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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 can't. We (speaking corporately) have specifically designed our
policies and guidelines so the error the author points out *cannot* be
remedied without massive massive amounts of work.

His example contrasts

"Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of
tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of
Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a
previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off Ahab's
leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."

with

"As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab
envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which
governs man thoughtlessly..."  "a crazed captain whose one thought is
the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's
monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as
the symbol of all the evil of the universe."

The latter fragments are certainly more interesting. But do you know
what I feel instinctively as I read the latter? I feel alarm bells
going off. Alarm bells which have names like NOR, NPOV, TONE,
WP:PEACOCK, and so on. I can in my mind's eye see an editor adding a
comment "Monomania is a specific psychological term; do we have a cite
for applying it to Ahab or is this just a rhetorical flourish that
should be removed per...?"

Yes, perhaps a particularly assiduous editor could track down apt
citations (perhaps 3 or 4 cites could adequately armor the first
quote, at least). But our current system is simply constructed so that
one can only write such an article if one is willing to go to
superhuman lengths in sourcing and defending it, or if one is willing
to quite simply ignore policy and guideline in the interests of great
prose and suffer the consequent assaults (such people seem to have a
tendency to burn out. I have no idea why).

FAs can perhaps take the former route, but the rest of us? I am
content to write articles whose prose is bland mediocrity but which I
will not die the death of a thousand nights in the library, or of a
thousand cuts.

--
gwern