[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[geni]

2008/5/23 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits
> are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
>
> http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-the-dumbest-generation/#comment-606
>
> (that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
>
> How to fix this scalably?
>
>
> - d.


You don't any more than you try and get literary masterpieces out of
scientific papers. Wikipedia aims to provide information in a very
concentrated form thus with the exception of "introduction to ..."
articles wikipedia articles are going to at best look like well strung
together factoids. If you look at the articles wikipedia is being
compared to they are from the 50s and 60s when encyclopedias tended to
argue a point of view.

NPOV and NOR  and citing sources require the text to be the way it is.
On top of that given a choice between being understandable and being
right wikipedians tend to chose being right. This is a natural result
of trying to be comprehensive while a non comprehensive work can skim
over the more complex parts of liquid crystals wikipedia doesn't.

-- 
geni