It's not so easy.
Quite a number of years ago I did some work for the online edition of Encyclopedia
Britannica. I was contracted to supply date-related materials that appeared on
the front page of the Britannica site. This sort of thing is very common today,
but was still rather rare back then, and since I'd built the
first Hebrew project of this sort, and since (although the Britannica site was
in English) the site production was done in Israel, I was offered the job. I already
had many sources from which to cull information, so finding items about which
to write wasn't a problem. Instead, the first serious problem was determining
which two or three items should receive the approximately 70 - 100 word blurbs
that would appear on the site and would then link to more in depth information
within the encyclopedia itself.
But once that problem was solved, the real troubles began. I worked with an editor
whom I never met face to face but with whom I corresponded either by phone or
by e-mail. Working with him was exasperating, though I quickly developed a genuine
and hearty respect for him. Getting my texts into proper English wasn't too much
of a problem, but getting my facts straight, or more accurately, basing my writing
on fact rather than on a collection of amorphous common-knowledge assumptions,
was something else. Even what appeared to be the simplest of sentences received
intense scrutiny. Did the industrial revolution really lead to a particular
event, or did it, and the event, both come from the same source? Was the success
of a particular expedition the result of a particular technology, or is
that simply a popularly held view, unsubstantiated by fact? I thought that I'd
be able to speedily type out about 300 words every week and make some quick cash,
but I ended up sweating much more than I'd expected.
I did, however, learn that there's a difference between writing for yourself and
writing for what's considered an authoritative source. Were I to write for the
Wikipedia, even though I could simply upload whatever I'd decided was accurate
enough or written well enough, I'm sure that I'd find myself picking my words
so carefully that I'd hardly ever get around to finishing what I was trying to
write.
Go to: Don't Bogart that Info