[Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

[Vicki Rosenzweig]

At 07:00 AM 9/18/02 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
>them.

Believable doesn't mean valid. I'd want a lot more documentation before I
accepted this.


>But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
>from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
>audience and came up with this proposed convention.
>
>A wikipedia article should begin with a section written for the huge number
>of people who read at a basic level (5th grade level to high school level).
>I suspect that middle school level kids are one of our better customers in
>any event. It should be both written in simple English and contain a basic
>explanation of the topic, accurate and clear, but without technical
>language and niceties, and unless easily stated without whatever
>complicating factors exist with respect to that topic. It should have a
>section title, "[[Simply put]]" or "In [[Simple Terms]], or "In [[Simple
>Terminology]]" (the link would explain what we are doing with this section).

Not at the beginning, please: this sort of approach will drive away much of our
best audience (and potential contributors). In particular, bright high-school
students do *not* want to be talked down to.

If you want to write "simple language" explanations, and cross-reference
them from the main articles, go ahead. But it's not as easy as you seem to
be assuming. (Purely as an exercise for the reader, I'd suggest trying to
rewrite your proposal so it's appropriate for a fifth-grade reading level.)

The beauty of Wikipedia is that *we have all these cross-references*. If
someone is reading an article about the American Revolution and doesn't
know who George III is, all they have to do is click.
-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org