At 05:49 PM 9/18/02 +0200, you wrote: The USA. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland are probably better, England is probably worse. Fred

On 18 Sep 2002, at 17:49, Giskart wrote: For international statistics have a look at the summary, http://www1.oecd.org/media/publish/pb00-9a.pdf Or at the full 200 page report at, http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf Imran

At 09:30 AM 9/18/2002 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: I think this is the key. If we can give them the basics in the first paragraph then if it is something they are interested in they will stretch their reading skills (use dictionaries, etc.) to finish the rest of the article. For some people that first paragraph may be all they are interested in. I know a lot people who probably fall in that 40% who have computers, and are on the Internet, but none of them would have any interest in visiting an encyclopedia. In fact, I would wager the very act of looking up a word in an encyclopedia would start to elevate their reading level to 5th grade or beyond. If we aim the encyclopedia to the 5th grade level then we will never help to elevate our readers. -Jim

Ray Saintonge wrote: Some of us have known this sad statistic for a long time. Although in the UK I think it' s 20%. That is still alarmingly high. Internal Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be written to be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level. Yes, they have done that in the UK too, for most government forms such as tax and Social Security. The problem is that they are largely incomprehensible to people with an adult reading age. The sentence end up winding too much and tripping over themselves. To break them up they shove in full stops and "ands". They eliminate all complex clauses, and end up being very ambiguous. Lately, utility companies have started simplifying too: my electricity bill now just says "PLEASE PAY £46.40", with no explanation of how many units I've used, or how much is tax, until I turn over and read small print. I agree. The opening paragraphs should establish context (already a wikipedia guideline), establish which discipline the article falls under, and give links to less specialized pages: "In [[mathematics]], a '''group''' .... " etc. Clear writing should always be a goal, but that should not result in over-simplified writing.

On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 17:38, Ray Saintonge wrote: Huh? Sourceforge is one of the biggest sites of the free software community, where development for a whole bunch of rather important applications is carried on. Doesn't need references to ghost projects from small AI sites to confirm its importance, really...have you looked at the amount of stuff that's on sourceforge, or its usage statistics, lately? Read the about sourceforge page... -- adamw

On Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:40:06 Karen AKA Kajikit wrote: My philosophy on article complexity is borrowed from Albert Einstein. "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler". Whilst I agree that a good writer can help simplify the complex, there are some topics which are covered in the Wikipedia which simply *can't* be covered fully without some complexity and a good deal of background knowledge (most of which is included in the Wikpedia somewhere, but discovering would take some time). For instance, to take an example from the world of computer science, if I wanted to describe the proof that SAT is NP-complete. To understand an article on this, you need to: * understand the concept of a mathematical proof. * understand Boolean logic, including the concept of satisfiability. * understand the concept of an algorithm. * understand the concept and workings of a Turing machine, and the Church-Turing thesis. * have a reasonably detailed understanding of the low-level workings of a computer, including the relationship between that and a Turing machine. * understand what a decision problem is - and thus be clear on what the SAT decision problem is. * understand what a complexity class is an how problems can be placed in them. * understand nondeterminism in the context of a Turing machine. * understand the classes P and NP. * understand the concept of transforming problems into instances of other problems. * given the above, appreciate what NP-complete means. Once all those concepts have been grasped, then and only then is it possible and useful to go through the proof, which still requires a certain degree of mental agility to follow. Some of the above steps are easy to grasp and can be explained in a couple of sentences. Some take weeks to teach from scratch. I describe the above not to blow my own trumpet (anybody with a computer science degree would be able to rattle off the same stuff) but to demonstrate that some things simply aren't explainable in terms your average fifth-grader (or even your average university graduate in an unrelated field) can understand immediately. I can think of lots of others in computer science, and the same commentary applies to other areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the rest of the sciences. It's not just the sciences, either. Musical theory, philosophy, the entire social sciences, law, and so on, all have concepts that take a great deal of background knowledge to explain succinctly and precisely. At this point, you might well wonder, "If these points are so arcane, why is the Wikipedia covering them at all?" My reply is that there's plenty of people who do have the background to read this type of article who would find the Wikipedia a useful reference, that given some time and determination all the information needed to understand the underlying concepts should be placed in the Wikipedia (including references to other sources to provide additional perspectives on an issue where required), and seeing that the Wikipedia has essentially unlimited room there is no reason not to include them if somebody wants to write them. However, I certainly agree that such articles should, in their introductory paragraph(s), include a simple, easy-to-read explanation of the concept, making any handwaves necessary to achieve comprehensibility, and referring the reader back to a more general, accessible article on the broader topic. Concepts should also be linked back to Wikipedia articles explaining them to write articles about them. After all that verbiage, I strongly disagree with the idea of splitting Wikipedia up at this stage. Make sure we provide comprehensible introductions to articles, readable overviews, and concentrate on clear writing, and most of Wikipedia will be comprehensible to most people who try to read it (perhaps with some help for younger children, but they're going to need help with any other reference). The topics that won't be comprehensible are unlikely to be read by them, anyway. -- ------------------------------------------------------------ Robert Merkel rgmerk(a)mira.net Node FLY on Melbourne Wireless : http://www.wireless.org.au ------------------------------------------------------------