[Wikimedia-l] Phonetic text and Easy to read texts

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2013/2/12 Anders Wennersten <mail at anderswennersten.se>:
> We had an expert from a center for for "promoting Easy to read text" to look
> into some of our introduction text for some articles on on sv:wp.
>
> She reacted strongly in us in some cases having phonetic text in parenthesis
> in the first sentence, explaining that people unused of reading reads on
> word at a time, and then just gets stuck on these strange part (and will not
> be able to read on)
>
> I also finds it seem to be common pratice on all versions, se for example
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II

It bothers me, too. There is a source for - putting birth dates,
phonetic pronunciation and foreign spelling in parentheses after the
article name is the usual practice in printed dictionaries and
encyclopedias. Wikipedia makes it even richer, because we are not
really limited by the glyph inventory of our printing press, we have
Unicode and can write all names in all scripts relatively easily. (By
"relatively" I mean that we are somewhat limited by the font inventory
of our readers, but this is gradually being resolved.)

However, despite the fact that we are following a fine tradition, I do
agree that it makes the opening sentence hard to read.

> are there other local initiatives to make our texts more easily read? Or
> where could it be appropriate to discuss if phonetic texts should not
> generally be transferred to the infoboxes?

Moving such information it to infoboxes is probably a good idea,
although I'd love to hear some expert advice from designers and
typography professionals.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬