Matthew Revell

Wikimedia Foundation - the chaps behind the fantastic Wikipedia - are demoing Wikinews, a site that brings the collaborative creation and editing process to online news.

This is great, particularly as no other mass audience, community-created news site, with the aim of neutrality, exists, to my knowledge.

My main concern about Wikinews is that the wiki process, by itself, isn’t fast moving enough to ensure the accuracy or neutrality of stories posted on the site. Whereas, over time, Wikipedia articles have the rough edges smoothed by the process of collaborative editing, news items are only seen by a substantial audience for a short period of time. So, inaccurate, or skewed, items could be influential before they are corrected.

Thankfully, and as you’d expect, Wikimedia have thought of this and proposed solutions.

At first, Wikinews will either have to rely on other news sources, to provide its stories, or restrict its output to that which can be directly experienced by its contributors. To me, both scenarios present limitations to how useful the wiki process will be. In the first instance, wiki editors will have to trust that other news sources are accurate and neutral. In the second, there won’t be enough people who have had direct experience, of most news stories, for the wiki editing process to result in something that is neutral; which is perhaps why Indymedia’s solidly left-wing stance has worked for its audience.

On a slightly more philosophical note, I wonder if Wikinews will challenge the idea of news as fact. If it gains a significant audience, and stays around for a few years, the accuracy of its archive will diminish. The ability to revise old news could be Wikinews’ major failing. It would, for example, be very easy to go through old news items and edit someone out of them. While, with Wikipedia, there is enough interest in most items for them to maintain some debate, and relatively frequent editing, who will bother to check that old news isn’t being fiddled with? Even if no one does mis-edit older news, could the very possibility devalue the archive?

I’m sure Wikimedia will come up with interesting solutions, and accommodations, to any problems Wikinews may face. I look forward to seeing how it grows, and also to contributing to it. A Wired News article about Wikinews suggests that it will counter the profits-driven nature of most American news. The BBC may get it wrong some times but man, I’m so grateful we have it.

Big brands really should look after their website copy. Come on Carphone Warehouse, you can do better than this write-up.

Here’s an article I wrote for ContentPeople, in April/May 2003, on Flesch readability.

Clarity is the commercial writer’s goal. With practice, it comes naturally. Finding the right level of readability is usually about gut feeling and consistency.

Increasingly, larger projects are looking to objective methods of measuring readability. The first - and most used - of these is the Flesch readability formula. Devised in the 1940s by American linguist Rudolf Flesch, it measures the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. Using Flesch’s chart and a ruler, a score is given. An easier way to check a Flesch score is with a software tool, such as Microsoft Word’s grammar checking.

In his book How to write plain English, Flesch admits that using such “a mechanical gadget for this doesn’t seem like an intelligent approach”. His belief, though, is that it reflects the process the brain uses to read. Essentially, Flesch says that it’s easier to read shorter sentences that contain shorter words. Not exactly a major breakthrough.

Perhaps the major flaw of readability formulae is their disregard for context. As John Wild, of the Plain English Campaign notes, “‘The cat sat on the mat’ has exactly the same readability index as ‘The mat sat cat the on’.” It has to be assumed, then, that anyone whose writing is measured using Flesch, or other formulae, already has a mastery of English.

Echoing John Wild’s reservations, Phil Scholfield, of the University of Essex, sees readability formulae as of limited usefulness. “While it is true that usually longer sentences and longer words are harder, that is not always so and several other things can make a text difficult, such as the complexity of its organisation and the difficulty of its thought/content.”

In an effort to achieve a higher Flesch readability score, it can be tempting to forget the actual, human readability of a piece and start slashing away at words. Almost slipping into the spirit of George Orwell’s Newspeak, Flesch suggests that writers should “take first aim at words with prefixes and suffixes, like establishment, available or required” and replace them with “a two-word combination like setting up, in stock or called for“. Rather doubleplusungood for subtlety in English, I’d say.

To be fair to Flesch, he admits that his formula is only useful as a guide. Certainly, for projects with large numbers of writers, the Flesch system can help to produce a uniformity of style. However, as web based translation services prove, language cannot be reduced to computerised rules.

Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, has described a technique for gaining a one-off, massive rise in traffic to a blog.

He suggests writing a funny post and perhaps adding a picture of a scantily clad woman, so that humorous-link sites, such as Fark or, for British readers, B3ta might pick up on it.

Now, Rick doesn’t claim that this is the path to commercial blog success. However, even if you just want a quick burst in traffic, I recommend avoiding such tactics. I foresee several problems:

• it offers a freak spike in traffic, not sustainable growth
• the visitors you will attract are looking for something funny/someone scantily clad, not the normal content of your site
• you may alienate your core readership.

Of course, Rick would agree that there is only one way to grow a commercial blog: offer well-written, relevant and interesting content that would be difficult to find in that configuration elsewhere.

I believe that traffic, for traffic’s sake, isn’t helpful in building a successful commercial blog.

A List Apart has an article on how to use CSS to create attractive, standards compliant HTML emails. You can read the article yourself. What’s interesting are the ten pages of reader comments.

As with many things internet related, there is great strength of feeling over HTML in email, amongst a very small group of people. Of course, many of these people believe themselves to be a hundred times more important than other internet users. Nonetheless, they repeatedly miss the point.

If you want markup, then please, put a link to the markup in the email, and I’ll go read it if I want.

You don’t seem to understand a fundamental thing, you have no right to demand ‘return receipt’ via log analysis.

If done in a standards compliant, responsible manner, why can’t some email have nice layout? You don’t give a reason!

One reader posts that if his boss demanded HTML marketing emails, he’d refuse:

So this is one point I would NOT concede to my boss. Just tell him, listen, HTML emails are bad and they WILL reflect badly on the company as they will clutter the mailboxes of our prospective clients, increase their download times and put us in the same league as spammers, which EVERYONE hates.

We all know bosses can be wrong, but why make yourself look foolish by peddling outdated prejudices against something?

Or what about the guy who is so desperate to cling onto plain text email that he’s prepared to look silly:

A simple plain ASCII text email will go miles further than HTML email or even CSS styled email.

Chaps, the game’s over: you lost control of the internet around eight years ago.

Why does HTML email ignite such ignorant comments? The reasons given by HTML email haters are, primarily:

• Email is meant to be plain text
• HTML email looks like spam
• They have an inexplicable hatred of anything that wasn’t around in 1993.

Oops. I think I’ve stumbled on it. These guys hate HTML email because it’s not part of the internet that used to shelter them from the real world. It doesn’t fit in with their command-line, text mode geekdom. One person commenting on the A List Apart article perceives exactly what the problem is:

Because they’re all tech-geeks, living in a pure uncorrupted binary world. The hardcore Linux warriors at my office are just the same.

HTML email doesn’t have to be an image tag, displaying a huge GIF. It can be a subtle, well thought out usability improvement. It can also be done in such a way that the majority of email clients can view it properly, as the article promotes.

We - the HTML email writers - realise that it isn’t suitable for every single email. Sometimes, though, it’s the best thing for the job. Anyone who says plain text email is the perfect communication medium, in all circumstances, is deluded.

Why do I let this bother me? Because this sort of person tends to be very vocal and to give projects and ideas a bad name. Just like the same type of person in the Linux community, they manage not only to miss the point themselves, but also to make it a lot harder for the real message ever to be heard.

Link

It looks as though I may have lost much of ContentPeople’s content.

ContentPeople was a site that I started early last year, with a former colleague Matt Beech. We wanted to offer practical advice, tips and general interest articles to online content professionals. Neither of us had time to do it justice, so it kinda’ fizzled out.

Recently, though, I’ve had a couple of requests to restart the site. I’d quite like to. So, I trundled off to find the MySQL database that held all the content. It’s gone. My old webserver seems to have been completely cleared out. Not even archive.org has most of the content.