Get Better Results With the “Plain English Wikipedia”
Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of public domain information on the Internet, and since it is relatively unaffected by the type of polarization inherent in social media, it can feel fresh exploring anything from airplane toilet mechanics to Alexander the Great without being bombarded by trolls. or advertising. But sometimes you might come across a page that makes your brain ache.
If you’re studying advanced quantum mechanics for a school project, plain old Wikipedia may not collect everything you need into one concise section that’s easy to understand. Likewise, if you are having learning difficulties or a student who needs to easily articulate a summary of a topic, some Wikipedia pages may seem overly dense and riddled with irrelevant, background information, not to mention verbose vocabulary.
Fortunately, this is where theSimple English Wikipedia comes into play. Plain English Wikipedia is essentially a shadow site for the Wikipedia homepage as it contains alternative entries for pages written in a more complex language.
How to find a simpler version of what you are looking for
If you are browsing the main Wikipedia article, for example about particle accelerators, and you can’t get what you want, change the url. Just add the word “simple” before the URL to access the Simple English page, and once you do, you will notice that en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator becomes simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator with the last link gives a quick rundown of the basics.
This concept currently applies to 186,000 articles on the site. You will notice that the differences do not necessarily mean a simplified version of the entries, but an emphasis on simple, understandable language. This is the main rule of Simple English Wikipedia,as described on the home page.
As expected, Simple English Wikipedia has a regular Wikipedia entry , and Simple English Wikipedia has a plain English entry. You will notice that on the Simple English page the sentences are shorter and the syntax is a little simpler. This is a digestible (and quite meta) example of how the whole concept works.
This is especially useful for people with special needs.
The overall goal of Simple English Wikipedia is to make it accessible to more people. As stated in the simple version of the Wikipedia article, the site is intended for students, children, adults learning English, and adults with learning disabilities. To this end, there are guidelines for people wanting to write their own entries in plain English, and they are slightly different from the standard rate pages you will find on the main site.
As explained onthe Simple English homepage, any contributor who is impatient to write an article should “use simple English words and shorter sentences” and focus on the general rule of “simple is not short”.
The home page of the site expands on what is meant:
Writing in plain English means using simple words. This does not mean that readers need basic information. Articles don’t have to be short in order to be simple; expand articles, add details, but use basic vocabulary.
For all the buzz and profit-driven platforms that define the modern internet experience, it’s nice to know that Wikipedia still does what it does best – and does it for as many people as possible.