Since Wikipedia started in 2001, great effort has been put into ensuring that it is readable, clear and understandable by visitors. Good Wikipedia writing is clear, concise, comprehensive and consistent. Excellent Wikipedia writing is, according to English Wikipedia's featured article criteria, "engaging, even brilliant, and of a professional standard". Wikipedia editors work hard to remove buzzwords, unnecessary jargon, peacock terms, marketing-speak, weasel words and other similar clutter from their work. And it's not just Wikipedia: all of the Wikimedia projects aspire to write clearly, neutrally and factually. English Wikinews says simply: "Write to be easily understood, to make reading easier." Sadly, documents and communication from the Foundation, from chapters, from board members and so on often fall far short of these sentiments. There are certain places where it is to be expected that communication won't necessarily be clear: I wouldn't expect a non-programmer to be able to understand some of the discussions on Bugzilla or mediawiki.org, but the Foundation's monthly report is something editors should be able to understand. From January 2012, under Global development's list of department highlights... "India program: Six outreach workshops in January in partnership with the community as part of an effort to increase outreach and improve conversion to editing" An outreach workshop... to increase outreach. Is that a workshop to train editors on how to do outreach? Or is it a workshop for newbies teaching them how to edit? Enquiring minds want to know. Later on in the same document: "We concluded an exercise on distilling learnings from all Indic communities and started the process of seeding ideas with communities." I was bold and changed "learnings" to "lessons". What is a learning? How does one distill a learning? And "seeding ideas with communities"? The idea, presumably, is the soil, into which one puts each different community. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. This one is a howler from a subpage of the movement roles discussion: "At the same time, for Wikimedia to adopt the best of the Olympic movement would probably raise the bar on accountabilities for chapters and other organizations" Accountabilities, plural? I can understand accountability, the state of being accountable to another. But I have no idea what accountabilities are. Can you collect them like Pokémon cards? And how would one raise the bar on accountabilities? Would that mean some accountabilities can't quite reach the bar? (Also, the idea that we could learn anything about accountability, singular or plural, from the Olympics strikes me as hilarious given the extensive history of corruption at the IOC.) If you search on Meta, it is possible to find lots and lots of other documents from the Foundation filled with corporate lingo. Projects are 'scoped', and there is a list of 'deliverables' -- not just any deliverables but 'specific deliverables' -- along with 'next steps' to deliver, err, those deliverables while 'going forward'. I can't be the only one who reads these things and whose brain stalls or goes into reverse. There have been numerous things where I've had to ask Foundation contacts to explain things in clear and simple language to me. I don't think I'm particularly stupid or uninformed. Nor do I think that the people who write in the manner I've described do it consciously. But we do need to fix it. If well-educated, informed native English speakers struggle with learnings and accountabilities and so on, what about those who don't natively speak English? When people see sloppy, buzzword-driven language, they wonder if this reflects sloppy, buzzword-driven thinking, or perhaps obfuscation. Clear writing signals the opposite: clear thinking and transparency. I'm not suggesting we all need to write as if we're editing Simple English Wikipedia. But just cut out the buzzwords and write plainly and straightforwardly like the best writing on Wikipedia. What can be done about this? There seem to be two possible solutions to this problem: one involves hiring a dominatrix with a linguistics degree to wander the San Francisco office with handcuffs, a bullwhip, a number of live gerbils and plentiful supplies of superglue, and given free reign to enforce the rules in whatever way she deems fit. The other, which involves far fewer embarrassing carpet stains, is to empower the community to fix these problems. Have a nice little leaderboard on Meta, and encourage community members to be bold, fix up bad writing, bad grammar and buzzwords. Reward their efforts with barnstars and the occasional thank you messages on talk pages. Commit to clear writing by adopting a policy of "copyediting almost always welcome" for chapter wikis, Foundation documents and as close to everything as possible. There are volunteers in the movement who happily spend hour after hour copyediting on Wikipedia and Wikinews and Wikibooks and so on. Give them the opportunity to fix up the language used by the Foundation and the chapters. Remember: how can community members support and become more deeply involved with the work of the chapters and the Foundation if they can't understand what you are saying? -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l