Comments on: The Wikipedia style

By: Micah Gummersall

Micah Gummersall — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:28:19 +0000

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By: Does The ‘Neutral Point Of View’ Make Wikipedia Boring?

Does The ‘Neutral Point Of View’ Make Wikipedia Boring? — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:18:42 +0000

[...] encyclopedias tend to be written in a punchier, more engaging style. The JOHO blog responds with a couple of interesting points. It suggests that Wikipedia’s policy of describing things from [...]

By: Does The ‘Neutral Point Of View’ Make Wikipedia Boring? | Technology Update News

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:06:47 +0000

By: Steve Bowbrick

Steve Bowbrick — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:54:44 +0000

I think this is a wider problem. Neutrality, where it is obligatory, is now being policed more strictly than ever. The BBC, for instance, is required by a ROYAL CHARTER to be neutral and is policed by a semi-independent trust plus a Parliamentary select committee, the whole of the pop press and many other bodies, both hostile and friendly, appointed and unappointed. As a result of this over-policing of both tone and content I judge that there’s a marked flattening of tone in much of the corporation’s factual output, a reduced willingness to take risks. A second reason is in Wikipedia’s constitution, which explicitly excludes ‘original research’. I think that contributors consciously drain entries of colour because they’re being hyper-cautious about this clause. After all, colour and opinion are what sister site Wikia is for.

By: Old Bogus

Old Bogus — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:55:28 +0000

Thanks, Dave, for posting my comment.

By: davidw

davidw — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:23:35 +0000

I’m posting this for Charlie Green because, for some reason, my site kept rejecting this comment. (Sorry
————-

Some of the “flatness” is due to Wki’s own policies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TONE

I haven’t tried to find the limits of “formal tone”. Yet.

Charlie Green

By: gregory

gregory — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:21:05 +0000

the real reason…

group mind is impersonal

By: Tim Jarrett

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:31:41 +0000

Expanding on my cryptic trackback:

Having spent some time on Wikipedia as an editor, there are a few factors at play. First, there are three real modes of editing a Wikipedia article:

1. Drive-by: if you’re nice, correcting a fact or adding a new development to an article about a current topic; if you’re not nice, blanking the page or saying something scatalogical about somebody.

2. Authoring: Creating an article or a substantial subsection as a solo author.

3. Redacting: Combining the contributions of dozens or hundreds of anonymous edits into a coherent whole.

I would guess that about 90% of all Wikipedia edits are of type #1. Type 2 (authoring) changes are probably another 7%, and of those, quite a few are drivebys too, creating content-light “stubs” for other people to expand. So probably 95% of all Wikipedia activity is a drive-by.

So that leaves 5% of the remaining Wikipedia edits for quality writing and redacting. And that’s where I think the long tail of Wikipedia works against it–fairly popular articles will get a disproportionately high share of attention, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that no Wikipedia editor will ever stumble across.

The site tries to provide tools (random page, list of recent edits, the AutoWikiBrowser) to encourage editors to redact and expand less popular articles, but Wikipedia is an attention economy just like everywhere else. So there are a lot of relatively high quality articles on episodes of the TV show “Lost” and a bunch of relatively mediocre articles on 19th century American fiction.

The other factor which traps a lot of beginning editors is the {fact} template, which expands to [citation needed]. If you’re writing such that absolutely every utterance can be supported by some reliable source, so that you avoid getting your writing tagged with {fact}, you’re not going to be going on too many flowery flights of fancy.

By: links for 2008-05-29 (Jarrett House North)

links for 2008-05-29 (Jarrett House North) — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:41:38 +0000

[...] Joho the Blog Â» The Wikipedia style Why is Wikipedia writing so boring? The combined influence of neutrality and {fact}, I think. (tags: wikipedia) [...]

By: Paula Thornton

Paula Thornton — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:33:13 +0000

Perhaps for some ‘plainness’ is not valued for its contribution to increased productivity. There are those of us who shun the floral like trading calories. I save mine for real flowers.