On 1/25/07, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Thursday, January 25, 2007, 10:21:27 PM, George wrote:
Hoping that your mind won't blow, here's a very well-sourced example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_general_election%2C_1946
That's a terrible article. It's not an encyclopedia article, it's a scholarly paper on the topic.
It's not a bad scholarly paper, on first look, but it's not a good encyclopedia article.
Do you have any reasons you think so? I don't think there's any policy claiming that Wikipedia articles should be dumbed down. For that, there's simple English Wikipedia. :-)
The point of the encyclopedia is to make an overview available and accessible to non-experts.
The intro is fine, but there's an excess of detail that follows, and the citations are overwhelming for normal readers.
I don't say that because I object personally ... in terms of quality level and citations and such, it is good, the sort of work I'd expect from grad students or academics doing an overview, including what looks like good citations... It's not my topic area of interest, but it's a good article from that perspective.
My concern is that "the average reader" will be overwhelmed by it. There's a reason that there's a spectrum of writing, from informal blogs, to popular magazines and newspapers, more formal magazines, expert magazines, professional journals, and then things like PhD thesies and the like. Most normal people stop reading a paragraph or less into the type of article that you see in professional journals. The style and info density is not something they want to deal with. Compare and contrast "Popular Science", "Scientific American" and "Nature" (or worse, a less-overview specialist journal in any field).
Somewhere between PopSci and Scientific American tends to be at what I suspect "the right level" is for Wikipedia, though the articles in the latter are generally longer than ours should be.
This will vary wildly from field to field and topic to topic. All generalizations are false. 8-)