[WikiEN-l] Re:Writing with our readers in mind

Sun Jul 10 21:40:51 UTC 2005

A good example of the difficulties is outlined in today's featured article on the Island Fox. The bit on the main page includes the sentence "Its small size is a result of [[island dwarfing]], a kind of [[allopatric speciation]]". Come again! To find out what that means you have to wade through the technical article [[island dwarfing]] and [[allopatric speciation]] - and to begin to understand the latter, you also have to try to understand [[speciation]]. I think it means - "It is small because it is on a small island", but why not just say that?

I have made a proposal called "Wikipedia is not an academic text" on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not , though I am sure others can think of a better wording. I suggest putting an explicit statement under a Wikipedia "policy" - and then maybe forming a WikiProject to simplify technical articles. The first aim would be to encourage existing editors of articles to simplify them - perhaps by subst'ing boilerplate text onto article talkpages outlining that the article seems to use too technical language and we'd like it to use non-technical language so it can have a wider audience - maybe also with an offer of a non-expert to help.

Jon (jguk)

Fastfission wrote:

I just want to say -- what we are talking about here is not "academic
style" but more accurately "technical style" -- something accessible
only to experts of certain types of information (which can be
philosophy or electronics or what have you). Plenty of academic
writing is nothing of the sort and should not be lumped in as such!
(the academic squeals)

The goal is to write well and comprehensibly for people with
non-technical backgrounds. Of course, there are times when our Wiki
technology allows us not to re-invent the wheel each time something
comes up, but of course this must be an issue of judgment rather than
strict policy.

FF

On 7/9/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 09/07/05, Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > It would be useful (if we don't already have it somewhere that I've missed) to have a firm statement that says articles should be written to be as intelligible to as many of our readers as possible, with our readers being anyone potentially searching for English-language information on the internet.
> >
> > Jon (jguk)
> 
> I guess you can't force people to write in a certain style.
> 
> But it's daft to write an encyclopaedia in an academic style. No
> academic in his right mind would refer to Wikipedia - I don't mean any
> offense, but that's just not it's place. They go to journals and
> texts.
> 
> What it is useful - what it should be aiming for - is to make subjects
> understandable to the 99.99% of the world that *isn't* expert in that
> field.
> 
> 
> Dan

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