Wikipedia:Readability
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This is an essay. It is not a policy or guideline, it simply reflects some opinions of its authors. Please update the page as needed, or discuss it on the talk page. However, in one of the sections below there is a policy proposal, and may be under a discussion to reach consensus. |
Wikipedia articles are for people to read. A good article on Wikipedia should be readable, or being easy and interesting to read. There are many things on Wikipedia that can annoy the readers of articles and even frustrate them, rendering some articles inconvenient to read, some to the extent of virtually unreadable. Such inconvenient impediments to an article's readability include excessive numbers of warning boxes, long lists within an article that make readers not wanting to continue rolling down the page, excessively long external link sections, styles that decrease reader's interest to read, among others.
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[edit] Too many warning boxes
Excessive amount of warning boxes on articles, such as simultaneous display of {{totally-disputed}}, {{cleanup}}, {{advert}}, et cetera, makes a reader of the article not willing to continue reading. And since readers would not be willing to read the whole article, there would be no interest for them to edit and improve it. A way to solve it is to remove warning boxes that are redundant. If there are too many problems on an article, maybe put the main problem on it and the rest in tak pages. I also propose that we can make a template that says "this article has multiple problems" containing all warning boxes on the article and add a "hide/show" button there so readers can choose either to see or not to see those specific problems.
[edit] Long list within an article
Short lists in articles to list something relevant is informative. But a long one that requires a reader to roll down to see the rest of the article would be an impediment for people to read the article. In these cases either the list should be shortened or should be separated into an independent list entry.
[edit] Style
A style of an article should follow standard Wikipedia manual of styles. Many articles in Wikipedia, espcially some short articles, do not follow the manual and make people discouraged to read them. One example would be an article on a congressman that mainly reproduce the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (their biographies read more like reference sources instead of articles for general reading) or poor paraphrasing of the "about" page on websites. To improve the readability of those articles, rewording, wikifying, or rewriting may be necessary.
[edit] Policy proposal
Here are two policies I propose pursuant to the essay I wrote above:
- Numbers of warning boxes (cleanup, NPOV, factual accuracy) shall not exceed two in each article.
- Lists and external links within an article shall not exceed the length of the rest of the article, with the exception of list pages (articles starting with "list of", such as List of World Snooker Champions).
Please go to Wikipedia talk:Readability/proposal discussion to discuss the policy proposal.
