Have you ever looked at a Wikipedia article and noticed the opening paragraph looks like it was written for somebody who knows a lot more than you do? Look up something like Planck’s Constant and you’ll see the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia version looks like it was intended for a physics major.
But that’s why there’s something called the Simple English Wikipedia.
Simple English Wikipedia is actually a subdomain of the regular Wikipedia, but it’s one where the content of articles is generally simpler. It uses Basic English words and grammar, and shorter sentences. (You could compare it to xkcd’s “Up Goer Five”, except that “Up Goer Five” is even simpler—it uses only the thousand most commonly-used words. Which is not to say it hasn’t also inspired attempts at imitation, including more by the xkcd author himself.)
Simple English only has a handful of articles compared to the original Wikipedia—114,000 rather than 4,920,000—but that’s still enough for quite a few complicated concepts and ideas—such as a much more comprehensible definition of Planck’s Constant.
And, really, this is necessary. One of my Twitter friends said “if Wikipedia is ‘too hard,’ it’s time for us to pack it in as a species,” but the thing is, because Wikipedia is so easy for people to edit, it can be hard for people to read—because a lot of the time, people lack enough empathy to put them in the shoes of the person reading the definition. People like to write complex explanations and show off how smart they are, when they should be doing exactly the opposite. Really, Simple English Wikipedia seems like a great idea. Hopefully, more people will contribute simple articles.
Incidentally, if you’re curious to see how well you would do at making an “Up Goer Five”-style explanation, this edit box will let you know if you use a forbidden word.
