[WikiEN-l] Academic study: Wikipedia cancer information accurate but hard to read

[Thomas Dalton]

On Sep 16, 2011 6:35 PM, "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> It is difficult to balance the needs of the general public, which reads
> more at a 5th grade level than a 9th grade level, with the need to
> present comprehensive information that would be of use to an oncologist.
>
> If we addressed this problem in a systemic way we would present alternate
> articles at differing levels of comprehensiveness and readability.
>
> Perhaps in the future.

If most people that have completed the ninth grade can't read at the ninth
grade level, you need to recalibrate your scale... Either that, or give up
on this nonsense that readability can be determined by word and sentence
length. It has far more to do with how engaging it is and how much prior
knowledge it assumes than how long the sentences are.

If people want something that doesn't require much language skill, we do
have Simple English Wikipedia. I haven't visited it in a while, so I'm not
sure how good it is these days.