[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?
Thomas Dalton
thomas.dalton at gmail.com
Fri May 23 14:22:33 UTC 2008
> 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.
You can have a neutral article that reads better than many of ours,
though. Certainly we don't want to be using all kinds of fancy
literary devices - we want to just state the facts, but we can do that
without ending up with a sequence of disconnect sentences. A lot of
the problems come from the fact that articles are often written one
sentence at a time (after the initial creation, at least) - those
sentences need to be better integrated.
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