Wikipedia talk:Readers first

Readers vs editors
I disagree strongly with readers first. For a very strange reason perhaps:

It divides people into editors and readers.

Our foundation principles state that everyone is an editor! All of our process is designed around the ability to edit pages.

Most people (probably you included) are editing wikipedia either because it's fun, and/or because it's useful for themselves. Why *else* would they contribute?

Kim Bruning 00:52, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the important thing to get out of Readers First is that the person writing the article is not the same as the person who will be reading it. Yes, that other person will also be a (possible) editor, but that doesn't mean we aren't different people who have different backgrounds. --malathion talk 01:15, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * It's like with jetliner oxygen masks, always write for yourself first, then think of others. Otherwise there's a chance that neither you nor others will ever see anything at all! :-) Kim Bruning 01:20, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * How do you think that analogy applies here? --malathion talk 01:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * At the risk of repeating myself, people generally edit wikipedia to scratch their own itch, or to fix a shortcoming for themselves, (or because it's fun, of course, but that comes later! :-) ), so to get started, well, making edits for yourself is no big deal. If you then later edit some more to improve for others, that's nice, or someone else might have already fix your work for fun of course :-) Kim Bruning 01:44, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Generally, I would say that what's fun about Wikipedia is not just the writing, but the idea of writing something that will be useful to someone else. I think this is a useful tip to help people to make their edits more encyclopedic and constructive for others. --malathion talk 01:50, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Except where it discriminates between readers and editors, which I'm not too pleased about :-) Kim Bruning 02:10, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Perhaps we could find a better name for the policy, that doesn't make the sharp distinction between intellectual editors and simple readers. How about Write for your mother? ;-) &mdash; Matt Crypto 11:33, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Elite writing for readers
At first glance, I thought this policy said nothing nontrivial. After all, of course we are writing to be read. There's hardly any point in saying so. At second glance, I realized that it did say something nontrivial -- something that makes me very uncomfortable. Specifically, it is dangerous for anyone here to imply that they know better than the rest of us what The Readers want. It is, after all, the same unacceptable tactic as the old line, "the lurkers support me in email".

This is a wiki. People can speak for themselves. There is neither any reason nor any excuse for some editors to claim to speak for The Readers in criticizing the work of other editors. Doing so has frequently proven to be an abusive tactic of argumentation -- "you must do what I say, because otherwise you are Against The Readers." This tactic has been used in disagreements about image censorship, about the AD/BC and BCE/CE abbreviations, and so on, on WikiEN-L as well as on talk pages.

It is always unacceptable to arrogate to oneself the privilege of speaking for others. This "Readers First" proposal seems too much like an entering-wedge for that mistake. --FOo 02:53, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * A good point, but it only applies insofar as this proposal is specific about what the readers want. The general principle, that editors should be encouraged to think about a broad range of potential readers, is sound. Bovlb 04:15:13, 2005-07-29 (UTC)


 * Indeed. I rather like this policy in toto, though the "always avoid the correct technical terms except when you can't be bothered, and instead belabour the point by attempting to explain extremely complex ideas in five words or fewer" (paraphrased ;-)) concept is one that, I have to confess, has me rather bemused.
 * James F. (talk) 10:55, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Overly detailed articles
I like this. I think it is a good codification of common sense, and is very valuable as a general guideline to point people at. I'm not sure we need to make it a concrete policy, though; working out a sensible level of assumed technical knowledge from the reader is, and should remain, a judgement call by editors. For example, many maths articles (C0-semigroup) are never going to be written in such a way that the average high-school student can grasp, nor should we bother, because these are deeply technical topics that the average high-school student would never have a need to look up. (My candidate for "Incomprehensible Article of the Week" would be Plastic -- we all think we know what plastic is in everyday use, but this article doesn't really help the everyday reader understand the topic). &mdash; Matt Crypto 11:29, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I also strongly disagree with this: "explain all jargon clearly on the article page - a link to another article is not enough". Part of the usefulness of links is that they eliminate much of the need to clutter the article with footnote or parenthetical remarks to explain a concept; the link is sufficient to explain the concept to any reader without the requisite knowledge. I would suggest changing this to, "Consider briefly explaining obscure jargon inline, rather than relying on links to other articles, particularly if the expected audience of the page is unlikely to be familiar with the term." or something. &mdash; Matt Crypto 11:42, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm with Matt on this one. Could you imagine if all the jargon in C0-semigroup had to be explained in the article? It would entail instructing the reader in mathematics up to the level where they'd be sufficiently educated to understand the concept, all done right there in the article! The ability to link to other articles where you can get an explanation of a term is surely one of the defining characteristics of the hypertext model we employ. This is why our article count can't readily be compared with traditional encyclopaedias to get a measure of our comprehensiveness. Asking editors to explain terms in the article instead of just providing a link so the reader can go and have a look if they aren't familiar with it is proposing a massive and fundamental change to the way we have always written wiki articles. Since jguk wrote this proposal I'm surprised it didn't occur to him that the cricket articles he spends much of his time on are hopeless from a jargon-explaining point of view if the reader is not expected to follow the links. Have a read of slip (cricket) or Australia v Bangladesh 18 June 2005 and imagine you're unfamiliar with cricket and incapable of following links to other articles. I can't help but think this page was just created to further the AD/BC cause in the interminable eras debate, as one of their main lines of attack is to claim readers are incapable of understanding CE/BCE. &mdash; Trilobite (Talk) 12:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Trilobite. Maurreen (talk) 16:29, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Article accessibility
Unfortunately someone lobbed the "proposed policy or guideline" template on the project page. I never intended this to be policy or guideline. It's more a drive towards making more articles accessible to more people. After all, it's better to have an article that can be understood by 1,000 readers rather than none at all. The point here is that it is better still if 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 can understand and learn from it.

As far as how this is meant to pre-suppose what readers want - it only assumes that readers want accurate and informative articles that they can understand and that they enjoy reading. It makes no more assumptions than that. It's not meant to be a panacea to be applied everywhere (and it will not resolve or help the BC/BCE dispute). But it may improve other articles. Take the article on chromosomes, for instance. Don't look at it yet. What would you expect/want such an article to offer?

I think it should tell a reader not familiar with biology what a chromosome is and why it is important. It should explain to that same reader what it does. It may have a small section at the end containing technical details for someone with more advanced knowledge, but really I'd be surprised if there's much that can't be explained to a novice.

Now look at the article. It tells me nothing. Not what one is, not why it's important. To me (and I guess to anyone else who is unfamiliar with what a chromosome really is) it is meaningless. And it's here that Wikipedia ceases to function as a proper encyclopaedia. I also ask myself, what would it cost to those who already know quite a bit about biology if the article was more accessible. The answer's nothing - no information needs to be deleted, none should be removed. It's just a question of rephrasing so that more can comprehend.

This is what Readers First is about. Encouraging editors of articles to think about their audience - and in particular to aim for as wide an audience as possible. Einstein wrote a best-seller on relativity and Hawkings a best-seller on time (although the later chapters admittedly beat many people). They did show that complicated ideas can be explained to a general population. There's no reason why we should not try to make our articles as accessible to as many as possible.

If there's anybody who understands what chromosomes are and who has the patience to explain them to a layman, I'd be happy to work with them to show exactly how the article can be improved, jguk 19:24, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Biology articles on wikipedia just simply suck. :-P Be happy there's any there at all at the moment. My goodness. It sould start out with Evolution being sorted out. There's simply no article on that subject. (And no, Evolution is definately not it!).


 * Oh hmm, if you want to write clear articles, how about having instructions on how to make clear articles? This set ain't it :-)


 * Ah! Yes chromosomes. Well, if you're a cell, you gotta store all your data somewhere. Cells store their data on DNA molecules, but where do you put all your DNA? Well, if you're a simple minded creature (prokaryote,bacteria,archaea(?)), maybe all the data fits on a single paired strand of dna (yes, in the famous helix shape), which you can then conveniently just tie into a ring, and leave it floating in your cytoplasm (that's "the guts of the cell")


 * Well, if you're all very complex (and have a metabolism either designed by microsoft, or one that's been evolving longer than *nix ;-) )- in fact if you're an eukaryote, having a single ring of DNA just isn't quite going to cut it to store your data. Really really long strands of DNA have this tendency to break, you see. So what you do is you take all your DNA, and have it in multiple paired strands, which you pack up in shockproof proteins (think analogous to polystyrene or bubble wrap :-P), and shove them all into a seperate organelle called the nucleus where you keep them all together. A single such handydandy bubblewrapped paired strand of DNA is called a chromosome. When cells are dividing (mitosis, meiosis), these chromosomes get all extra-tightly rolled up for transport, and the result is actually big enough to see under a normal light microscope. It's quite cool to just be able to actually *see* the DNA of a creature like that  :-)


 * This might need to be boringized, and slightly un-lie-to-childrened, but would that make a good intro? Kim Bruning 14:09, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Template removal
The removal of the template implies that this page has been accepted by the community, which doesn't appear to be the case.

Jguk says above: "Unfortunately someone lobbed the "proposed policy or guideline" template on the project page. I never intended this to be policy or guideline. It's more a drive towards making more articles accessible to more people."

Being that the project page sets out a box specifically designating "Guidelines", it's hard to see how the page is not proposing "guidelines".

"Drive" is defined as "an organized movement to achieve some purpose". The page is not an organized movement, it is static instruction.

Jguk has been opposed to instruction creep in the past. If this material is kept, I don't see that it deserves its own page. Maurreen (talk) 22:57, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Spot on
I'm very glad that this has been written as it's absolutely spot on. There is no point in writing to a level higher than that of Mr Average - no-one who is already expert in a particular area would come reading about it in Wikipedia, but so many articles have ended up being written to that level. The articles on drugs are perfect examples: many, many people are interested in the likes of fluoxetine and paracetamol, but much of either article is inpenetrable. Let me put it this way: my mum recently wanted know more about both, and I naturally pointed her to Wikipedia. Needless to say, when I read those articles I wasn't in the least bit suprised that she'd come away disappointed. Dan100 (Talk) 22:22, July 30, 2005 (UTC)
 * You say, "no-one who is already expert in a particular area would come reading about it in Wikipedia". I strongly disagree. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a reference work, not a textbook, and experts are always using reference works. Few people can store all the knowledge they need in their heads, even when they are thoroughly familiar with a field. I don't disagree with the need to factor in the needs of "Average" readers, but we shouldn't exclude the needs of "Expert" readers also. &mdash; Matt Crypto 22:47, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
 * EEK, AARGH! Dangerous meme! Now you guys are dividing between editors and readers too, Let's not do that! Can't we rename delete this page? Kim Bruning 23:46, 30 July 2005 (UTC) I'm fine with making articles accesible to all, no problem, I'd like to argue in its favor, but what this page is doing is arbitrarily dividing between 2 classes that didn't exist before the creation of this page. Anyone can edit wikipedia, we're all editors. Let's not make a division. Kim Bruning 23:49, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Erk, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm not sure where you're coming from here ;-) Where was I suggesting a division between those who read and those who edit? Reading and editing are actions available to everyone: all who edit read at some point (one would hope!), and many of those who read edit. But regardless of whether someone edits or not, we're discussing the extent to which we make pages accessible to everyone who reads, or "readers" in a shorthand word. I was arguing that experts may read about topics they already know a lot about (they will edit too, hopefully, but that's beside the point). &mdash; Matt Crypto 10:26, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Practical guide to building accessibility
I have a single, simple recommendation for anyone who is concerned about accessibility. Rather than preaching and magnifying instruction creep, instead simply proceed in normal Wiki fashion:


 * 1) Select an article which you find difficult to understand.
 * 2) Come up with some questions that you'd like answered.
 * 3) Ask them on that article's talk page, or on Reference desk.
 * 4) Integrate the answers with the article, or ask the answerers to do so.
 * 5) Repeat with a new article.

There is no need for any "movement", and certainly no need to pound on the spurious, harmful Readers-vs.-Editors myth.

By the way, I'd like to specifically repudiate and condemn the claim that "there is no point in writing to a level higher than that of Mr Average". When I read an encyclopedia entry, I do so to raise my level of knowledge of the subject matter. If the article is so simplistic that it is unable to tell me anything I don't already know, it fails. Likewise, if the article uses dumbed-down language in an effort to avoid "jargon" (that is, precise language used by practitioners), then it leaves me unable to talk about the subject with anyone who really does know it. (Experts use jargon not to obfuscate, but because jargon offers a level of precision unavailable in ordinary language. This is as true in science as it is in knitting.) --FOo 16:55, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Brilliant summary
As an editor of many years, this is the first time I have stumbled across this. What a superb brief summary. I should like to expand it, but that of course would not be the point – do you know how many pages WP:MOS has? I don't!

I may, however, quote it in WP:RFD, my usual hangout and (you may have guessed) a near typo to this. It encapsulates what we try to do at RfD: Not what is "right" in some abstract editor way, but what will serve our readers best? We must make educated guesses across the realms of all topics, but we have a good bunch who sort it out as best we can, without malice and with much intelligence It's good place to hang out since there is such a variety of topics from across the speculum.

Superb. Si Trew (talk) 07:03, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Looking for something similar but not quite this
The main point of this essay (which could use a nutshell, btw) seems to be that editors should keep in mind readers, many of whom may be different than themselves. I'm looking for an essay to cite that expresses something similar but very distinct from this: that the interests of editors and readers are distinct, and that content in mainspace should be tailored for readers rather than editors. Such an essay would be cited, for instance, to rebut proposals to further blur the front-end and back-end portions of WP, or to explain the differences between Wikipedia and WP:About. Does such an essay exist? Sdkb (talk) 06:57, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Update: I found pretty much what I was looking for in WP:READER, which was very unhelpfully not previously linked in the see also section. I fixed that. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 06:55, 4 April 2020 (UTC)