On 5/28/2012 5:08 PM, Anya Shyrokova wrote:
My main thought is that the statement: "Writing should be clear and
concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or
unnecessarily complex wording" is somewhat self-contradictory. Jargon
exists in order to increase precision and decrease vagueness/ unnecessary
wording. That is why academics, or really any community of professionals,
tend to develop it. However, if one uses too much of it, the reader begins
to feel that he needs a higher level degree to understand what's going on.
People who are not good writers tend to poorly handle the balance between
needing to use common language and being precise.
The great advantage of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia is that it
allows a community to collaborate in building it. As Anya's insight
indicates, communities tend to develop their own language in order to
communicate about issues. These languages invariably specialize to meet
community needs, like conveying precise meanings, and become a little
challenging for outsiders to understand (our own community jargon
illustrates the point quite well).
Well, the great advantage of creating an encyclopedia on the web is that
it enables us to use hyperlinks. In this environment, writing that uses
a specialized vocabulary should take advantage of hyperlinks in order to
explain the language. In theory, that alone would be able to solve most
of the problem here.
I agree that academics, among others, may need to improve their writing
styles in order to better serve our readers. But I think there are more
fundamental cultural issues at work as well, and addressing some of
those might produce an encyclopedia in which it's easier for writers to
stick with language they find accurate and precise. These issues
include: concerns about "overlinking" in article text; hostility to
"redlinks" for articles not yet created; work that focuses exclusively
on single articles rather than how they fit into the context of the
encyclopedia; greater interest in working on new, hot topics than older,
established knowledge; and lack of skill being applied to crafting
articles about core concepts in many fields. For that matter, a stronger
and more effectively utilized Wiktionary would help as well.
--Michael Snow
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
