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

[George Herbert]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:09 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/23/08, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> [...]
>>  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.
>
> Copy editing isn't that easy, Charles. I know we have a few editors
> who make it look easy, but that's because they're very good at it. For
> most of us, it can be a struggle.

And I think that people who have the background (professional or
educational) to copyedit aren't the ones most attracted as
contributors.  And there's a huge ramp-up curve in learning all the
other local style guide stuff, which is organized around content not
style.

We're not copyeditor friendly.

That said, a few loud, outgoing copyeditors wandering randomly around
dropping gems of rewrites here and there might have a wonderful
effect.  If anyone knows such people, either in the project or
outside, encouraging them to work on that point would be a very useful
thing.  Getting past the current copyeditor unfriendliness would be a
great long term improvement.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com