While some say that Wikipedia is actually against promoting real knowledge, it would seem that Wikipedia also promotoes simple knowledge. This may be old news to some — but I was actually quite surprised to come across simple.wikipedia.org. The idea behind Simple English Wikipedia is to provide a way for people who read little English to get the same knowledge that more proficient English readers would get from the regular Wikipedia (this is just as useful to kids, who may not understand all of the definitions on regular Wikipedia).
If you look something up on Wikipedia (say for example, the word ‘encyclopedia’), you’ll get a definition that (including sources) is 3472 words long. That’s lots of information and detail to tell you what an encyclopedia is. Contrast that with Simple English Wikipedia’s 272 word definition of what knowledge is: if you just want to understand what an encyclopedia is, the shorter version is much more efficient. Contrast that with the dictionary.com definition of encyclopedia, which is only 57 words.
While these definitions all serve different purposes, Simple English Wikipedia provides a layer that sits between the expanded encyclopedia definition and the dictionary definition. The potential of Simple English Wikipedia, as I see it, is not only to provide non-native English readers with a way to get at knowledge, but also to summarize and condense the knowledge found within the regular Wikipedia.
But that brings me to a question: is the purpose of Wikipedia itself not to make knowledge transparent enough that it can be easily understood by anyone? Given that an encyclopedia’s purpose is to give the reader a broader understanding of a field of knowledge — why couldn’t all Wikipedia definitions be written clearly enough so that anyone could understand them? Or perhaps there could simply be a summary heading on each Wikipedia page, summarizing, simple language, what the page is about?
While the purpose of Simple English Wikipedia makes sense (and is certainly a noble endeavour), is the creation of a whole simplified parallel encyclopedia practical and necessary? Isn’t the simplification being overcomplicated?
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March 10th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I beg to differ. I find the simple wikipedia to be retarded in some cases – an insult to anyone’s intelligence. Here’s what I thought of it when I happened across it.
March 12th, 2007 at 8:42 am
I have to agree with your assessment of the ‘electricity’ entry. Explaining a term using the term itself is just bad practice.
This is why I don’t really believe that Simple English Wikipedia is simplifying things — someone who is confused by the ’simple’ definition then has to check regular Wikipedia for the differences between the two definitions. While I understand what the creators of the simple version were trying to accomplish, it just seems largely redundant, and probably could’ve been incorporated into the regular Wikipedia somehow.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:00 am
i’m not gonna talk about simple.wikipedia but i read that article you mentioned about “wikipedia against promoting real knowledge” and although i don’t agree with the other parts of it, i was thinking that i’ve not delved deep into some issues and felt content with getting some superficial explanation/definition from wikipedia. for example i may open up a page of max weber and read about his ideas from wikipedia, without going further. but a few weeks ago i saw this mistake and now i’m always telling myself that this is an f’n encyclopedia and it’s just general knowledge and that i should read some decent articles (or why not actual books) to get further info. well i’m not really trying to make point here, but seeing this issue brought up, i think wikipedia may in time create a dummification of people, because wikipedia is nearly always the first result on a google search, everyone will be content with the knowledge on there, and some deeper reading will be left to academicians .. that’s an interesting an unforeseen sideeffect of a great thing i guess..
thx for the pointers
March 12th, 2007 at 9:44 am
That’s an interesting point Mersenne. In a sense, Wikipedia does simplify some complex issues that would probably need further clarification in order to be contextualized by a reader. Wikipedia’s ’summary effect’ is both a pro and a con — it provides us with the luxury of not having to read up on the topic ourselves, but at the same time, that advantage is also a disadvantage, since we don’t do the reading up that we probably should in order to fully understand a topic.