(no subject)

[prog]

For all my recent crowing about Wikipedia -- which has become my main outlet for non-bloggy writing, these days -- there is one major problem with its content: almost every article possesses a highly inconsistent style, not only switching voices but varying in stylistic correctness. And I mean "style" in the objective sense -- that is, readability and consistency, using the language to convey the encyclopedic information to the reader a way that's both efficient and engaging. There are infinite ways to do this right, and even more ways to do it wrong, ahem. I don't mind inevitable voice-change if all styles used are high quality, but my hackles go up when a good artcle is pitted with incompetently written or poorly thought-out edits.

An example is the article on immortality that I spent some time with yesterday. There were edits that were obviously stylistically wrong, like from the person who sprinkled non-sequitur references to a favorite Hindu mystic all over the introductory section. So I went ahead and fixed them, actually trying to make lemonade from this, creating a small section on "mystical immortality", mentioning this holy man's ideas as one example, and the alchemists' hunt for the philosopher's stone as another.

The article is rather high quality (the summary of major world religious views being particularly good) until the last major section, "Immortality in Fiction". Here we get a whiff of the fannish taint as people pile in sentences about the lifespans of elves in different role-playing systems and the myriad ways to kill vampires, finally ending in a barely legible paragraph about a Tezuka manga. To this writer's eye, the proper way of fixing this involves blowing the whole section away, and replacing it with a single, tight, link-filled paragraph. And maybe this would be the proper WP-ish thing to do. But I do not yet have the boldness to do it without hesitating and hedging.