[Wikipedia-l] A Three Way Split

Wed Sep 18 16:30:19 UTC 2002

Fred Bauder wrote:

>I was watching ABC news and saw a believable statistic, that 40% of the
>adult population can't read at the 5th grade level.  Not much we can do for
>them.
>
>But it got me thinking and then I read a short article in a book of exerpts
>from ETC about tailoring your writing to the semantic capacity of your
>audience 
>
>I have noted in my own writing style that I tend to mix up material of all
>three types in the opening paragraph. A conscious choice to write for our
>likely audiences would, IMO, result in a more useful (and authoritative)
>enclyclopedia.
>
The motivation for this is commendable, but I don't see it as a 
reasonable course of action.  It reflects the process that leads to a 
"dumbing down" of education.  More can probably be done to improve 
skills by having articles where the reader has to stretch just a little 
to be able to understand what's going on.

The 40% of "adults" who can't read above the 5th grade level are not 
likely to be using computers or spending a lot of time on the internet 
anyway.  The adults who did not graduate from high school probably have 
limited computer interest as well.  The most promissing audience is 
likely the student who is not yet old enough to have graduated.

There's a real challenge in knowing just who comes to Wikipedia to 
simply read select articles and why they read what they read.  Currently 
5 of the top 10 most viewed articles (after the Main Page) relate to 
9/11 and another two are of current affairs nature

In any event, writing in this three level fashion is a particularly 
difficult thing to do.  Those who are very knowledgeable in their own 
specialty sometimes have no appreciation of what it is that the general 
public wants to know about their subject.  Some subjects can't even be 
simplified at all.  How we interpret the concept of writing for the 
benefit of lower reading abilities is another problem again.  There was 
a situation a few years ago in the United States where the Internal 
Revenue Service decided that all of its tax guides should be written to 
be readable by people with a 10th grade reading level.  What that meant 
was that a long difficult word would be replaced by a phrase or even a 
whole sentence full of simpler words.  That made the the guides at least 
50% thicker.  The person who didn't care to read a 100 page manual, 
wasn't going to be any more enthusiastic about a 150 page manual even if 
it did contain simpler language.  To make matters worse, those people 
who were able to make enough sense of the guide to pick out what was 
relevant for them became turned out by the excess verbiage.

Asking that the lead paragraph of an article reasonably and succinctly 
defines the subject matter may be as much as we can hope for.

Ec