[Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Michael Snow]

On 5/28/2012 5:08 PM, Anya Shyrokova wrote:
> 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.
The great advantage of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia is that it 
allows a community to collaborate in building it. As Anya's insight 
indicates, communities tend to develop their own language in order to 
communicate about issues. These languages invariably specialize to meet 
community needs, like conveying precise meanings, and become a little 
challenging for outsiders to understand (our own community jargon 
illustrates the point quite well).

Well, the great advantage of creating an encyclopedia on the web is that 
it enables us to use hyperlinks. In this environment, writing that uses 
a specialized vocabulary should take advantage of hyperlinks in order to 
explain the language. In theory, that alone would be able to solve most 
of the problem here.

I agree that academics, among others, may need to improve their writing 
styles in order to better serve our readers. But I think there are more 
fundamental cultural issues at work as well, and addressing some of 
those might produce an encyclopedia in which it's easier for writers to 
stick with language they find accurate and precise. These issues 
include: concerns about "overlinking" in article text; hostility to 
"redlinks" for articles not yet created; work that focuses exclusively 
on single articles rather than how they fit into the context of the 
encyclopedia; greater interest in working on new, hot topics than older, 
established knowledge; and lack of skill being applied to crafting 
articles about core concepts in many fields. For that matter, a stronger 
and more effectively utilized Wiktionary would help as well.

--Michael Snow