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Quality writing: veracity & comprehensiveness don't be mattering no none ifs y'all ain't gots ya sum

Or, Quality writing: veracity and comprehensiveness are irrelevant if the writing is incomprehensible

As expressed on this page and multiple other related pages (see, for example, WP:1.0/A "...though the content and language quality are also factors."), quality writing is inferior to most other issues, such as citation, scope, and legal compliance. The Assessment page practically says, "Oh yeah, and, uh, we like stuff to be written real good." The only way to make it more clear that writing is an afterthought in this process is by explicitly saying, "Quality writing was an afterthought. Sorry about that, mate."

Consider the Wikipedia:List of policies page. Dozens of topics are highlighted, including don't be a sock puppet and don't self-identify as a pedophile, but "write well" is not explicitly on the page. At best, it is implicitly included in the See also section in the third level of an unordered list.

In reality, the quality of nearly all Wikipedia articles is only measured by scope, relevance, and citation. Until someone desires Wikipedia to designate the article as a good article, the writing quality is irrelevant. This is more evidence that writing is an afterthought and that the de facto Wikipedia policy is that writing is substantially inferior to nearly every other aspect of Wikipedia's existence.

If quality writing really is important, then it must receive attention equal to that of veracity and relevance. If quality writing is an unimportant as it seems, then I sincerely believe that the list of polices and this page should both explicitly describe its relative importance. The list of policies, for example, could state something like, "Nearly all other policies trump quality writing. If an article meets high standards in other aspects, then the quality of the writing will become more important. In all cases, however, it is preferable to sacrifice quality writing to achieve goals such as verifiability."

A warning such as the one above would prevent me from wasting my time improving the writing quality of an article: except for exceptionally minor edits, my edits are typically reverted or overwritten within hours. Until today, I did not understand the systemic bias against quality writing in favor of stability and dozens of other policies. (See, for example, Wikipedia:List of policies and good article criteria.)

A subjective anecdote about poor writing on Wikipedia

I have spent the last few hours navigating the labyrinth of Wikipedia:(XXXXX) pages because I was reading yet another Wikipedia article that was so poorly written that I wanted to cry. Because of the inexcusable and patently wrong statements in the article, I clicked on an internal link to find accurate information. The second article was at least as heartbreaking and painful to read as the first was. I decided to make one small edit on the second article because the error was so egregious that it distorted verifiable historical facts. I always check the talk page before making edits, but the talk page was even more disappointing.

I was disappointed because the talk page informed me that Continental Congress, the page I had intended to edit, is part of three projects: one project assigns it Top-importance and the other two assign High-importance. This important page had at least two significant errors in the first sentence that most 16-year-old Americans should be able to identify. But many (most?) Wikipedia users are not American, so the errors would be opaque to them. (For completeness, the original page I viewed was History of the United States dollar.)

Because I did not understand Wikipedia's quality grading, I investigated it before I made any edits. That began my unwitting journey to accidentally discover the Minotaur that devours good writing on Wikipedia: the de facto policy of sacrificing quality writing to appease the gods that govern other parts of Wikipedia and its articles (with the possible exceptions of Good articles and Featured articles).

The good news is that now I understand why my edits regularly die and when I feel the desire to improve Wikipedia, I will find avenues that might have an impact, instead of attempting to write using the digital equivalent of disappearing ink. hunterhogan (talk) 12:22, 4 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to hear about your poor experience. Although I sometimes have things reverted, I have nearly always found that improvements in the quality of the writing are welcomed. However, I'm rather confused by your examples. You decry the emphasis on veracity, yet you equate factual errors in the Continental Congress article with poor writing. Surely veracity includes fixing "errors in the first sentence that most 16-year-old Americans should be able to identify"?

There is a valid reason for the emphasis, however. An article that is poorly written but factually accurate is, like many textbooks, still useful even if it is hard to read. An article that omits significant pieces of information can be misleading. Also, as you point out, Wikipedia is written by people from all over the world, and grammatical rules vary considerably. Do you write "the colour of aluminium", with the comma outside the inverted commas, or do you write "the color of aluminum," with the comma outside the quotation marks? (I'm a Brit in New York, so I have to switch constantly.) This variability in the language inevitably means that sometimes you may see a grammatical "error" that in another country is considered the correct form.

Having said all that, good writing still shines through in any form of English. In our offline releases, we have excluded some quite important and well-referenced articles simply because of the poor quality of the language. The Wikipedia community does value good writing, and for an article to reach Featured Article status it is seen as essential. If you would like to collaborate on improving any articles, let me know, and perhaps we can tackle it together, and I'll be sure to deal with any unsuitable reversions by well-meaning Wikipedians. Walkerma (talk) 05:11, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Hunterhogan: To address your specific complaint, I think "don't write badly" is not a policy on Wikipedia because "if you can't write well, don't write anything at all" is the opposite of the behavior we want to promote. While we prefer well-written prose, we also welcome people who know stuff but who have poor English skills or not a lot of time to add that content. Other people who do have good English skills are then encouraged to come along and tidy up. Indeed, the whole point of the article assessment process is to track and encourage progress, not only in scope and factual accuracy, but writing quality. As you can see on Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment, poorly written articles receive low grades ("C" or lower). To get to a "B" grade, an article must be well-written in addition to being suitably referenced, comprehensive, accessible, structured, and illustrated. I agree with Walkerma; it seems unusual that genuine improvements in quality would be reverted. When that happens, in my experience there is generally some sort of misunderstanding or mistake and a brief conversation will resolve the dispute. Looking at your edit history, it seems you have become involved in politically controversial edits related to global warming and Tibet. I can see how you would feel rather emotionally burned out after that; most people would. Clearly you are an active Wikipedia reader and a person with expertise in the finer points of English grammar and composition. Given you are unsatisfied with the quality of writing and want to do something about it, I would encourage you to give making small edits another try. I expect most of your edits will stand, but there will still be occasional reverts, some legitimate and some mistaken. I think you will have a much more pleasant experience if you assume good faith and also allow for the possibility that your own edit was in error or there is a some alternative which would be preferred after some consensus-building. I was just reading [1] and it seems there you took a revert which the reverting editor found factually justified as a personal insult. Terseness is common in edit summaries and is not a sign of rudeness. Indeed, their reply on the talk page seemed really polite. I'm sure if you had simply replied "Hi, this was reverted, but I think X means Y" and cite your sources, they would have politely replied with their rationale, and y'all could have amicably resolved your differences or identified the need for more research. If you don't have the time or energy to stick around and monitor the conversation, you can just drop a polite note on the talk page noting the revert, explaining your own rationale, and leave the question for others to resolve later. In my experience, with more edits articles do indeed become more informative, accurate, and well-written. I hope you can find a way for editing to be more fun and satisfying for you; I enjoy it because we so often learn something interesting from what others have written and even from resolving our initial disagreements. -- Beland (talk) 18:23, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Global list of highest priority items

I'm looking at the grid and right now there are 99 quality-unassessed articles of Top importance. I was trying to find a way to get a list of those articles, but all the categories seem to be Wikiproject-specific. I was going to spend some time grading Top-importance articles just to make those numbers better; maybe other editors would be similarly motivated if we had that available. Thanks, and thanks for this already-pretty-awesome product. -- Beland (talk) 18:25, 22 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You need the "Release Version Tools" (see the navigation template at top right) - more specifically, something like this. This allows you to list articles from ALL projects, and sort them by importance or external interest score (both are good but independent measures of importance), and I also put them in reverse quality order. The resultant table isn't perfect, but I think you'll find what you need. And THANK YOU! When we finally get a chance to make our next release - we're still trying to fix the software - we will really appreciate your work. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 05:03, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Walkerma: Oh, excellent. I started going through the list, and I'm curious what it means when Quality is "----"? I see that on some pages that are clearly already graded, both with {{WikiProjectBannerShell}} wrappers like Talk:Alexander Alekhine and simple tags like on Talk:Bishop (chess). -- Beland (talk) 02:08, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, that baffled me as well! That column is supposed to show something like "B-Class". I will be sure to ask the people who wrote that code. However, these are a very small number out of the total, and perhaps represent ones with broken templates or categories.

Looking more closely, you perhaps want to start with this list, because you don't want to start work on List-Class article and the like. That page shows where the REAL quality ratings begin, and shows plenty of Stubs. When we first created this tool, the quality ratings were pretty much just that (starting with Stub as the lowest), but the WikiProjects added other classes to help them keep track of lists, etc.

If you look at the actual articles that were rated as Top/Stub, you can see that some probably do not deserve to be worked on. This reflects the facts that:

Most truly important articles have long been improved to be better than Stub!
Top importance relates to internal importance to the WikiProject, not to Wikipedia as a whole. For example, there are a lot of sports articles that are probably very important if you're an afficionado of the Green Bay Packers, but unimportant if you've never heard of that team! That is why, when we )the 1.0 team) put together a global collection, we adjust for the importance of the WikiProject in assessing an importance score.
Sometimes people are enthusiastic - even fanatical - about one particular topic, person, etc. and they rank some obscure board game as "Top-importance" based on their own (rather biased!) view. If others from the WikiProject don't catch these, they can persist.

The External Interest (EI) score is a more objective number, because it's based on a combination of nos. of links-in, language versions, and page hits. For the article collections, we combine EI with the importance score, as we believe a machine/human combination is most helpful. Walkerma (talk) 15:09, 28 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to restrict A-class use to big projects

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 110#Restrict A class usage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 15 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Query

"The next version will be version 0.9, which we hope to release some time in 2013."

Since there is no further information, I assume version 0.9 was never released. So, my question is, since this information hasn't been updated, is this an inactive project? I know the assessment continues but as far as this Version 1.0 project, is that on an indefinite hold? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:09, 8 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Version 0.9 was indeed never released. Unfortunately, the person who inherited the computer code (the code we used for 0.7 and 0.8) was unable to get it to work, and we haven't had anyone else offer to help. I'm fairly code-illiterate, and I've been busy on other things, and so in the absence of an computer programming expert to help we can't push things on.

BUT, the good news is that User:Kelson (who wrote the Kiwix code almost single-handedly, and has been very active on 1.0 projects since 2005 or so) has offered to turn his hand to fixing this over the summer. I will also have a lot of time to work on it too. So, please don't write the project off as "inactive" just yet - just on hold until June or July! With working code, the two of us will be able to oversee putting Version 0.9 together. Would you be able to help? Walkerma (talk) 04:06, 13 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Query

Can anyone answer this question? --John (talk) 19:41, 29 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 92: / Line 92: @@
 :Yes, Version 0.9 was indeed never released.  Unfortunately, the person who inherited the computer code (the code we used for 0.7 and 0.8) was unable to get it to work, and we haven't had anyone else offer to help.  I'm fairly code-illiterate, and I've been busy on other things, and so in the absence of an computer programming expert to help we can't push things on.
 :BUT, the good news is that User:Kelson (who wrote the Kiwix code almost single-handedly, and has been very active on 1.0 projects since 2005 or so) has offered to turn his hand to fixing this over the summer.  I will also have a lot of time to work on it too.  So, please don't write the project off as "inactive" just yet - just on hold until June or July!  With working code, the two of us will be able to oversee putting Version 0.9 together.  Would you be able to help? [[User:Walkerma|Walkerma]] ([[User talk:Walkerma|talk]]) 04:06, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
+== Query ==
+Can anyone answer [[User_talk:John#Wikiproject_Ireland...problem|this question]]? --[[User:John|John]] ([[User talk:John|talk]]) 19:41, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Revision as of 19:41, 29 April 2014

Archives

Quality writing: veracity & comprehensiveness don't be mattering no none ifs y'all ain't gots ya sum

Or, Quality writing: veracity and comprehensiveness are irrelevant if the writing is incomprehensible

A subjective anecdote about poor writing on Wikipedia

Global list of highest priority items

Proposal to restrict A-class use to big projects

Query

Query