[Wikipedia-l] Simple English and English look too confusingly similar

[Erik Moeller]

I just read this blog entry from January:
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/04/academia_and_wikipedia.php

The author, Danah Boyd, a notable blogger and expert in social networks, 
criticized "the Wikipedia entry" for "social network", but she actually 
referenced the entry on the Simple English Wikipedia. What's worse, 
nobody in the comments corrected her, even though they clearly went to 
the English Wikipedia to look up different topics and compare.

I suspect Danah googled for the title rather than visiting Wikipedia. 
Picking the wrong site is an easy mistake to make, since, except for the 
word "Simple" in the URL and page title, articles from the two sites 
look exactly the same. The concept of a "Simple English" Wikipedia is 
also not a trivial one to grasp even if someone actually does see it in 
the title, so they may just ignore it and think it's some strange 
Internet thing. After all, many addresses have things like "www10" or 
even arbitrary server names in the front.

If an expert can make that mistake, I'm sure many other people have, 
wondering why all the Wikipedia articles they looked at were written in 
very juvenile prose and incomplete.

I strongly recommend that we change the look and feel of the Simple 
English Wikipedia to avoid that confusion, perhaps going so far to add a 
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]] to that effect. A somewhat different logo would 
also help. The changes I can make without being a sysop are limited, 
though, and Simple is not particularly active, so I thought I'd bring 
this to the attention of the list first.

Regards,

Erik