2013/2/12 Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se:
We had an expert from a center for for "promoting Easy to read text" to look into some of our introduction text for some articles on on sv:wp.
She reacted strongly in us in some cases having phonetic text in parenthesis in the first sentence, explaining that people unused of reading reads on word at a time, and then just gets stuck on these strange part (and will not be able to read on)
I also finds it seem to be common pratice on all versions, se for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II
It bothers me, too. There is a source for - putting birth dates, phonetic pronunciation and foreign spelling in parentheses after the article name is the usual practice in printed dictionaries and encyclopedias. Wikipedia makes it even richer, because we are not really limited by the glyph inventory of our printing press, we have Unicode and can write all names in all scripts relatively easily. (By "relatively" I mean that we are somewhat limited by the font inventory of our readers, but this is gradually being resolved.)
However, despite the fact that we are following a fine tradition, I do agree that it makes the opening sentence hard to read.
are there other local initiatives to make our texts more easily read? Or where could it be appropriate to discuss if phonetic texts should not generally be transferred to the infoboxes?
Moving such information it to infoboxes is probably a good idea, although I'd love to hear some expert advice from designers and typography professionals.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore