[WikiEN-l] poor writing skills of some non-english speaking wiki contributors

[james duffy]

>Cprompt wrote
>The problem is that what is proper English can be very subjective,

Starting a sentence with a capital letter isn't. Finishing with a full stop 
is sort of seen as obligatory, while people do tend to think that verbs are 
a good idea. Yet I was told yesterday of an article found by a contributor 
that used commas for full stops, full stops for commas and didn't use a 
single capital letter. Oh and wrote an entire history article in the present 
tense. Those things aren't "very subjective", they are elementary. The 
article, BTW was very good. All it needed was correction. But apparently 
because it was on an obscure historical fact it never was looked at and 
remained un-proofed for months. The person who found it didn't have time to 
fix it, forgot about it then weeks later remembered it. It would have been 
handier if, had they no time themselves, they could have simply put it on a 
special list where whomever had the time could have fixed it. That way, an 
article with good content would have become a good article to read, doing 
justice to the good work done by someone who simply was not fluent in 
english.

>and that pretty much all of the pages on Wikipedia are considered to be 
>drafts, subject to later revision.

We may see them as such, but a user who knows nothing of wikipedia and finds 
an article through google will presume it is /the/ final text in an 
encyclopædia, not some draft.

>Google searches might reveal a poorly-written article, but it could also 
>reveal one of those "YEAY JOSH IS GAY" pages. We should just keep our own 
>standards up and hope that others realize that the nature of Wikipedia is 
>that we'll have some Brilliant Prose, and some articles that are 
>sub-Brilliant Prose.

I am not criticising sub-Brilliant Prose. I am pointing out that we /do/ 
have articles that aren't prose at all. There are users who want to 
contribute but need more help than most in terms of being able to express 
their knowledge. We need a system that can help them express their knowledge 
where they themselves lack the linguistic skills to do so. (I know if I was 
contributing to French wiki I would be out of my depth linguistically. I 
would welcome being able to put my French article onto a special page with 
the message - this may need to be proofread because my french may not be 
100% accurate.)

JT

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