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Wikipedia editors are pretty smart.[citation needed] Around 8% of us have a PhD,[1] compared to 1.3% of the general population.[2] Having a lot of education may help us write accurate information, but it may also be a hinder. If we spend our time around other people with degree, we may start overestimating the general population's reading ability. A push to use high-quality reliable sources further means we'll often use academic sources. Those sources serve a much more elitist audience than we. There may be a tendency to follow the same style however, leaving our articles too difficult to understand.
According to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, "the closest thing we have to a Prime Directive"[3] is to:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."[4][5]
The sum of all knowledge for Every Single Person" is an ambitious goal. Of course, we're not really trying that.. You can't provide information that is both reasonably complete and understandable to a toddler. But we should be trying harder to provide information that most adults and teens can understand, even if they've not had the privilege of attending university.
Is this really a problem?
editFortunately, a lot of research has been done on readability of Wikipedia. A significant portion of research is related to our treatment of medical articles, but there are also a few more general studies
| Field | Study | Results |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple | [6] | WP much more difficult than Britannica |
| Multiple | [7] | 75% of Wikipedia articles score below the desired readability score |
| Health | [8] | The readability of the 25 most accessed disease articles is too difficult, but has improved between 2008 and 2018. |
| Health | [9] | Our information about medication is much more difficult that the average reader in the US can understand. |
How to solve it?
edit- Shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs and shorter articles
- In addition to high-quality sourcing, also consult with sources meant for general audiences. How do they describe difficult concepts?
- Pictures
- Pictures that people without superhuman eyesight can read
References
edit- ^ "Wikipedia editors study" (PDF). WMF. 2011.
- ^ "How many people have a PhD? Data from OECD countries - Master Academia". master-academia.com. 2023-01-14. Retrieved 2023-04-29.
- ^ Wikipedia edit by User:Jimbo Wales, 22:49, 14 October 2012 (UTC) Full quote:"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." is the closest thing we have to a Prime Directive. "Everyone can edit" is a means to that end, and very very very far down the list."
- ^ "Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds". Slashdot.org (Interview, Q&A). SlashdotMedia. July 28, 2004. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
Wikipedia is an excellent project, and Slashdot readers' questions for Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were just as excellent -- as are Jimmy Wales' answers to 12 of the highest-moderated questions you submitted.
- ^ "Wikimedia vision". Wikimedia Foundation. August 4, 2018. Retrieved August 30, 2022.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
- ^ Jatowt, Adam; Tanaka, Katsumi (2012-10-29). "Is wikipedia too difficult? comparative analysis of readability of wikipedia, simple wikipedia and britannica". Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. CIKM '12. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 2607–2610. doi:10.1145/2396761.2398703. ISBN 978-1-4503-1156-4.
- ^ Lucassen, Teun; Dijkstra, Roald; Schraagen, Jan Maarten (2012-08-20). "Readability of Wikipedia". First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v0i0.3916. ISSN 1396-0466.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ Brezar, Aleksandar; Heilman, James. "Readability of English wikipedia's health information over time". WikiJournal of Medicine. 6 (1): 1–6. doi:10.3316/informit.984404208892889.
- ^ Candelario, Danielle M.; Vazquez, Victoria; Jackson, William; Reilly, Timothy (2017-03-01). "Completeness, accuracy, and readability of Wikipedia as a reference for patient medication information". Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. 57 (2): 197–200.e1. doi:10.1016/j.japh.2016.12.063. ISSN 1544-3191.