[Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Anya Shyrokova]

My main thought is that the statement: "Writing should be clear and
concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or
unnecessarily complex wording" is somewhat self-contradictory. Jargon
exists in order to increase precision and decrease vagueness/ unnecessary
wording. That is why academics, or really any community of professionals,
tend to develop it. However, if one uses too much of it, the reader begins
to feel that he needs a higher level degree to understand what's going on.
People who are not good writers tend to poorly handle the balance between
needing to use common language and being precise.

Getting people to "conform" to a style of writing that is somewhat
contradictory and may require a skilled eye to interpret seems to me a bit
of an unnecessarily complex battle. But I agree that maybe more can be done
to highlight to people that they aren't really writing in a way that others
understand. Or even somehow flagging to other editors who are better at
writing that re-styling may be necessary. I'm all for making it easy for
people to contribute their knowledge in a way they are comfortable with and
then making it easy for others to make that knowledge more accessible.
Divide and conquer, so to speak.

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> Today I was browsing the many fine articles that have been edited on EN as
> part of the Wikipedia initiative by the Association for Psychological
> Science.[1] There is no doubt that the articles which these professors and
> students have worked are better by any measure of quality.
>
> But I was left with a nagging annoyance: these articles are almost all
> incomprehensible to someone without a advanced college education and a high
> degree of proficiency in English. Topics as basic as [[job satisfaction]]
> or [[social network game]] are written like a literature review or a paper
> for a journal. When an article about gaming on Facebook is that academic, I
> think we might have a problem. ;-)
>
> That's not to say the articles written by regular volunteers are always so
> concise and clear. But I think it's pretty obvious that professors and grad
> students in particular have trouble adapting to a more general interest
> audience. This is an issue that could seriously impact how useful Wikipedia
> is to most of our potential readership around the world.
>
> I think the addition of uncovered topics and much-needed citations balances
> out the inherent tendency of academics to write unnecessarily complex
> prose. But maybe there are ways that folks in the General Education Program
> at the WMF and in volunteer projects can start to be bolder about letting
> academics know that they direly need to conform to the Wikipedia style of
> "Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid
> ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."
>
> Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
> any similar experiences?
>
> Steven
>
> 1.
>
> http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
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