When you're trying to write a blog.wikimedia.org entry or wikitech-ambassadors email about a technical topic, but you want to make sure nontechnical Wikimedians can read it, is there an automated check you can run through?
For general readability we have http://www.readability-score.com/ to check, for example, the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease. My blog entry https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-stops-problems-in-their-tracks/ has a grade level of 11.5, meaning that it would be difficult for someone to read it unless they had about as much English fluency as an average US student in their last year of pre-college schooling. In the future I will probably aim more for a grade level of 10 or so; we have a lot of non-native English speakers in our community. I think it's too difficult to rewrite everything in Up-Goer 5 http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ or Simple English Wikipedia style, even for regular-person-friendly blog entries about WMF Engineering,[0] but I am willing to be told if I am wrong. Aside from general readability, I also want to be careful about using jargon, and substitute more accessible terminology where possible. I may whip up a script to check whether some text has words from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Glossary and the other site glossaries in it, unless someone has a better idea. -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation [0] I just tried rewriting a couple sentences from my blog post in Up-Goer 5 style. "Now, we are looking forward to making more places to give people their words and pictures, more quickly. The team is planning to make another place like that." _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
