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

[phoebe ayers]

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

FWIW, I taught a class about Wikipedia last year for freshman
university students [and wrote a paper about it, which I need to get
around to posting], and one of the things we did was compare WP
articles to Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, a la the Nature study.
Their overwhelming consensus was that Wikipedia tended to include more
information (for nearly every topic we looked at), but that Britannica
articles were almost always better written. Partially this was because
Britannica articles tended to be shorter and have the information
better integrated into the body of the article. Almost everyone
complained that Wikipedia articles were often too long to be useful or
readable.