[WikiEN-l] Print edition: unevenness of coverage

[Daniel P.B.Smith]

I believe the print edition will indeed require "a ton of editing." But 
there is a far more serious issue I believe is lurking in the wings: 
unevenness of coverage.

For example, take a look at the article on "medicine." On close 
inspection, it is mainly an organization scheme with a list of links, 
which in many cases are themselves are lists of links, and so forth. 
Within this tree, quite a lot of the entries are unlinked. In the print 
edition, can we leave out an article on "medicine?" Can the article on 
medicine refer to "thoracic surgery" when there's no article on 
thoracic surgery? Is it acceptable to have articles on general surgery, 
neurosurgery, otolaryngology, orthopedic surgery, poastic surgery, and 
urology, but not on cardiovascular surgery, maxillofacial surgery, 
pedicatric surgery, thoracic surgery, and vascular surgery?

Who's going to write all the missing articles?

A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are 
interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable 
importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ 
widely. This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become 
much more apparent in a print edition.

Actually, the medicine example isn't a good one because most of the 
articles that _are_ there--that is, specifically those that are linked 
to by the Medicine page or the tree of links it points to--are not very 
good. Which, of course, raises another question...

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at world.std.com alternate: 
dpbsmith at alum.mit.edu
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
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