[WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia

Mon Oct 24 15:31:59 UTC 2005

Delirium wrote:
>Tony Sidaway wrote:

>>A whole section on the spelling of the word "encyclopedia"?   This is
>>one of the problems that are endemic to wikis.  Relatively trivial
>>topics become extended into a pseudo-debate.

>I agree to some extent, but only in that it's a problem of organization
>and focus.  I think this sort of information is useful to have, just not
>useful to have highlighted in prominent places.  I've taken the liberty
>of moving the "debate about how this article should be spelled" sections
>out of the intro of a few articles to a #Name section near the end,
>which I think works fine.  There's certainly no reason to remove
>information that might be of interest to someone, so long as it's
>verifiable and not unduly getting in the way of other information.

I agree. Excellence in prose is important, but it's secondary (though
a close second) to good information. I think that if I look something
up and have  the choice between information presented in excellent
prose and more complete and accurate information presented in middling
prose, I'll find the latter much more useful. Comprehensiveness and
accuracy is more important than excellent prose, given a choice.
(Though both are much better.) Does anyone disagree?

(This is something to watch out for when you're overly proud of your
writing - if someone adds new information to the article in clunky,
horrible prose, you have to resist the urge to remove the blemish!)

- d.