[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

[Chris Lüer]

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>I think you've put your finger on the problem there. The mechanisms by which
>Wikipedia articles improve and degrade are not fully understood, and there
>may well be some complex factors that we don't consider seriously enough.
>
>But we can make a stab at guessing the main factor: entropy. An article that
>is edited frequently by many people will probably degrade quickly. An
>article that doesn't start out with a firm structure will not improve until
>a single person or a tightly organized group imposes such a structure. An
>article that is part of a series of similar articles that are edited by the
>same group of people will tend to have a structure similar to the others in
>the series.

Another factor is the tension between information and style. On the 
one hand we want to have lots of accurate information, on the other 
hand we want to have well-written, readable articles, and those two 
things aren't easy to bring in agreement. If you add facts, you'll 
likely ruin the style, and if you improve the style, you'll likely 
remove information. In popular articles, people care more about 
information, so the style is going to suffer.

What can be done about that? Reorganizing the facts while being 
careful not to remove any. And this is really hard, because you need 
to be familiar with all of the facts before you can successfully 
reorganize them, or you'll distort them.

         Chris
         [[User:Chl]]