[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

[Delirium]

Matthew Brown wrote:
> What is lacking, IMO, are good articles on a lot of general but
> non-contentious topics.  It's a lot easier to write an article on a
> very specialised topic than a general one.  The specialized topic is
> likely to be well-bounded and of obvious and simple scope.  Sources
> for such articles are generally easier to find (because they are so
> specific, they're easy to search for) and not contentious.  It's a lot
> harder to find authoritative sources for general information,
> ironically, even though it's easy to find non-authoritative ones.
>   

Partly I think it's because this is a greater-than-Wikipedia problem. 
We're good at summarizing consensus knowledge, but "how to best provide 
a general overview of a field" is frequently something about which no 
consensus exists outside Wikipedia. There are usually a few major 
textbooks, survey articles, etc. (sometimes many more than a few), often 
with significantly different approaches and decisions about what should 
be covered at the top-level and how. I know in my field the most popular 
textbook is also one of the most resented and criticized!

In more specific articles we deal with this by basically summarizing all 
the major views/approaches/etc., but doing that in a top-level article 
defeats the purpose of making it a readable introduction. In a handful 
of cases we can split them into separate articles, like "the [x school] 
view on [y]", which is a little easier to find a consensus about.

-Mark