[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia spanks Encarta, Brockhaus

[Stan Shebs]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Hmm, something that strikes me looking at those results is that on
>>several categories Wikipedia seems to do worse on the "easy" topics
>>but better on the "hard" ones. I don't know if I'm just imagining it,
>>and it could just be a coincidence, but that seems like an interesting
>>finding (were there any graphs in the article? one could probably
>>construct a graph that demonstrated patterns like that).
>>
>
>This is sadly true and I'm part of the problem since I love to write about
>specific topics concerning geology yet have never added much to core
>geology-related articles such as [[geology]] or [[mineralogy]]. This also seems
>to be true for articles about specific species (we have many well-developed
>ones) vs articles about core biology-related topics (not many well-developed
>ones). 
>
I've experienced that too - one of the things I'm planning to do
on my next library sojourn to look at present-day encyclopedias'
main articles on computer science and other of my areas, and draw up
little outlines showing scope and size of their parts, as a way of
learning by example about how to organize them. Our specific topics
have plenty of raw material, so I think main article work is more
about judicious wordsmithing than anything else.

Stan