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?
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
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?
First Tom, thank you for the constructive suggestions all around. If everybody came forward with criticisms that also included options for fixing things in a simple way, then Foundation-l would be a lot happier place.
The only possible hitch I see in the idea to welcome more copyediting in public documents is that, unlike say the Wikipedia article about cars or the Simpsons or what have you, writing about Foundation work usually involves describing things a volunteer doesn't know about unless they were a part of doing the job. I don't mean they don't have the capability to understand, just that if you're working on something that is not common knowledge, how is it possible for random folks who come along to clarify the language? There are no reliable sources to go read and cite, because it's original research. ;-)
Seems like a Catch-22 to me: documents about what we do at the Foundation are sometimes not plainly understandable, and yet you can't make them understandable unless you know what it is you're supposed to be describing.
Best regards,
Steven
2012/2/18 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com:
Seems like a Catch-22 to me: documents about what we do at the Foundation are sometimes not plainly understandable, and yet you can't make them understandable unless you know what it is you're supposed to be describing.
It doesn't have to be based on external sources like an article, but it should be readable.
If somebody doesn't understand a publication and doesn't hesitate to ask for a clarification, that's already progress.
Thank you, Tom, for writing that email!
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hi Tom,
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
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.
The style may be less than elegant, but isn't it entirely sensible that if you undertake a larger effort to increase outreach, you carry out, well, outreach workshops alongside other things?
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.
Fair enough - but it seems to me not so much a question of style than one regarding level of detail. Remember that you are talking about the "highlights" for that section, i.e. telegram-style headlines which summarize more extensive information from below (in this case the "India Programs" subsection), and that the monthly WMF report, which synthesizes the work of over 100 employees and contractors, is already TLDR for many readers - which was one reason for introducing the separate https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights . Having said that, I think that a link to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Ses... might have been useful here.
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?
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learning#Noun , #3 (which cites a quote from a New York Times article for that usage). It's not my personal favorite word either, but honestly, I can think of worse examples for opaque corporate lingo.
How does one distill a learning?
Again, Wiktionary to the rescue (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/distill ): "to distill" can be used in the general sense of "to extract the essence of". So I imagine that to distill a learning, one sifts through a large amount of information to extract a relevant insight. How that was done in this particular case is, again, a valid question, but once more, the concern would be more about level of detail than about the style of writing.
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.
Minus the sexual fantasies, a lot of this is already going on at the Foundation. Among the various communications people who help Foundation employees/contractors to inform the community and the public about their work, by reviewing and editing reports or blog posts before they are published, there are in fact longtime Wikipedians like our Technical Communications Manager Guillaume (cf. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_Blog/Guidelines&d... ) and myself (whose edit summaries on Wikipedia frequently include links to [[WP:PEACOCK]] ;). I'm not saying there is no room for improvement, but there is a lot of that stuff which doesn't make it into the published versions that you see.
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.
You mean something like the conspicuous notice saying "You are more than welcome to edit this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc" that has been included on the top of each of the Foundation's monthly reports on Meta for almost two years now (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_April_2010 ) ?
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.
As exemplified above, for many texts published by the Foundation, this opportunity is already there (even those on Meta which do not carry that explicit invitation are on a wiki for a reason). And even on the closed Foundation wiki, many volunteers have editing rights and help out with exactly the sort of thing you describe (example from this week: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Draft/Staff_titles ).
So I think it is more about motivating volunteers to take up this opportunity, rather than creating it. In fact, let me use the occasion and thank the volunteers who have copyedited or corrected the WMF monthly reports on Meta since I took over the task of publishing them in August, who include Tony1, Graham87, Ainali, Peteforsyth, Mike Peel, Jeremyb, Rich Farmbrough, Akaniji and yourself.
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?
While I don't find all of your examples convincing, I fully endorse your goal in general and am in fact grateful for your email for entirely selfish reasons: It has the potential to facilitate my work a bit by providing valuable ammunition ;)
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On 18 February 2012 22:33, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Tom,
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
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.
The style may be less than elegant, but isn't it entirely sensible that if you undertake a larger effort to increase outreach, you carry out, well, outreach workshops alongside other things?--
It's perfectly sensible; I believe what tom means is that if you're undertaking a larger effort to increase outreach, it is fairly clear what the workshops that are part of that effort are aiming to achieve. It could have been phrased as "Six workshops were held in January in partnership with the community as part of..."
Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation
On Feb 18, 2012, at 6:27 PM, Tom Morris wrote:
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?
I want a set of those cards. No, I need a set of those cards. No no, I will do or pay just about anything for a set of those cards. ;-)
=========================== Stu West WMF Board Treasurer and Accountability Aficionado
Dear Tom,
I couldn't agree more. And I remember that I understand Amir's blog entries quite well, in sharp opposition to some other WMF technical guys' blog entries...
A copy-editor with an eye for newbies, non techies, non native speakers of English etc. would be a great idea.
Kind regards Ziko
2012/2/18 Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org:
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/
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