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

[George Herbert]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Seconded.

People who know how to write will look at typical articles as a
morass.  I often have that reaction.  Most Wikipedians are fact,
detail, and policy oriented rather than working to make the literature
aspect as compelling as possible.

Of our potential failings, I would rate this as somewhat less
important than factual errors, lack of sufficient facts or details,
lack of images, or policy violations such as OR in an article or NPOV
failures.  Our value as an encyclopedia is lessened if people don't
like reading articles.

The single factor most affecting how far people read, once you find
the page and assuming at least minimally competent writing, is whether
there are images on the article.  Prose quality comes in a moderate
second to that.