Readability tests edit
What Does Open Collaboration on Wikipedia Really Look Like? (2010)
Though Flesch-Kincaid grade and reading levels did not correlate with any other factors in the revision cycle, analysis revealed that the average grade level of an article was 9.708 +/- 4.685, with a median of 8.88, and that the average difficulty level was 43.632 +/- 20.402, with a median of 46.77. To put this in perspective, legalistic End User License Agreements distributed with software have been reported to have an average readability score of 35.7, slightly more difficult than the average Wikipedia article, and most states require insurance forms to have a minimum readability ease of 40, which would be roughly equivalent to the average Wikipedia article (Grossklags & Good, 2007).
Read-Able Paste URL, get readability
Read-Ability bookmark so when on a page you can click to test that page
Readability scores & example sentences
Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease
Based on a 0-100 scale. A high score means the text is easier to read. Low scores suggest the text is complicated to understand.
206.835 - 1.015 x (words/sentences) - 84.6 x (syllables/words). A value between 60 and 80 should be easy for a 12 to 15 year old to understand.
Flesch Kincaid Grade Level - equates the readability of the text to the US schools grade level system. 0.39 x (words/sentences) + 11.8 x (syllables/words) - 15.59
Gunning Fog Score 0.4 x ( (words/sentences) + 100 x (complexWords/words) )
SMOG Index 1.0430 x sqrt( 30 x complexWords/sentences ) + 3.1291
Coleman Liau Index 5.89 x (characters/words) - 0.3 x (sentences/words) - 15.8
Automated Readability Index (ARI) 4.71 x (characters/words) + 0.5 x (words/sentences) - 21.43
Coleman Liau and ARI rely on counting characters, words and sentence. The other indices consider number of syllables and complex words (polysyllabics - with 3 or more syllables) too. Opinions vary on which type are the most accurate. It is more difficult to automate the counting of syllable as the English language does not comply to strict standards!
| Elementary school | |
| Preschool | 4–5 |
| Kindergarten | 5–6 |
| 1st Grade | 6–7 |
| 2nd Grade | 7–8 |
| 3rd Grade | 8–9 |
| 4th Grade | 9–10 |
| 5th Grade | 10-11 |
| 6th Grade | 11–12 |
| Middle school | |
| 7th Grade | 12–13 |
| 8th Grade | 13–14 |
| High school | |
| 9th Grade (Freshman) | 14-15 |
| 10th Grade (Sophomore) | 15-16 |
| 11th Grade (Junior) | 16-17 |
| 12th Grade (Senior) | 17-18 |
| Post-secondary education | |
| Tertiary education (College or University) | Ages vary, but often 18–23 (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years) |
| Vocational education | Ages vary |
| Graduate education | Ages vary |
| Adult education | Ages vary |
Assessments of Wikipedia edit
'Furthermore, care must be exercised in interpreting the absolute values of the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indices as it was developed and has been evaluated in a different context to medical communication. The topics covered require use of long, multisyllabic words to which the index is sensitive. However, it is clear that most of the resources make reading demands that would exceed the capacity of many users. None had reading levels consistent with primary completion/early secondary school level, despite approximately half of those in many developed countries having a reading age equivalent to primary school completion (Office for National Statistics, 1996; National Work Group on Literacy and Health, 1998) Few, if any, would meet criteria for formal patient information material or plain language statements for trial participant recruitment (Paasche-Orlow et al. 2003). Further research should aim to discover how such information affects consumer health behaviours such as help seeking and use of evidence-based treatments. Such research might involve naturalistic reports of user behaviour (Sillence et al. 2007; Frost et al. 2008) and may be assisted by the web’s move towards greater interactivity, information sharing and collaboration.'
Readability of the Top 50 Prescribed Drugs in Wikipedia (2009)
While the Department of Health and Human Services, using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) assessment standards, classifies anything at a reading level above grade 9 as “difficult,”...the mean grade level of the 50 sampled drugs was 15.5 - well above a high school education.
Pelcher also used an additional readability test in order to measure certain criteria the FKGL neglects to address. This system, called the Health Information Readability Analyzer (HIReA) looks at what makes a passage easy or difficult to read. It scores text on semantic, lexical, syntactic, cohesive, and stylistic scales running from 1.0 (very easy to read) to -1.0 (very difficult). Again, most of the most commonly prescribed drug’s Wikipedia pages were found to be well outside the reading level of most Americans.