On 5/21/13 5:45 AM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
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?
<I can not help making that comment given the topic of your email, sorry>
I read this sentence at least 4 times, trying to figure out what you meant.
At first sight, I thought some words were missing (when... but... >>>
usually, a "when" is followed by a "then" not by a "but").
Then I realized that the "but" part was to be read as an additional
comment and that what matters was actually "when" followed by a
question. I then thought "is that a question to us" ? At second sight,
it actually looks to be a question to us. I started thinking "what is
meant by automated check" ???
I thought the next paragraph would bring some light on what you meant by
"automated check" so that it would become possible to answer your
question (just wanted to help...)
Last, I realize that the question was actually meant from you, to us.
But was supposed to be a point we were actually wondering about. And
that your email was actually an answer to this prospective question (in
case we might wonder). The question was not a question.
Actually the rest of the explanation uses only one expression that are
unknown to me ("whip up a script") but I am happy to say I understood
the general meaning. Still, I would suggest avoid weird sentences such
as "when... but... is there ?". Be straight to the point.
For information, the grade of your email is : Average Grade Level 8.7
(yeah !)
Which is good on the paper (sort of paper). But still was hard to
understand. I am still not quite sure what the goal of your email
exactly was :(
But I loved the link to http://www.readability-score.com/ :)
Flo
My own grade is 5.9...
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.
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