[Foundation-l] A day to celebrate, Wikipedia on the cover of the Stern magazine, in a comparison with Brockhaus (and guess who "won"...)

Sat Dec 8 11:09:33 UTC 2007

2007/12/5, geni <geniice at gmail.com>:

> Which tends to be getting worse. Partly because unless a writer is
> exceptionally good readability will tend to an extent conflict with
> correctness.

I think there are other reasons as well:
* Corroborative editing, like we do on Wikipedia, works well to
collect various aspects of a subject, but it also means that any
structure in an article as a whole will degenerate over time, which
strongly decreases readability
* For correctness one needs to know about the subject and have good
sources, for readability one needs to be a good writer. 'Professional'
encyclopedias can choose their writers to be both knowledgeable and
good writers (although they don't always do so). We have to do with
the volunteers we have. Some of them are good writers, some are not.
On the other hand, almost all of them have some subject they know much
about, and often tend to work on these subjects. Thus, using
volunteers, correctedness can still be achieved, but readability is a
hit-or-miss.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels