About Quantity and Quality When Writing Articles

Interesting discussion I followed yesterday, about the numbers-game. And whether a search-engine could figure out whether an article has original content.

Would you please excuse me that I do not agree with this numbers game, more if it is about writing (articles).

Of course you can only improve the quality once there is a quantity. Once you have been producing a significant stream you can measure; how many hits do you have on your articles? Is the average increasing? Do you get feedback? Could you do better than this?

Counting is simple. And so is comparing numbers. And therefore the pattern of the game is the most well known in the world. But not everything is a game.

At school we learn about mathematics and about language. This dichotomy continues later in alpha-studies and beta-studies. If it is true that boys dominate the numbers part where girls outperform in the language and communication areas. If that is the case, what does this tell us?

It tells us that the mathematicians are wrong if they think that numbers govern over quality. But working with numbers all day might give you that impression. If you are surrounded by numbers you inherently think that five is more (important) than four.

Rather than alpha and beta, this is even more about culture. A company need to report growing (financial) figures. Increasing earnings per share. Growth in each quarter. Quality is important, but at the end of the day, it's the numbers that count.

Agreed, as long as it is not about writing articles. There is only one rule: it's the quality that counts.

Back to this search engines. They can count the number of links to your site. They can count the number of pages. Do they also count the number of type errors, wrong grammatical constructions (I hope not...)? All (Account-) able though.

But what about the quality? What is that anyhow? What do we know about quality? A difficult question... Something for a follow-up.

2006 Hans Bool