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
While I understand the motivation, I think a better plan would be to put some effort into the Basic English Wikipedia. One person started it, but it hasn't caught on yet.
Stephen Gilbert
--- Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net 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.
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
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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.
40% of the adult population of what ? The USA ?
Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not so bad. -- giskart
At 05:49 PM 9/18/02 +0200, you wrote:
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.
40% of the adult population of what ? The USA ?
Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not so bad. -- giskart
The USA. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland are probably better, England is probably worse.
Fred
Actually, only Canada beats the U.S. according to some statistics that I looked up. And that appears to be due to diversity in the U.S., i.e. although blacks read less well than whites, it turns out that Hispanics have the most reading difficulties, which makes sense of course, since they are not from native-English-speaking families.
I think, based on the same research that I did, that 40% at < 5th grade level is overblown. That's not consistent with the numbers that I've seen. But, I'm not an expert in this area by a long shot.
Fred Bauder wrote:
At 05:49 PM 9/18/02 +0200, you wrote:
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.
40% of the adult population of what ? The USA ?
Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not so bad. -- giskart
The USA. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland are probably better, England is probably worse.
Fred
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On 18 Sep 2002, at 17:49, Giskart wrote:
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.
40% of the adult population of what ? The USA ?
Perhaps the statistics of other English speaking countrys like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England are better so the overal numbers are not so bad. -- giskart
For international statistics have a look at the summary,
http://www1.oecd.org/media/publish/pb00-9a.pdf
Or at the full 200 page report at,
http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/8100051e.pdf
Imran
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.
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
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.
The motivation for this is commendable, but I don't see it as a reasonable course of action. It reflects the process that leads to a "dumbing down" of education. More can probably be done to improve skills by having articles where the reader has to stretch just a little to be able to understand what's going on.
The 40% of "adults" who can't read above the 5th grade level are not likely to be using computers or spending a lot of time on the internet anyway. The adults who did not graduate from high school probably have limited computer interest as well. The most promissing audience is likely the student who is not yet old enough to have graduated.
There's a real challenge in knowing just who comes to Wikipedia to simply read select articles and why they read what they read. Currently 5 of the top 10 most viewed articles (after the Main Page) relate to 9/11 and another two are of current affairs nature
In any event, writing in this three level fashion is a particularly difficult thing to do. Those who are very knowledgeable in their own specialty sometimes have no appreciation of what it is that the general public wants to know about their subject. Some subjects can't even be simplified at all. How we interpret the concept of writing for the benefit of lower reading abilities is another problem again. There was a situation a few years ago in the United States where the Internal Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be written to be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level. What that meant was that a long difficult word would be replaced by a phrase or even a whole sentence full of simpler words. That made the the guides at least 50% thicker. The person who didn't care to read a 100 page manual, wasn't going to be any more enthusiastic about a 150 page manual even if it did contain simpler language. To make matters worse, those people who were able to make enough sense of the guide to pick out what was relevant for them became turned out by the excess verbiage.
Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.
Ec
At 09:30 AM 9/18/2002 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.
I think this is the key. If we can give them the basics in the first paragraph then if it is something they are interested in they will stretch their reading skills (use dictionaries, etc.) to finish the rest of the article. For some people that first paragraph may be all they are interested in.
I know a lot people who probably fall in that 40% who have computers, and are on the Internet, but none of them would have any interest in visiting an encyclopedia. In fact, I would wager the very act of looking up a word in an encyclopedia would start to elevate their reading level to 5th grade or beyond. If we aim the encyclopedia to the 5th grade level then we will never help to elevate our readers.
-Jim
Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net writes:
There's a real challenge in knowing just who comes to Wikipedia to simply read select articles and why they read what they read. Currently 5 of the top 10 most viewed articles (after the Main Page) relate to 9/11 and another two are of current affairs nature
Maybe a short questionnaire for wikipedia readers, which they can fill out volontarily, would help to get answers to these questions and would give interesting insights about the wikipedia audience to the regular writers.
greetings, elian
Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
Some of us have known this sad statistic for a long time. Although in the UK I think it' s 20%. That is still alarmingly high.
There was a situation a few years ago in the United States where the
Internal Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be written to be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level.
Yes, they have done that in the UK too, for most government forms such as tax and Social Security. The problem is that they are largely incomprehensible to people with an adult reading age. The sentence end up winding too much and tripping over themselves. To break them up they shove in full stops and "ands". They eliminate all complex clauses, and end up being very ambiguous. Lately, utility companies have started simplifying too: my electricity bill now just says "PLEASE PAY £46.40", with no explanation of how many units I've used, or how much is tax, until I turn over and read small print.
Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.
I agree. The opening paragraphs should establish context (already a wikipedia guideline), establish which discipline the article falls under, and give links to less specialized pages: "In [[mathematics]], a '''group''' .... " etc.
Clear writing should always be a goal, but that should not result in over-simplified writing.
For our Source Forge people, I was just trying to check for broken links in my bookmarks and came across the following at gameai.com.
I've been lax in mentioning this, but there's a group that spun out of one of the sessions at 2002 GDC http://www.gdconf.com now over on SourceForge http://www.sourceforge.com . This group is trying to create some common AI Interface Standards http://sourceforge.net/projects/ai-standards/ to help guide the evolution of future game AIs. Neat stuff, really. Hop on over and talk about what you'd like to see... Posted: 08/27/02
I thought you might like to hear that people have been paying attention to you.
On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 17:38, Ray Saintonge wrote:
For our Source Forge people, I was just trying to check for broken links in my bookmarks and came across the following at gameai.com.
I've been lax in mentioning this, but there's a group that spun out of one of the sessions at 2002 GDC http://www.gdconf.com now over on SourceForge http://www.sourceforge.com . This group is trying to create some common AI Interface Standards http://sourceforge.net/projects/ai-standards/ to help guide the evolution of future game AIs. Neat stuff, really. Hop on over and talk about what you'd like to see... Posted: 08/27/02
I thought you might like to hear that people have been paying attention to you.
Huh? Sourceforge is one of the biggest sites of the free software community, where development for a whole bunch of rather important applications is carried on. Doesn't need references to ghost projects from small AI sites to confirm its importance, really...have you looked at the amount of stuff that's on sourceforge, or its usage statistics, lately? Read the about sourceforge page...
On 18-09-2002, Fred Bauder wrote thusly :
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.
This 3-tier approach would require a special kind of discipline from Wikipedia authors that I think would be hard to achieve with the current 'no rules' rule.
Besides it would mean major rewrite of almost (all ?) articles.
Regards, kpjas.
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.
As a former primary teacher and recovered dyslexic, I'm not at all surprised that 40% of the population are only up to a 5th grade level (if that).
I'm a fluent adult, and there are some articles in the wikipedia that leave me going 'huh?!' because they're too complex and convoluted... I think a really good writer who knows what they're talking about can make complicated information seem simple, but a poor writer or someone overly involved in the subject can make the simple seem incredibly complex because they assume that everyone else has a certain level of understanding that they don't actually have.
On Thu, 19 Sep 2002 10:40:06 Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
As a former primary teacher and recovered dyslexic, I'm not at all surprised that 40% of the population are only up to a 5th grade level (if that).
I'm a fluent adult, and there are some articles in the wikipedia that leave me going 'huh?!' because they're too complex and convoluted... I think a really good writer who knows what they're talking about can make complicated information seem simple, but a poor writer or someone overly involved in the subject can make the simple seem incredibly complex because they assume that everyone else has a certain level of understanding that they don't actually have.
My philosophy on article complexity is borrowed from Albert Einstein.
"Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler".
Whilst I agree that a good writer can help simplify the complex, there are some topics which are covered in the Wikipedia which simply *can't* be covered fully without some complexity and a good deal of background knowledge (most of which is included in the Wikpedia somewhere, but discovering would take some time).
For instance, to take an example from the world of computer science, if I wanted to describe the proof that SAT is NP-complete. To understand an article on this, you need to:
* understand the concept of a mathematical proof. * understand Boolean logic, including the concept of satisfiability. * understand the concept of an algorithm. * understand the concept and workings of a Turing machine, and the Church-Turing thesis. * have a reasonably detailed understanding of the low-level workings of a computer, including the relationship between that and a Turing machine. * understand what a decision problem is - and thus be clear on what the SAT decision problem is. * understand what a complexity class is an how problems can be placed in them. * understand nondeterminism in the context of a Turing machine. * understand the classes P and NP. * understand the concept of transforming problems into instances of other problems. * given the above, appreciate what NP-complete means.
Once all those concepts have been grasped, then and only then is it possible and useful to go through the proof, which still requires a certain degree of mental agility to follow. Some of the above steps are easy to grasp and can be explained in a couple of sentences. Some take weeks to teach from scratch.
I describe the above not to blow my own trumpet (anybody with a computer science degree would be able to rattle off the same stuff) but to demonstrate that some things simply aren't explainable in terms your average fifth-grader (or even your average university graduate in an unrelated field) can understand immediately. I can think of lots of others in computer science, and the same commentary applies to other areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the rest of the sciences.
It's not just the sciences, either. Musical theory, philosophy, the entire social sciences, law, and so on, all have concepts that take a great deal of background knowledge to explain succinctly and precisely.
At this point, you might well wonder, "If these points are so arcane, why is the Wikipedia covering them at all?" My reply is that there's plenty of people who do have the background to read this type of article who would find the Wikipedia a useful reference, that given some time and determination all the information needed to understand the underlying concepts should be placed in the Wikipedia (including references to other sources to provide additional perspectives on an issue where required), and seeing that the Wikipedia has essentially unlimited room there is no reason not to include them if somebody wants to write them.
However, I certainly agree that such articles should, in their introductory paragraph(s), include a simple, easy-to-read explanation of the concept, making any handwaves necessary to achieve comprehensibility, and referring the reader back to a more general, accessible article on the broader topic. Concepts should also be linked back to Wikipedia articles explaining them to write articles about them.
After all that verbiage, I strongly disagree with the idea of splitting Wikipedia up at this stage. Make sure we provide comprehensible introductions to articles, readable overviews, and concentrate on clear writing, and most of Wikipedia will be comprehensible to most people who try to read it (perhaps with some help for younger children, but they're going to need help with any other reference). The topics that won't be comprehensible are unlikely to be read by them, anyway.
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
I strongly disagree with the idea of splitting Wikipedia up at this stage. Make sure we provide comprehensible introductions to articles, readable overviews, and concentrate on clear writing, and most of Wikipedia will be comprehensible to most people who try to read it (perhaps with some help for younger children, but they're going to need help with any other reference).
In many cases that should read "perhaps with some help *from* younger children".
Ec
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