skip to main content
10.1145/2396761.2398703acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescikmConference Proceedingsconference-collections
poster

Is wikipedia too difficult?: comparative analysis of readability of wikipedia, simple wikipedia and britannica

Published:29 October 2012Publication History

ABSTRACT

Readability is one of key factors determining document quality and reader's satisfaction. In this paper we analyze readability of Wikipedia, which is a popular source of information for searchers about unknown topics. Although Wikipedia articles are frequently listed by search engines on top ranks, they are often too difficult for average readers searching information about difficult queries. We examine the average readability of content in Wikipedia and compare it to the one in Simple Wikipedia and Britannica. Next, we investigate readability of selected categories in Wikipedia. Apart from standard readability measures we use some new metrics based on words' popularity and their distributions across different document genres and topics.

References

  1. J. Blumenstock. Automatically Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles, Recent works, School of Information, UC Berkeley, 2008Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. M. Coleman and T. L. Liau. A computer readability formula designed for machine scoring, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 60, pp. 283--284, 1975.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  3. K. Collins-Thompson and J. P. Callan. A language modeling approach to predicting reading difficulty. In HLT-NAACL 2004Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. E. Dale and J.S. Chall. The concept of readability, Elementary English, 26(23), 1949Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. K. Ehmann, A. Large, and J. Beheshti. Collaboration in Context: Comparing Article Evolution among Subject Disciplines in Wikipedia, First Monday, Volume 13 Number 10, 2008.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  6. L. Feng, N. Elhadad, and M. Huenerfauth. Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment. In ECCL, 2009 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. R. Flesch. A new readability yardstick, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1948, 32(3), pp. 221--233.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  8. J. Giles. Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature 438, 900--901, 2005Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. D.I. Shalowitz and S. Wolf. Shared decision-making and the lower literate patient. Journal of law, medicine & ethics, 32, 759--64, 2004Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. J. Ure. Lexical density and register differentiation, London: Cambridge University Press, 443--452, 1971Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Is wikipedia too difficult?: comparative analysis of readability of wikipedia, simple wikipedia and britannica

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CIKM '12: Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
      October 2012
      2840 pages
      ISBN:9781450311564
      DOI:10.1145/2396761

      Copyright © 2012 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 29 October 2012

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • poster

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate1,861of8,427submissions,22%

      Upcoming Conference

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader