth on subjects that they can become really fascinated by looking into, causing the more advanced topics to get better articles...
From: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com Reply-To: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com, wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100 To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus
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).
Maybe the tendency to write about interesting subjects leads people to go in depth on subjects that they can become really fascinated by looking into, causing the more advanced topics to get better articles...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
This problem plagued the Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition), only the most dedicated volunteers were willing to tackle the dull words like "put" "see" "art" "the" etc, words like "transmogrify" or "fandango" were much easier.
Fred
From: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com Reply-To: Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com, wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100 To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus
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).
Maybe the tendency to write about interesting subjects leads people to go in depth on subjects that they can become really fascinated by looking into, causing the more advanced topics to get better articles...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP] ________
Fred Bauder wrote:
This problem plagued the Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition), only the most dedicated volunteers were willing to tackle the dull words like "put" "see" "art" "the" etc, words like "transmogrify" or "fandango" were much easier.
That's an important and acute observatiuon. I think that the same could be said of Wiktionary. The unusual words are easier because they are so seldom used. If you need to look up a word you are more likely to get it right than if you rely upon your memory.
Still, I would not use the adjective "dull" to refer to the common words. It's their rainbow nature that makes them so difficult.
Ec
On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 23:31:25 +0100 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).
I have done a count for it, and it doesn't seem that Wikipedia scores consistently worse on 'easy' topics. In fact, Wikipedia scores about equally (average about 3.5) on all three difficulties. Brockhaus scores similarly in the easy and hard categories, but worse in the intermediate one. Encarta is equal to Brockhaus in the easy and intermediate categories, but failing clearly on the hard subjects - especially because of 6 zeroes.
Here are the numbers (for each encyclopedia and difficulty category the number of 0/1/2/3/4/5 scores):
EP easy: 1/2/0/5/9/5, total 78 (average 3.5) EP medium: 4/0/2/4/8/4, total 68 (average 3.1) EP hard: 6/2/1/6/4/3, total 50 (average 2.3)
BH easy: 0/0/4/6/6/6, total 84 (average 3.8) BH medium: 4/0/4/5/5/4, total 63 (average 2.9) BH hard: 1/0/3/7/5/6, total 77 (average 3.5)
WP easy: 1/1/5/2/3/10, total 82 (average 3.7) WP medium: 1/0/4/4/6/7, total 79 (average 3.6) WP hard: 2/0/1/7/6/6, total 77 (average 3.5)
Still, there is _something_ true in what you say. Wikipedia's scores on easy subjects seem to be more spread out than on the medium and hard subjects. There are more 5s but also more 2s. On the other hand, Wikipedia's scores on hard subjects show a general content of quality - only one 2 and no 1s among 20 subjects that at least had something.
Maybe it has something to do with the Wiki method of working on on one another's texts. Maybe the more difficult texts are mostly work of one or two people, with the rest only acting as a copy-editor. Apparently those are giving good work. On the easier subjects, 'everyone' thinks he/she can write something, which can have both positive and negative effects. The positive one is the "cooperative editing" effect: The article gets constantly improved and added upon, with many small parts leading to one great article. The negative one is that the first version may have been written by someone who does not know the subject very well, or is not a good writer. This may lead to a poor structure of the text, which is not easily improved upon. Also, when the improvement is better done by rewriting than changing the existing material, those who know more about the subject might go write their own piece on more specialist subjects instead. Perhaps it would be interesting to compare Wikipedia's notes to the edit history of the pages.
Andre Engels
--- 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).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On the plus side, once we get someone to donate the contents of a brief generalist encyclopedia into the GFDL, it will undoubtedly have decent content for core articles, with only brief mentions of specific topics.
--Sj
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 22:35:51 -0700 (PDT), Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com 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).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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
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
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