User:Femke/readability

Wikipedia editors are pretty smart. Around 8% of us have a PhD, compared to 1.3% of the general population. 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" 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."

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?
Fortunately, 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

How to solve it?

 * 1) Shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs and shorter articles
 * 2) In addition to high-quality sourcing, also consult with sources meant for general audiences. How do they describe difficult concepts?
 * 3) Pictures
 * 4) Pictures that people without superhuman eyesight can read