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

[Charles Matthews]

SlimVirgin wrote:
> It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to
> lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of
> an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is
> missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the
> structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone
> on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task,
> especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused
> of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
>   
Most of our articles are neither controversial, nor edited by many 
people, of course. There isn't much mileage in making points about the 
style of the most controversial 20,000 articles - if we had the other 
99% under control we'd be doing a good job.

I'm a bit alarmed about the references in this thread to newspaper 
journalism techniques. Do recall, everyone, that such articles are 
recycled, in most cases in 24 hours.

We should concentrate, mainly, on having articles well organised, so 
that people can find the information they want. Once that's done, 
improving readability is an essentially trivial copy-editing function. 
Indeed, not enough of that goes on. But the "Moby Dick" example 
originally posted in the thread doesn't prove to me that the article in 
question was failing to inform (nor even that the critic had taken the 
point on NOR).

Charles