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.
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).
This should be followed by the section "In [[General Terminology]]" which
would contain material tailored to the high school or college graduate,
basically the top 20% of the population which is literate. A attempt would
be made to edit this so that a coherent NPOV article results which reads
easily, including basic technical language and definitions.
The third section of advanced or specialized material (for you, who
regularly tested in the 99th percentile +) would give a full technical
treatment, would not try to create an integrated viewpoint (that is the
ambiguities of the topic would be exposed), go into detail about
controversies in the area etc.
There would be an external links and further reading after each section
with appropriate material.
I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to mix up material of all
three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious choice to write for our
likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful (and authoritative)
enclyclopedia.
Fred Bauder