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

[David Gerard]

2008/5/23 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:

> 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.


There's ways to do compact, terse writing well. e.g. The Economist
(without the frequently-on-crack opinionation).


>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.


There is that.


> NPOV and NOR  and citing sources require the text to be the way it is.


I don't think they do, actually. But that's why good writing takes
conscious effort.


> 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.


Again, this is a matter of being aware of good writing as a desirable thing.

The "lots of dangling subclauses and qualifiers" style is endemic, but
just getting all the detail in doesn't make it acceptable quality.

Being accurate is more important than being well-written, but that
doesn't mean being well-written isn't important.


- d.