<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />Cancer Information on [b]Wikipedia Is Accurate, but Not Very Readable[/b]
Newswise (press release)
Newswise — It is a commonly held that information on Wikipedia should not be trusted, since it is written and edited by non-experts without professional ...

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Working link.

Thanks for that-- that link works for me for the first time. None of the others I tried (about six of them now here on WR) worked, and obviously I'm not the only one. Could the mods please just delete all those other newsfeed-started threads (which are duplicates), and leave THIS one?



Wikipedia has never really discussed what reading level it's aimed at in its general articles (obviously we're not talking about the high-powered math stuff). 9th grade? 12th grade?

This has gotten me interested in what words the reviewers decided would not be understood by your average 9th-grader, but that a college student had a good shot at. "Autofellatio" anyone?

Guess they could try the "Simple English" WP, but it probably would err too far in the opposite direction.

Obviously I don't know the exact methodology of TJU's study but as they did say "standard algorithms" it couldn't have differed materially from mine. See I found a page which purports to calculate readability of inputted text based on five (apparently standard) algorithms:
http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/

For amusement purposes only I asked it to compare the text of the Cancer article vs. a sample of my own shittily turgid prose. In both cases the selection began at the first paragraph and ended before the ==Notes== section.

I'd hesitate to put much faith in these algorithms as they gave me the following results (higher numbers meaning "harder to read"):

For the Cancer article:
13.40 15.90 14.40 12.10 13.00 (average 13.76)

For the paintball thing:
14.30 15.90 13.20 13.10 14.80 (average 14.26)

I accidentally out loud.

[sic]

These algorithms are all based on things like word length and sentence length. They take no account of the difficulty of the concepts or the clarity of the writing. To be fair, these are of course far harder to measure. I believe that people have poked fun at these readability analyses by pointing out that textbooks on advanced physics can apparently have better scores than popular novels. (Of course, some popular novelists are completely unreadable!)

[url="http://news.google.com/news/url?fd=R&sa=T&url=http://www.collegenews.com/index.php?/article/study_says_wikipedia_accurate_but_badly_written_04634633333/&usg=AFQjCNHB2qLimvCN4JDRuY66N3cOvih4Gg"][img]http://nt2.ggpht.com/news/tbn/_maUZmphMx0z_M/6.jpg[/img]
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<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia accurate, but densely written, says new study[/b]
College News
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Pity they can't automatically delete Commons then

The admired photo is actually on Commons, not Meta.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikia_Girl_9.jpg

I suspect she's under 18.

They must not have bothered to read Lung Cancer.



Second sentence is an error, contradicting Wikipedia's own definition of metastasis.

Yep. Moreover, "cancer" is not simply "uncontrolled cell growth." That's the definition of "tumor," and some tumors are not cancerous (malignant). To be cancerous, a tumor must ALSO be invasive (at mnimum) and usually (though not always) capable of metastasizing also. It's not just "growth" that does this, as the first part of the second sentence wrongly suggests. Invasiveness and ability to metastasize are separate properties that are different from mere ability to grow and grow.

For example, people have occasionally been relieved of non-cancerous tumors weighing over a hundred pounds (growing in the abdomen, for example). After removal, they were fine. And as another example, there are a few rare cancers which invade but never seem to metastasize. Physicist Richard Feynman died from one of these. It kept invading until removing it fouled up his kidney function and he died. Had his doctors kept better track of him (perhaps he never went for checkups often enough) they could probably have prevented that.

Gak, WP screwed up that article.

The sad thing is that people could be dying because Wikipedia screws up their thinking so much that doctors have to devote resources to deprogramming and reeducating them.

Not to mention Rabies which still gives people the idea that they don't have to worry about it until before the onset of "severe symptoms".



Eh sounds like that bite is no big deal as long as you see the doc as soon as you start to feel weird.