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September 10

If readability matters

Which version is easier to understand? I ask you for help because I still believe that readability matters, and the mere existence of Simple English Wikipedia is not a good excuse for making our articles hard to read. So, my problem is that some editor reverts my edit either without any explanation or with the "argument" that "previous was fine", and they don't want to join the discussion I started. By the way, is this the standard of cooperation in Wikipedia?

I think that in the current context "corollary" does not mean anything different from "consequence" or "result". The term corollary seems to be better suited to math and logic, not physics. Read the following (unfinished) sentences:

"As a consequence, gravity has a negligible influence on..."
"As a corollary, gravity has a negligible influence on..."
"A corollary is that gravity has a negligible influence on..."

Which version would you choose? According to Google, the first version is the clear winner. In the above example both words are used in the context of gravity, like in the edit in question. So if corollary is a better word then why does it not translate into Google Search results?

Maybe my first edit summary was too sarcastic, which could trigger negative emotions, because it contained the sentence: "Do you want to prove your intellectual supremacy at the expense of readability?" But, on the other hand, most of us do want to be perceived as more intelligent than others, myself included;-) Anyway, I would like to know your (even negative) opinion. After all, anything is better than being ignored :-) 85.193.215.210 (talk) 02:51, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Tbh, the entire first paragraph is overly abstruse; especially this sentence: It is thus acceleration relative to a free-fall, or inertial, observer who is momentarily at rest relative to the object being measured. (emphasis added) Often the best option is to check the source for clarity, but there is no source. Perhaps the best option is to start a discussion on the article's talk page. Fwiw, I personally agree that version 1 is preferable, given the context. 136.56.52.157 (talk) 05:56, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I find the next sentence (Gravitation therefore does not cause proper acceleration, ...) also very hard to understand, in either version. The choice between "corollary" or "consequence" is, in comparison, a minor matter; my preference would be to use "This means that ...". Another point: since, by definition, an accelerometer measures proper acceleration, it is hardly helpful to clarify proper acceleration as being measurable acceleration as by an accelerometer. In general, the lead of the article is far too long and unnecessarily complicated (see WP:LEAD). There is no need to discuss the relation with gravitational acceleration in any detail already in the lead, and references to coordinate acceleration and special relativity should IMO be moved to sections after the lead. --Lambiam 08:03, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I very much agree that while the lead could be greatly improved, the choice between "corollary" or "consequence" is not a significant aspect of that. When I said "previous was fine", I was referring specifically to that unnecessary change. The IP's repeated quibbles over straightforward language, and attempts to change words based on google hit counts, are disruptive. Kzqj (talk) 09:21, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So you must have had some other reason for repeatedly reverting the change even though, as you say, it is not significant. Was it because you were worried about setting a precedent in which all difficult words in the article would be changed for the most common and popular ones? This would destroy some of the finer detail of expression, making it easier to read the words but harder to grasp the meaning, much like how the "Universal Wikipedia" suggestion three posts above would work out. On the other hand, the text should be accessible: jargon, shibboleths, and scientism should be avoided. Unless there's some more history to this conflict, it's easy to assume that the OP was acting in good faith, and did indeed get annoyed about the impenetrable stuffiness of the article with its needlessly pompous words, and wished to fix it for the benefit of a general audience. Which, as we've established, should be done, but in a more thorough and expressive way than merely by swapping academic words for common ones. Card Zero (talk) 14:19, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Card_Zero They keep reverting the "insignificant change" and their only "argument" is previous was fine, and they ignore my invitations to join the discussion. I really want to know their real arguments but previous was fine is not an argument at all. I would like to know how my version harmed the article because - Wikipedia:ROWN states clearly: Do not revert unnecessary edits (i.e., edits that neither improve nor harm the article). I am also accused of using Google as a linguistic tool. But by all means Google Search can be used as a linguistic tool. Especially the language in Google Books is quite reliable. After all, most of them are scanned paper books (more than 40 million titles as of 2019). Of course, to interpret the results correctly is not always easy. I also use specialized linguistic tools like https://books.google.com/ngrams/ or https://www.english-corpora.org/iweb/, where you can check almost everything, including punctuation. 85.193.215.210 (talk) 18:25, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I may well have misunderstood user:Kzqj, but I think you might be being accused of dumbing down language to the lowest common denominator, when Simple English Wikipedia already exists as a separate project. Card Zero (talk) 02:35, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but to me Simple English Wikipedia is too simple. I wish there was Plain English Wikipedia. And I believe it will be created by artificial intelligence. It is only a matter of time because natural language processing is already so good that our normal Wikipedia could be translated to plain English, maybe even in real time. After all, it is much easier to translate from English to English than from English to Chinese. 85.193.215.210 (talk) 12:55, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's a bad idea, I will flatly say, but I've just worn myself out trying to explain basically the same thing in the "Universal Wikipedia" thread, above. I think the point is that an encyclopedia article is not merely data: it's intended to refer to a clump of ideas, which exist in the abstract in human culture. There's even a moral dimension to that, in the perception of what it is that it's important to say about them. It explains the ideas, but it also references them. It can be checked against the ideas, which exist independently in human minds in general, outside of anything written down. The AI can't discern what's intended, or what matters. It can make a statistical fudge of attempting to guess, but it doesn't understand the ideas. The result would be like processed liquid food for someone who can't chew. Card Zero (talk) 18:52, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Card_Zero Eventually I noticed the "Universal Wikipedia" thread, thank you :-) I think you underestimate artificial intelligence and the fact that there are millions of non-native English speakers who need lots of information in plain English, but not in Basic English offered by Simple English Wikipedia. Overtime the AI will start to understand the intended meaning. I don't buy the theory that AI uses only brute force methods which is not thinking. The human brain uses various methods while thinking, maybe brute force too - we still don't know. Maybe brute force is crucial for our thinking and we only interpret the results coming from brute force as pure logic supported by intuition. But what is intuition? Isn't it the product of brute force? Even one day we discover that brute force is crucial for our thinking, it will never become an argument that we humans cannot think. So the double standard is obvious. And though brute force is the main method, it is not the only method used by AI. As for processed liquid food - is it really bad for someone who can't chew and the only alternative is to die from starvation? 85.193.215.210 (talk) 21:23, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's annoying that this is a debate now, with real-world effects like you wanting to have Wikipedia sent through an AI filter by default. I'd like you to read The Beginning of Infinity about AI, which counters this idea that people are moving the goalposts when they deny that it has real intelligence. That "real intelligence" is also known as Artificial general intelligence, which I notice the article you linked didn't mention. I love and respect Douglas Hofstadter and the late Marvin Minsky, but I'm not sure they would truly claim that AI is heading toward AGI in incremental steps, and I'm certainly on the other side of this debate. David Deutsch basically says that decades of throwing everything and the kitchen sink at a problem do not represent progress in solving it. Improvements in AI are not steps toward AGI, that's just faith and wishing and hype, what's needed is a leap in understanding - which wouldn't require a huge unwieldy Google-hosted program, just a single idea, at which point the problem would already be solved, even before the idea was turned into any executable code. We need something we can explain, not to superstitiously ascribe intelligence to the mystification of complexity. (Animal rights arguments get involved in this too, and I find myself having to deny that cute animals like a beloved dog have a little bit of true intelligence, which means the emotional side of the argument is on the same side as the kitchen-sink-complexity side, giving you an unfair advantage.) Card Zero (talk) 16:47, 12 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Intelligence is not really a well defined thing though. There are lots of reasons why asking "is <insert non-human thing> intelligent" an almost-impossible to answer question, because we don't really have a way to define what "intelligence" is. There's all kinds of things like sentience and sapience and raw computational power and emotion and empathy and all sorts of things that get cofounded in the definition. What we really want to know is 1) "Does <insert non-human thing> have a human mind" and 2) is the difference between <insert non-human thing> and a human mind a matter of quality or of quantity. Which is to say, does the non-human thing do the same thing the human mind does, just at a different level, or is it doing something completely different than what the human mind does. It's these fuzzy questions and nebulous answers that led to Alan Turing to come up with the Turing test: A human mind is capable of doing human things, and if other humans thinks <non human thing> is a human mind, then there is no difference between them. Any other measure of "intelligence" doesn't really matter; because those are not "being like a human", they would just be "passing some arbitrary metric based on what it can do" not on what it is. --Jayron 32 15:38, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]