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

[Sage Ross]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The evolved Wikipedia house style is a grey stodgy morass. Some bits
>> are better written than others, but it's getting noted:
>>
>> http://www.edexcellence.net/flypaper/index.php/2008/05/wikipedia-enabling-the-dumbest-generation/#comment-606
>>
>> (that's a blog post quoting a book that isn't online)
>>
>> How to fix this scalably?
>>
>>
>> - d.
>
> You can't. We (speaking corporately) have specifically designed our
> policies and guidelines so the error the author points out *cannot* be
> remedied without massive massive amounts of work.
>

Here is my favorite/most depressing example of inspired prose losing
out to prosaic phrasing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Noah%27s_Ark/Archive_5#biblical_proportion

That aside, I think one of the comments at the Chronicle of Higher Ed
version of this story (
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=468 ) gets it
right:

"Heck, did they even read Moby Dick before writing their paper on it?
If one's only view of writing is the Wikistyle, then how can one see
that there are better, more creative, more interesting ways to craft a
sentence?"

Bauerlein says: "The concern for bias probably underlies the
neutrality style, but I wish I received a lot more biased,
opinionated, argumentative, judgmental, stylish, and colorful papers."
 But there are many situations where the cut-and-dry approach of
Wikipedia will serve students well.  The world has quite enough people
who take a biased, opinionated, argumentative, judgmental, stylish,
and colorful approach (to writing, to politics, to their jobs, etc.).
Even if English professors aren't pleased with the trend, I think
we'll be better off if the next generation has a higher proportion of
educated people who take the Wikipedia path to writing and argument.
Surely there will still be plenty of clever and opinionated writers to
write novels and waste ink on the New York Times op-ed pages.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)