Wikipedia talk:Meetup/SDGs/Communication of environment SDGs

Creating an account and picking a Wikipedia user name

 * You can create a Wikipedia account by clicking "create account" at the top right of the main Wikipedia page. This link is visible only if you are not logged in already.
 * This page explains how to select a suitable user name, please read it before deciding on your Wikipedia user name: WP:Username policy.

Help to get started, suggestions for easy tasks
This page from an online edit-a-thon in 2020 gives you some guidance if it's your first time to edit Wikipedia articles. It also makes some suggestions for the types of tasks you could do in order to contribute: Meetup/Online edit-a-thon on climate change - November 2020

Available video tutorials for new editors
There are five short editing tutorial videos (created in 2022) available in my Youtube Playlist. For anyone who hasn't done much editing yet I recommend that you take a look to see if there is anything there that you didn't know yet. - The videos were recorded during a live training session (webinar) I did for Julia Barrott at SEI in July. I call it a "train the trainer" session. - Content of the five parts from the "train the trainer" session:
 * Part 1: Quality assurance, watchlists, reviewing new edits
 * Part 2: Quality of existing articles, the lead, article history, page statistics
 * Part 3: how to edit, uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, using excerpts
 * Part 4: why and how to interact with other editors on Wikipedia, talk pages
 * Part 5: Creating new Wikipedia articles (pros and cons), using redirects EMsmile (talk) 07:36, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Videos to show how to add references

 * There are several videos in my Youtube Playlist that deal with how to add references, see for example Videos 4, 5 and 7.
 * There is also a video in the playlist (Video Number 7) to show how I add references for the IPCC chapter reports (they do have a DOI number now but the DOI does not work yet). The same method can also be used for any publication where the more convenient "automatic" form doesn't work. E.g. whilst many UN and WHO reports carry ISBN numbers, I find that in Wikipedia when I use "cite, automatic" it doesn't work with those ISBN numbers. EMsmile (talk) 07:36, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Basic guidance for readability improvements
The readability of many Wikipedia articles is low, meaning they are difficult to understand. This difficulty in understanding the sentences may apply in particular to younger people, people without an academic degree, not used to complicated English or for those who do not have English as their native language.

Here are some examples how you can help to improve the situation:
 * Replace long words with short words whenever possible.
 * Reduce sentences to 15-20 words. Sometimes it's as simple as turning one long sentence into two short ones. (however, breaking up sentences can detract from the flow or it can result in quite "staccato" text and may not flow as well as more complex sentences; keep this in mind when editing for readability.)
 * Reduce paragraphs to 5-6 lines. Readers skim over dense, non-stop text. Paragraph breaks offer white space and give readers a chance to breathe.
 * Consider converting passive voice to active voice.

A useful tool to check the readability of a specific Wikipedia page is by using this tool (webfx) or this tool (online utility) Then, see if you can improve the readability score. On the 0-100 scale, higher is better for the Flesh reading ease score. Aim for at least 55. EMsmile (talk) 08:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Chat GPT
You can ask chat GPT "how would you say this sentence "xxx" in easier language?" (or similar).

In-built Wikipedia readability tool (under "tools" on the right)
Readability tool: To install this script, go to your common.js and add the following line: importScript('User:Phlsph7/Readability.js'); // Backlink: User:Phlsph7/Readability.js For example this is my common.js page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EMsmile/common.js

Hemingway App
A helpful tool is Hemingway App. It highlights long and complex sentences, passive voice verbs, and adverbs (which are often, but not always, unnecessary). It also provides some statistics and a grade-level reading score. It doesn't choke on jargon which is important. If you want to try it, then just copy your text, go to the website, and paste it into the middle of their webpage (as if to replace the description/instructions there). EMsmile (talk) 08:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Quillbot
For anyone working on readability or on paraphrasing quotes: I've just started to use Quillbot. Wow, it's a revelation! I am almost shocked at how good their AI-algorithm is. It would be perfect for students who want to copy stuff from the internet but not be caught... (after about 5 uses, it's asked me to sign up for a free account. I've done that now. So far it's still for free, I'll see if it's asking me to pay at some point; if it's good, I might do that even).EMsmile (talk) 07:41, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Further information by User:Dtetta: "Regarding Quillbot - thanks for finding that tool Elisabeth! I checked it out with the NOAA edits to the ocean acidification article. It seems like it does a very good job when you’re dealing with every day kinds of concepts, such as the introductory sentences in the ocean acidification article. It’s not quite as good at paraphrasing text that involves more detailed scientific concepts, like the sentences in the article that deal with how seawater chemistry affects the organisms that rely on calcium carbonate shells. From what I could see in terms of pricing, the premium service is $20 per month, and about $100 per year. . . they clearly give a pretty good yearly discount. I’ll stick with the free service for now, and see how many edits I can do on that plan." EMsmile (talk) 07:41, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * That's very good to know. The price is not cheap but I hope the free version will carry me a long way. I've used it so far to convert quotes from the IPCC report into text that is easier and "different" so that I get around the copyright problem. So I am very happy about that. But good to know that it would struggle with the more complex science type sentences. EMsmile (talk) 07:41, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Readable
Another option is the Readable tool. There is also a Readable pro service: It looks like the cost would be $24 per month for 6 users. Further information by User:Dtetta:
 * The improvement suggestions that Readable and Hemingway give are both fairly limited. One thing Readable does do is give you alternatives for hard to read words, which I like (didn’t notice that on Hemingway). It’s also a bit easier to see the immediate effect of an edit you try on Readable. But neither give you full sentence alternatives to difficult sentences - guess the AI just isn’t there yet.
 * I personally usually go to Readable first, but will often check on Hemingway as well (it finds adverbs, but doesn’t give you alternative phrasings).
 * Another nice feature is that you can download readability reports for a given text in case you want to share them.
 * Readable helps me be much more efficient when I am doing the readability improvement edits. And it makes the whole process much less confusing. The feature that does this is the ability to save texts and then reload them into the readability analysis tool. For this article I saved the original text in one file, put the original NOAA edits that I used for the first updates to the article in another file, and then experimented with the NOAA language that I had put on the page to figure out what modifications worked best to improve readability, saving that as a third file.

Working with content experts and adjusting their contributions
This is my message in a nutshell: Further details:
 * Many Wikipedia articles have low readability (i.e. difficult to understand).
 * Our project has an emphasis on improving that. We use the quality parameter “readability” to score that. I use this free website to calculate the readability score: https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/
 * Content experts are usually not that good with writing in simpler language. It’s our job to translate their edits into simpler language.
 * Readability is a parameter that we have weighted very highly in our quality score assessment, see here (20% of the overall score in Phase 2 and yet for most of our articles, even after 2 years of work, the readability score remained low. (note readability is calculated with an algorithm which takes into account e.g. the length of sentences but also the number of multiple-syllable words; as a result, an article about “sustainability” will score low on readability because the term “sustainability” has so many syllables; this is a problem)
 * When we receive comments back from content experts (e.g. a marked up Word document), their suggestions would often make readability worse. That’s because they are content experts, not science communicators. This is where we come in! When we enter the experts’ comments into the Wikipedia article, we need to adjust their language into something that the public can understand. Easy example: experts often send us very long convoluted sentence. We break a long sentence into 2 or 3 and voilà it’s already easier to read (and easier to translate if people later translate it into other languages).
 * My experience is that the content experts have no objections when we modify their text submissions into text that is easier to understand. However sometimes, we might change the meaning of a sentence (by mistake). Therefore, ideally, the expert will read over our new improved versions after we’ve entered it into the Wikipedia article. So there are usually several rounds of editing involved. EMsmile (talk) 08:57, 12 October 2022 (UTC) EMsmile (talk) 08:58, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

The right timing or sequence
Our problem is that extensive work on readability does not make that much sense when the article’s content is poor and messy. So theoretically, work on readability can only take place properly after the article has been upgraded for good content. In our case though we do try to work on all quality parameters in parallel, so when we add new content we should make it easy to read at the same time.

The idea is to work on readability only for those articles that are already in good shape with regards to content. When we add new content that is sent to us by content experts, we should always have readability in mind, and improve readability as we go along, using the simple steps as outlined above. EMsmile (talk) 08:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Working on article leads
How to improve leads? Here is some guidance, using the IPCC article as an example: Regarding the lead of the IPCC article, perhaps before you start on the readability issue you need to check for content first. The lead is meant to be a summary of the article, not an introduction. It’s supposed to be about 600 words long, 4 paragraphs and summarise the entire article. E.g. if the article contains a sizeable section on criticism, then a summary of that criticism section should be in the lead. (see here for more info. Therefore the order of attack might be:
 * 1) Review and improve the content and structure of the article in its entire length. Don’t be scared to cut out outdated stuff or to move things to sub-articles.
 * 2) I think the article is still a bit long. We could easily shorten also those excerpts, e.g. taking just one paragraph, not two from the sub-article in the excerpt. (let me know if anything is unclear about the excerpts, it’s basically just a mirrored text from the lead of another article)
 * 3) Work on readability of the main text
 * 4) Work on content of the lead, ensuring it’s a good summary
 * 5) Work on readability of the lead.
 * 6) But the whole process is always quite iterative. If you prefer to tackle content and readability together (in parallel), that also works. EMsmile (talk) 07:47, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Should articles have a section on criticism?
If the article already has a section on criticism, do pay close attention. Keep in mind also the WP guidance on this: WP:Criticism. In a nutshell: section heading called “criticism” is not actually recommended, it’s normally called something else. Articles should include significant criticisms of the subject while avoiding undue weight and POV forking. Compare with the article on the SDGs where I have now called it "conceptual problem areas". EMsmile (talk) 07:56, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Paraphrasing content from IPCC reports as they are not open access
If the IPCC reports were open access we could just copy and paste directly from them. See for example how I did it here for the “sustainability” article where I added content from an open access publication like this. In the references list, it looks like this: "Bosselmann, Klaus (2010). "Losing the Forest for the Trees: Environmental Reductionism in the Law". Sustainability. 2 (8): 2424–2448. doi:10.3390/su2082424. ISSN 2071-1050. CC-BY icon.svg Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." Whereas for IPCC reports I can’t do that. As a result I would have to quote either with quotation marks or I would have to paraphrase and summarise “in my own words” (a good tool for this is Quillbot). Using long quotes is frowned upon in Wikipedia articles, see e.g. here where another Wikipedian pointed this out. EMsmile (talk) 08:20, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Adding wikilinks
Make sure you use wikilinks often but keeping in mind not to overlink, see here: Help:Link. Do add wikilinks for technical terms.EMsmile (talk) 08:33, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Only one space after fullstops
Let’s use only one space after fullstop at the end of a sentence. EMsmile (talk) 08:34, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Let's generally use the long ref style (with page numbers)
In Wikipedia there is a "long ref style" and a "short ref style". Articles with very long lists of references often use the "short ref style", like climate change. You can easily see the difference: articles with long ref style have just one references list at the end. Articles with short ref style have two lists: one for references and one for "sources".

For this project here, let's generally use the long ref style, unless the article is already in short ref style and other Wikipedians insist that it should stay like that (check on the talk page before changing it). See also here for a previous discussion. Advantages of the long ref style:
 * It is much easier to understand for new editors.
 * It does not result in broken links when content and references are copied from one article to another.
 * It can be corrected automatically using the automatic generator with a DOI number (all the IPCC report chapters now have a DOI number (although right now they don't seem to work)).
 * It's easier to see how many times the same publication is cited (which I find an interesting metric). EMsmile (talk) 08:37, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Page numbers (for reports) should be added by using this syntax in source editor after the reference: for page 6. It will generate a small superscript after a colon, like this:. (this is not a Wikipedia-wide recommendation but only a recommendation for the team members of this project). See for example at climate change adaptation. This is also explained in Video 4 of this Youtube Playlist.

American or British English spelling?
When you start editing Wikipedia articles, the question arises: American English or British English? The guidance is: keep the language version that is currently dominant. See here for more: WP:ENGVAR. If I have a choice, I tend to make articles in American English (like if I start a new one, or if the article uses a wild mixture of s and z). But for the main articles with the WikiProject Climate Change, the convention has become to use British English (generally speaking). I remember User:Femke once saying: We Europeans have put so much effort into climate change awareness (in Wikipedia and in general) that we might as well stick to the British English version as a small reward… EMsmile (talk) 08:42, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
 * You can also add the language flag to the talk page to make it clear. E.g. here. So either: or  which looks like this on the top of the talk page:  or . EMsmile (talk) 08:42, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

What to add on your user page
This applies to anyone who is working as part of this project which may or may not involve paid editing hours: You should included a mention of our project and also add the “member of WikiProject Climate Change” box. To do that, just add this: or  (one of them is black the other one is white). You don’t need to give away your personal information but some content about yourself is always useful. You also need to have a sentence or two on your user page explaining the potential WP:COI (conflict of interest) situation and to explain if you are paid or how the project is funded. Compare with the user pages of our team members so far here. EMsmile (talk) 08:48, 12 October 2022 (UTC)