Wikipedia talk:Simple talk/Archive2 October 2003

From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.

[edit] on 2003/10/25

Today's TTT issues:

Please make articles complete before you try to make them "simple". If you don't, then they can be as simple as you like, but, they just get expanded with terms that you didn't use, and, then, they have to be simplified again.

While a complete article that is too complex can be simplified without losing content in one process over time, it requires a lot more luck to get the article right randomly expanding it to be more complete and cutting it back to read more simply...

No! Articles do not have to be complete. Wikipedia is a work in progress. Angela


My vote for "Simple" before "complete". I think that all Wikipedia articles may be assumed to be *never* really "complete", and that working on the basis of trying to make them so is basically against the idea of Wikipedia. -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br


It's true they are never complete. But you can't "vote" on an issue that is a constraint. It's fairly obvious that if you don't make an effort to completeness before simplifying, the article never gets to a point of coherence, and the right level of language and balance with more complex language and Simple English Staging never gets settled. So this isn't something you vote on, it's something you adopt as a deliberate choice. SEW is still a Wikipedia. One has to ask the same scope and factoring questions. And one has to ask them before one asks vocabulary questions.
Furthermore, we know that historically new articles (in the other Wikipedias) are usually fiercely edited and re-edited for a while before settling down. The state of "relatively complete" is achieved by consensus rather than fiat. -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br
*Wikipedia articles are *not* edited "randomly" (except in vandalism, a small percentage of cases and not what we're talking about here), but rather by consensus among many users.* -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br
OK, I don't mean to suggest it's really "random", but it's not a "consensus" if it's just edit wars of attrition either... which is more common than either of you are admitting. NPOV doesn't solve all problems. In many ways it is just a gateway for more problems, subtler ones.

I think it would be easy to argrue that *everything* on Wikipedia is in some sense done by "wars of attrition", and/or that there is a spectrum rather than an opposition between "consensus" and "edit war". -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br

"NPOV doesn't solve all problems. In many ways it is just a gateway for more problems, subtler ones." -- Maybe so. But nothing *does* solve all problems, and the attempt to be NPOV is one of the core Wikipedia values. If we don't all try for NPOV, we won't accomplish much -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br

I agree it's a bit elitist to be complete and complex before one lets those who only understand Simple English in. But they aren't the primary contributors. So trying to make articles in progress simpler, before they are properly scoped, named, factored and links settled, is really false economy. It's counter-productive, since someone else loses the clues they needed to finish the article, and may even have to add back links removed in a "simplifying" drive. I can see "simplify" becoming as political as "neutralize" on some other Wikipedias has become... A Random Troll

"I agree it's a bit elitist to be complete and complex before one lets those who only understand Simple English in. But they aren't the primary contributors." -- This sounds *quite* elitist to me. We don't "let" those who only understand Simple English in. SEWiki users, contributors, and editors are de facto anybody who can get to a WWW-capable terminal, can use it, and stumbles across this site. -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br

True, but we can and should make some reasonable assumptions about who those people are, using statistics. Simple English Users does just that. Please add probabilities of them getting to a WWW-capable web terminal, if you can find this data. It does exist. And it's not our "permission" that matters, it's the probability that they will feel technically and culturally comfortable editing pages. Not every culture teaches people to be bold in challenging what appear to be "expert" opinions.

"I can see "simplify" becoming as political as "neutralize" on some other Wikipedias has become..." -- ARTroll, I'm not familiar with this "neutralize" issue. Can you give a few words of explanation? Thanks. -- RJ092191.user.veloxzone.com.br

Basically the way things get neutralized is not itself neutral. It depends on people who share some point of view like most obviously "the Internet is good, the WWW is good, Wikipedia is very good," and maybe some ideas like "progress is good, English is a good language to learn, mathematics is very important, and physics is the most important and basic knowledge about reality." When you think about it, that's so far from neutral it's a joke. It looks nothing like the way ordinary people in the world think. So we know that a lot of things require some political effort to neutralize and education of people who see no problem with this mind-set. One camp at Wikipedia wants to ignore this issue. Another camp thinks its the most important thing. It's kind of a war in some ways. A lot of m:factionalism is resulting from it. You should read http://meta.wikipedia.org arguments on this especially http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/power_structure and etc.

I think "neutralise" means to make something NPOV.

But who judges when it *is*? You have lots of unattributed statements assumed to be true in articles like en:particle physics. No one demands that these be attributed in detail. However much LESS controversial statements in ecology get challenged all the time. A great example of the double standard is that en:carrying capacity was a disambiguation page that tried to reserve space for non-existent ab/uses of that term for thigns like traffic management, while en:Standard Model just bald-facedly steals those basic words to talk about particle physics. Think about it. This is the most blantant POV possible. Even worse battles go on over issues like en:truth and en:knowledge. Western philosophers assume they can just monopolize those concepts, keeping out anything said after 1960 or by disadvantaged people or groups, by religion, or even Western philosophers who challenge the traditional beliefs (like truth being something you can write down at all, or knowledge being not tied to spatial reality or the senses or cognition). Try to write anything coherent about this, and it gets attacked regularly with no respect for process (mass cuts and unjustified reverts from anonymous parties constantly shifting IP numbers). Think about it. This is a much worse neutrality problem than a few adjectives.
See SEUS_Juan_looks_at_the_sky for a Simple English User Story about the different mind-sets that a typical user might have to balance and deal with, and why we should be careful about this balancing in our articles.

I think articles should be written as simply as possible from the start.

Right. But no simpler! Some topics just require more complex language than others, which is why Simple English Staging matters so much.

In theory there should never be any complex english anywhere on the site.

Let's set a target date by which all articles must be in Simple English as we THEN understand it. But let's not try to start by tying up our brains. We need to be able to approximate and get it right later.

These talk pages should all be in simple english, but i think we all need to become more familar with it before we can use it without losing the art of conversation. -- Tango

True. Same issue. So set another target date by which talk must be in SE to get answered.  ;-)