I hear a lot about how Wikipedia is poorly written. I hadn't really prioritized that problem, until today. This is a fine example of horrible writing skills in what ought to be a highly-visible article (about the second-ranked American tennis player):



This is just awful, awful, sixth- or seventh-grade-level writing, on both grammatical and editorial levels. If this paragraph is any indication, Wikipedia truly is a sloppy and irresponsible encyclopedia product.

P.S. Apparently, I was finishing my degree at Emory University the same year Touré matriculated as a Freshman.

P.P.S. There is no mention of Touré's theory about James Blake in Touré's Wikipedia article.

Greg

I'm not the best writer, but prose like that makes my stomach hurt. For some reason it really depresses me. The only thing more irritating than prose like this is trying to correct it and watching it get reverted. Which, in my experience, happens quite a bit.

I don't know if the majority of articles are written like this, but a good many are. Clicking random, more often than not, brings up a poorly written article. Sometimes it is obvious that the writer's first language is not English and those are not that hard to correct. The hard ones not only have bad writing, but are also arranged in no logical order. Making sense of disjointed thought and turning it into (at least) decent writing is impossible unless you have an understanding of the subject matter.

But like I said before, correcting this prose is not the hard part, the hard part is actually getting the better written version to remain! I've seen this happen with copy editors on Wikipedia, and I have no idea why or how they keep it up. In my opinion, this goes back to the whole "dysfunctional community" thing, when droves of incoherent trivia is preferred over legible prose.

Now that I think about it, Wikipedia was sort of founded on incoherent and random trivia, wasn't it?

Now that I read Touré's actual book review in the NY Times, I am even more convinced of how Wikipedia can botch, distort, and twist the actual truth, so that it becomes a more emotional, raw, and provocative untruth.

I hope some thoughtful Wikipedia Reviewers will take the time to read the book review. Do you come away with anything near the racial conflict that the Wikipedia article portrays? From Wikipedia, I would have thought that Touré had thoroughly chastised James Blake for "ignoring the issue of racism in tennis". From reading Touré's own essay, I get nothing of the sort.

My colleagues here have been saying it over and over again, and I'll be the first to admit, I wasn't paying close enough attention. But I am honestly beginning to see how Wikipedia can distort the truth in such harmful ways. This paragraph from the James Blake article is complete garbage.

Greg

Interestingly, that's even after an attempt to clean it up somewhat - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=156165600. It used to say "NY TIMES book review", for example. Who writes like that?