[WikiEN-l] While we're at it, NOR line-by-line

[Relata Refero]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Yes - it's worth noting that many of the research practices espoused
> by Wikipedia on WP:V and WP:NOR are the sorts of things that are
> taught in high school, where the "every statement that has ever been
> thought by anybody other than you has to be precisely sourced" thing
> is taught.
>
> It is not taught (at least by any remotely intelligent teacher, which,
> admittedly, is far from coextensive with the set of high school
> teachers) because it is true or good practice - it is taught because
> high school students *honestly do not understand the basic idea of
> citing a source yet*. But what it produces is not good writing - it
> produces writing at a level which can be further improved to good
> writing.
>
> (And notably, high schoolers intuitively grasp that they are not
> engaged in good writing, because the moment they're not being watched
> by a teacher they will revert to more normal writing, which, while
> often not good, at least eliminates some of the artificially imposed
> badness of high school writing).
>
> The problem is that Wikipedia needs to be better than high school
> writing.
> -Phil
>
>
Phil, I hope when you say "writing" you mean something deeper than writing.
Because I am convinced that the only people who care about the quality of
writing on Wikipedia are a subset of those of us who write Wikipedia.
Everyone else comes here for easily accessible and moderately reliable
information, and doesn't care how badly-written it is, as long as its
reasonably accurate and adequately laid-out.

RR