What's the scientific background of hemingwayapp? I don't see anything on their website. There is no one-size-fits-all readability algo for English, as far as I know. Nemo _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

On 7 Mar 2015 09:13, "Magnus Manske" <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com> wrote: for the English Wikipedia initial paragraph: Thanks Magnus Was hoping this would be the case and you would confirm that :-) I personally would be very keen to get this into Wikidata via a bot. What are the blockers for doing that? What has the discussion been around that so far? https://tools.wmflabs.org/autodesc/?q=Q9358&lang=&mode=long&lin… > On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 8:38 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> What's the scientific background of hemingwayapp? I don't see anything >> on their website. There is no one-size-fits-all readability algo for >> English, as far as I know. >> >> Nemo >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mobile-l mailing list >> Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

I'll state a bunch of things that are obvious to me, but should probably be written down in some way... IPA, other names, and names in other languages indeed make reading harder. They are there because of a tradition. There's a tradition of printing encyclopedia articles like this (that's also where the bold font in each articles' first words comes from). Just open any printed encyclopedia. It's a nice continuation of tradition, and Wikipedia takes it to extremes thanks to the blessings of Unicode - old printed encyclopedias were lucky to have Cyrillic characters in their typography, and some good ones had IPA, Arabic, and Devanagari, but you won't find pervasive use of Georgian or Kannada in a lot of printed encyclopedias. We have pretty much everything in Wikipdeia. The information is valuable, but having it all in parentheses in the first sentence begins to be non-practical. It will help to at least be aware that a proposal to change this will break with traditions; traditions must be treated with respect. But in the 21st century on the web it may make sense to transfer IPA and names in other languages to the infobox. Other names in the same language will probably have to stay in the opening sentence, because article naming is a super-contentious issue. And yes, the Foundation has no authority to just change it, because it's a matter for the Manual of Style, which is owned by the community (in all languages). As a member of the editing community, I would support it, and I even mentioned it on mailing lists in the past (too busy to search where), but it needs to go through proper discussion. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ 2015-03-07 2:49 GMT+02:00 Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

On Mar 9, 2015, at 2:17 PM, Ryan Kaldari &lt;rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Call me old-fashioned, but I would really hate to see the lead sentences of Wikipedia articles auto-generated by a program. Our text is dry and monotonous enough as it is :) On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 5:05 AM, Jane Darnell &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com <mailto:jane023@gmail.com>> wrote: I agree with Magnus that it should be Wikidata to the rescue for problems like these, not some new policy that throws current WP contributors into a tizzy. I am not sure how precisely, but maybe if all parts of a lead sentence were in Wikidata then one could then experiment with a new Wikidata property for "Mobile lead" which could first be seeded with the label and barring that the WP lead? On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Amir E. Aharoni &lt;amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il <mailto:amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote: I'll state a bunch of things that are obvious to me, but should probably be written down in some way... IPA, other names, and names in other languages indeed make reading harder. They are there because of a tradition. There's a tradition of printing encyclopedia articles like this (that's also where the bold font in each articles' first words comes from). Just open any printed encyclopedia. It's a nice continuation of tradition, and Wikipedia takes it to extremes thanks to the blessings of Unicode - old printed encyclopedias were lucky to have Cyrillic characters in their typography, and some good ones had IPA, Arabic, and Devanagari, but you won't find pervasive use of Georgian or Kannada in a lot of printed encyclopedias. We have pretty much everything in Wikipdeia. The information is valuable, but having it all in parentheses in the first sentence begins to be non-practical. It will help to at least be aware that a proposal to change this will break with traditions; traditions must be treated with respect. But in the 21st century on the web it may make sense to transfer IPA and names in other languages to the infobox. Other names in the same language will probably have to stay in the opening sentence, because article naming is a super-contentious issue. And yes, the Foundation has no authority to just change it, because it's a matter for the Manual of Style, which is owned by the community (in all languages). As a member of the editing community, I would support it, and I even mentioned it on mailing lists in the past (too busy to search where), but it needs to go through proper discussion. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com <http://aharoni.wordpress.com/> ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ 2015-03-07 2:49 GMT+02:00 Dan Garry &lt;dgarry(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:dgarry@wikimedia.org>>: (moving to mobile-l) Thanks Vibha, this is really informative. It's very clear that our first sentences really suck for supporting quick lookup, primarily because their information hierarchy is all wrong. That said, it's important to remember that we now have Wikidata descriptions displayed in the apps for this exact reason: to let people find out quickly and easily what something is. So, although I agree that our first sentences are suboptimal, it's important to put the problem in context and remember that users do have Wikidata descriptions now to satisfy this use case. It's not like we're totally failing them, we could just be doing a bit better. Rather than piling on hacks by trying to scrape the content in the first sentence and reorganise it (which causes information loss, and is extremely fragile from a technological perspective), the long term solution is, at least to me, to invest in is getting our engaged readers to write clear, coherent Wikidata descriptions. These can then be used across all platforms to support that workflow. Of course, there may be room for some quick wins that we can put in place while we figure out truly compelling UX for getting readers to submit descriptions. We can explore those quick wins in our brainstorming session on Monday. But we must remember that these will only be short-term, hacky solutions to the problem, and that we need to address this problem at the source in order to be really successful at it. Thanks! Dan On 6 March 2015 at 16:13, Jon Robson &lt;jrobson(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:jrobson@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Any reason this is on mobile-tech and not mobile-l (I'd love to hear from people like Amir on this subject)? It would be good to flag this problem to a wider audience and part of our problem with most mobile issues is people just are not aware of this sort of thing. Many probably haven't even heard of the hemingway app... It would be interesting to see how a wikidata generated first sentence would score with the same app. On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Vibha Bamba &lt;vbamba(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:vbamba@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Hi Folks, Kaity and I used the Hemingway app <http://www.hemingwayapp.com/> to analyze the readability of our first sentence, using a few articles. They all scored poorly, an ideal grade level of 10 is recommended for clear bold writing. This difficult problem arises from the first sentence containing one or more of the following: IPA Keys Birth/ death dates Other Names/ AKA's Help/info links Alternate spellings and scripts Additional details Details like dates are replicated in the infobox, if it exists in the article. Other templates such as AKA's/IPA's are extremely useful but need to be presented in a clear and structured manner. Some of this comes from the Manual of style <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Lead_section#First_sentence>, but it is abused in many cases. Its sad, because many readers come to Wikipedia to answer the 'What is this/ who is this' question. Google Knowledge panel strips out all brackets and presents important details as a list, under the description. We have started investigating solutions for this on mobile. I would encourage you to try this out on mobile web or apps. Thanks Vibha & Kaity --- Articles we used: Bern <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern> Genghis Khan <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan> Cephalopod <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod> Mahatma Gandhi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi> Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche> Carthage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage> Phoenicia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia> Timur <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur> ---- Vibha Bamba Senior Designer | WMF Design -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l> _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l> _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l> _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

Well, I only got 5 out of 8. I guess computers have gotten clever. Damn new-fangled gadgets! On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Bahodir Mansurov &lt;bmansurov(a)wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l