Re: Adaptation and Personalization

A few of us over many years tried to shift the reading level of the leads
of EN WP's medical articles and we managed to succeed.

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Readability_of_English_Wikipedia%27s_health_information_over_time

However there was a great deal of pushback with some insisting the reading
level be increased again. This was one of the reasons a few of us switched
our efforts over to mdwiki.org so we could more easily continue writing for
a general audience.

James

On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 5:15 AM Adam Sobieski via Wikimedia-l <
[email protected]> wrote:

> Wikimedia-l,
>
> For whom should large-scale repositories of knowledge, e.g., *Wikipedia*,
> phrase their content: article-subject-matter experts, laypeople, or
> students? Similarly, what about technical documentation? Digital textbooks?
>
> While *English Wikipedia* provides a vast and accurate source of
> information, its reading level is said to be generally high, requiring a
> college-level comprehension. For easier access, *Simple English Wikipedia* was
> created, simplifying vocabulary and sentence structures to improve
> readability and comprehensibility for a broader audience.
>
> What if *English Wikipedia* and *Simple English Wikipedia* could be the
> same Web resource? What if end-users could choose to send site- or
> article-specific "adaptation parameters", e.g., via HTTP request headers to *English
> Wikipedia* servers, to receive one of a multitude of article phrasings
> available at each article's URL?
>
> That is, what if users could direct their Web browsers to
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis , for example, and receive
> an article custom-tailored to their preferred reading levels, language
> fluencies, and background knowledge (or to a proximate user-modeling
> cluster or stereotype)? What if these technical features simply worked as
> users navigated hyperlinks connecting articles to one another, exploring a
> vast adaptive encyclopedia?
>
> As considered, there would be opportunities for finer-grained adaptations.
> Articles could have more than two phrasings, e.g., *English* and *Simple
> English*.
>
> While there are multiple technical approaches for delivering these
> features, each approach presenting its own technical challenges, I am
> envisioning that generative artificial-intelligence technologies can be of
> use for adapting, personalizing, and custom-tailoring audience-independent
> wikitext documents into cachable, reusable, audience-dependent articles
> served to those end-users who opt to configure and send their "adaptation
> parameters" to *Wikipedia*’s Web servers. Other users would, as
> considered, receive articles' default phrasings.
>
> I am excited about fine-grained adaptation and personalization, in
> particular as these pertain to educational resources. For these reasons, I
> recently started a new *Adaptation and Personalization Community Group*
>  [1].
>
> I am reaching out to invite anyone interested in these topics to browse
> and participate in our ice-breaker technical discussion forum [2] and to
> join the new group [1]. Thank you!
>
>
> Best regards,
> Adam Sobieski
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/community/adaptation/
> [2] https://github.com/w3c-cg/adaptation/issues
>
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-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

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