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

[Ray Saintonge]

Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:05 AM, 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?
>>     
> 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.
>
> His example contrasts
>
> "Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of
> tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of
> Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a
> previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off Ahab's
> leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale."
>
> with
>
> "As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab
> envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which
> governs man thoughtlessly..."  "a crazed captain whose one thought is
> the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him..." "Ahab's
> monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as
> the symbol of all the evil of the universe."
>
> The latter fragments are certainly more interesting. But do you know
> what I feel instinctively as I read the latter? I feel alarm bells
> going off. Alarm bells which have names like NOR, NPOV, TONE,
> WP:PEACOCK, and so on. I can in my mind's eye see an editor adding a
> comment "Monomania is a specific psychological term; do we have a cite
> for applying it to Ahab or is this just a rhetorical flourish that
> should be removed per...?"
>
> Yes, perhaps a particularly assiduous editor could track down apt
> citations (perhaps 3 or 4 cites could adequately armor the first
> quote, at least). But our current system is simply constructed so that
> one can only write such an article if one is willing to go to
> superhuman lengths in sourcing and defending it, or if one is willing
> to quite simply ignore policy and guideline in the interests of great
> prose and suffer the consequent assaults (such people seem to have a
> tendency to burn out. I have no idea why).
>
> FAs can perhaps take the former route, but the rest of us? I am
> content to write articles whose prose is bland mediocrity but which I
> will not die the death of a thousand nights in the library, or of a
> thousand cuts.

Different subject areas require different approaches to editing, and 
different styles.  The detached style of a technical article about 
advanced mathematics may be suitable for that subject, but it turns 
people away from reading the great works of literature. Describing a 
metaphor is on a par with trying to explain a joke to the one person in 
the room who doesn't understand it.

Ec