More on the Wired Article

I made a bunch of edits to the Wired article midday today, since a 3p Pacific cutoff loomed today. The article will be poured over by paid editors at that point, who likely will trim it back down to the size it was since it doubled in length.

I think I got rid of as much as I added. It had to do edits in very small chunks, creating many more version history entries than I would have liked. My changes kept getting rejected as other people tried to edit at the same time. Sort of frustrating. It would have been much easier to edit, I think, if the content could have been chunked in a way that more than one person could edit parts of the page at the same time, without the wiki locking out those changes.

Matt Ingram posted a critical blog entry a couple days ago, since updated. He thinks what was being produced is too encyclopedic. We’ll see if in the end it holds up when the final bell sounds in a couple hours. I would agree that the content seems to be too broad, and there is a tendency to treat the examples added in as more important than they probably are. (For instance, someone after me added a bit on political wikis, and it was difficult to not mention PoliticWiki on the chance it would stick.) However, there is a lot of editing involved in writing. Restructuring some of this could address much of the criticism.

What does seem to be lacking, though, is a personality. Maybe that is really what Ingram is sensing. One writer has complete control over the way phrases are crafted and will have a sense of how much a more punchy delivery might work. A single writer, particularly an experienced one, gets to know her audience (and vice versa). Communal writing tends to become more sterile. That is probably a big reason academic papers are on the bland side. My own assumption was that any bit of attempted cleverness I encountered was either the original author’s style (so I didn’t want to touch it) or some other editor’s witticism (so I wanted to delete it).