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

[Risker]

On 26/05/2008, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Indeed in my "day job" as a computer science academic, this sort of
> concern is making copyediting fall out of favor quite rapidly. It's
> mostly been phased out for unrelated reasons (cutting expenses), but the
> few journals that still insist on doing extensive editing for style
> (like anything the IEEE runs) annoy many authors, as we have to keep
> re-reading our own drafts to figure out what they screwed up this time.
> It can even end up in comical exchanges of drafts where the author will
> change something back to what they actually meant to say, the copyeditor
> will change it back to conform to "house style", the author will revert
> the change in the next exchange, etc.


Speaking as someone who does do a fair amount of copy-editing, I have to say
that there is a qualitative difference between editing a decently
written article with a primary editor and good referencing, and the
overwhelming majority of articles that are poorly referenced hodge-podges of
whatever information different drive-by editors happened to insert.  I tend
to work on the decent articles at the invitation of the primary editor, and
when doing so will read whatever online references are available and will
ask a lot of questions (talk page or FAC/GA/peer review page) to help the
editor clarify what was meant. Even in relatively well-written articles, I
have found many instances where the reference sources don't match up with
the material in the article that they are intended to provide references
for. In "average" articles, usually a third of the references fail to match
the statement they're being used to reference.  I've also seen some
relatively worrisome "ownership" of poorly sourced, ungrammatical articles
that are written so poorly as to be confusing, contradictory, or nearly
unreadable - to the point where correction of a typo or spelling error leads
to instant reversion or an inquiry on a talk page leads to beratement of the
questioner.  So - is the problem the copy editor not understanding, or is
the problem the quality of the work in the first place?

Risker