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

[Delirium]

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.
I think this is partly because we're undertaking a more ambitious task. 
With our hierarchical organization (the "Main article: ..." thing) we're 
ideally creating articles that can be read at any desired level of 
detail, from the capsule summary to the several-page overview to the 
nearly-book-length treatment.

If you look outside Wikipedia for, say, biographies of famous people, 
you can find good biographies of almost any length you care to look for, 
from a capsule one-page summary to a multi-volume set of books. We want 
to incorporate a good portion of that range---maybe excluding the 
multi-volume tomes, but including enough detail so that the interested 
reader can read more than just a few pages on the subject. That's a bit 
harder than just writing a single relatively short article on the subject.

-Mark