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May 23, 2008, 01:41 PM ET
The Wikipedia Style
I can tell when my students have consulted Wikipedia when writing their papers. Sentences lose their singularity, transitions go flat, diction pales. The discourse sounds like information issuing from a neutral platform, not interpretation coming from an angle of vision. The assignments are literary, and one expects some individual style to enter the prose. Instead, students write as if they were composing an encyclopedia entry—or rather, a Wikipedia entry.
I wondered if older encyclopedias delivered the same featureless prose, and came up with some comparisons which I outlined at Education Next. Check out these versions of Moby-Dick. Here’s the Wikipedia entry:
“Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.”
And here’s Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly…”
And here’s the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him…”
And Cliffs Notes (1966): “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”
Each one is more vibrant and entertaining than the Wikipedia entry. The information is no better, and Wikipedia is, indeed, a marvelous source for a quick date, fact, definition, event. But in style, most entries are deadening.
Students assimilate the idiom every time they call it up. That’s the implicit lesson. Wikipedia has become such a popular resource tool that they think Wikipedia style is proper academic style. When writing for intellectual purposes, they assume they should drop the creativity, dash, and metaphor that appears in their personal profile pages (however puerile the content). The concern for bias probably underlies the neutrality style, but I wish I received a lot more biased, opinionated, argumentative, judgmental, stylish, and colorful papers.
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