[WikiEN-l] Three cheers for Wikipedia's cancer info (or two and a half)

[William Pietri]

On 06/02/2010 10:01 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>> FAs are frequently all but unreadable to the casual reader. How
>> >  feasible would it be to add "intro clear to casual reader"? I realise
>> >  some topics are just never going to be that clear ... particularly
>> >  with the tendency for FAs to be about specialised topics.
>>      
> And I realise I've just said "hey, let's add another rule!" which is
> an intrinsically bad thing. So if someone can come up with another
> idea then that would be really good.
>    

Can we just test the readability to the casual reader? No rules or 
anything; just make the data available and trust that people will use it 
wisely.

I could imagine a few different approaches to that:

   1. On every page we put a feedback widget. A simple
      three-clicks-and-done thing, with the option to offer more detail.
   2. Randomly sampling readers, where we ask 1 reader in X for their
      opinion on the article.
   3. A separate article evaluation tool, somewhat like
      fivesecondtest.com. Anybody can nominate a page for evaluation.
      Volunteer readers are assigned random pages. They give feedback.
      Maybe, to see if the basic ideas come across, they also summarize
      what they remember after the page is closed.
   4. Something like Mechanical Turk, where we test different versions
      of the same paragraph or section to see which works better with
      readers.


All of these have their issues, and I'm sure there are others, but 
basically I'm saying that we could use our vast  traffic and the immense 
goodwill of our readers to get real data on reader experience.

William