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

[Ray Saintonge]

phoebe ayers wrote:
> 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.
>   
Of course Britannica has the advantage of being able to copy edit after 
the facts are all in, or individual authors have a great deal of 
editorial control over single articles.  If we could ever develop an 
acceptable system for evaluating articles, coherent writing should 
definitely be one of the criteria.
> From personal experience with lots of nonfiction writing, I know that
> copyediting something to condense it -- to say the same thing in fewer
> and better-chosen words -- is quite difficult. But it seems like
> that's another aspect of quality we should really start focussing on
> more. A concise and precise article is a thing of beauty.

Absolutely.  Perhaps one of the most useful lessons from my long-ago 
high-school English classes was précis writing.  In the early days of 
computers when electronic memory was at a premium, programmers learned 
to condense their efforts.  Elegant solutions saved bytes.  Poor writing 
quality may very well be the dark side of "Wikipedia is not paper."

Ec