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

[David Gerard]

2008/5/24 SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com>:
> On 5/24/08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than writing
>>  flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new
>>  information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.

> I didn't mean that good prose should never be changed, but it would be
> nice to see it improved. Instead, what happens when you get an article
> to the point where the topic is well-covered and the writing flows
> well is that almost all edits to it after that are a deterioration.
> It's rare that an article continues to get better after being
> featured, for example, but not unusual for it to deteriorate unless
> it's watched closely. When I wrote that people should hesitate to edit
> good prose, I meant precisely that -- not that they shouldn't, but
> that they should ask themselves whether what they want to add or
> remove really does constitute improvement.


I'm speaking more of my own annoyance when I got an article to
featured, it was well-written with good flow, and someone added some
clunky, badly-written sentence that was ... entirely relevant. My
initial urge to remove it as clunky was, IMO, just incorrect.

I don't see a problem with articles going through a cycle of
well-written -> more details -> copyedited -> well-written. Of course,
as Ian points out, domain knowledge is important in the copyeditor!
(Or at least a talk page note "I've copyedited for flow and structure,
please fix any important detail I may have messed up" - an express
statement of non-OWNership.)


- d.