[WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

Fri Oct 7 12:25:32 UTC 2005

On 10/7/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> God help the person who tries
> to get [[Earth]] past the present FAC process and keep it under 200KB.
>

"Mostly harmless."

And for my next trick...

Seriously, though, I notice that Earth is currently only 32kb in length. If
the FAC process is so bad that it is likely to produce needlessly bulky
articles, maybe we should devise some kind of anti-FAC--perhaps something
that would take FAC votes and apply them in reverse.

As an off-the-cuff critique, I'd say that the intro contains too much
obscure astronomical stuff and absolutely nothing about earth in art and
culture, nothing about human population, and somehow omits the significant
facts that it's mostly covered with liquid water, has a nitrogen atmosphere
with 20% oxygen, and is home to countless trillions of protista.

Earth is said to be called "Terra" (actually you only see this in SF
stories) and we're treated to the obscure "Tellus", while the common
classical Greek name for earth, Ge, is nowhere to be seen in the article
(though oddly enough the less common variant, Gaia, is).

The writing style is the usual mediocre wiki-standard ("the third-closest
planet to the sun" instead of the idiomatic "third planet from the sun".)
Someone will say "sofixit". No thanks. Any obscure merkin academic
waffle-monger can have wikipedians haring off to fix articles left right and
center, but I instead have some ambitions that the tenor of my critiques may
influence some of them to think instead about their writing style.
 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun>