weekly update:

• started data collection for articles from English Wikipedia
• thinking through other potential metrics to consider; consulting with Design Research on previous insights

Weekly update:

• Identified 3 potential approaches for prioritization. I started to explore those with articles in enwiki.

Topics:
Some topics are generally more difficult to read/understand than others. In fact, I found that readability of articles varies substantially across topics when calculating the Flesch-Kincaid grade level for all articles and calculating averages across the set of 64 topics from the article-topic model. This suggests to prioritize articles from topics that are more difficult to read.

• average readability score for all articles (FKGL): 11.7
• highest readability scores (difficult to read): mostly STEM (e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Medicine&Health) (FKGL>14)
• low readability scores (easy to read): Culture and Geography (e.g. Sports, Music, Geographical) (FKGL<11)
• see below for full list

difficult to read / high pageviews / few edits:
On an article level, we could identify articles for which we might anticipate a need for a simpler version if it is i) difficult to read, and ii) has many pageviews, and iii) has few/no editing activity (i.e. dont seem controversial). Specifically, I consider the following metrics for prioritization

• readability score (FKGL)
• page-length (# characters of the lead section)
• whether a corresponding article exists in Simple English Wikipedia
• number of pageviews in a given month (example January 2025)
• number of edits in a given month (example January 2025)

Fixing the following criteria:

• top-5 percentile in terms of pageviews
• no edits
• a reasonable length (i.e. between 1,000 and 100,000 characters)
• no existing article in Simple English Wikipedia
• no list- or disambiguation pages

This yields overall 25,478 articles. From these, one can select different subsets of articles that can be considered difficult to read

• at least slightly difficult to read (FKGL>12): 15,861 articles
• at least difficult to read (FKGL>15): 5,087 articles
• at least very difficult to read (FKGL>18): 1,085 articles

Maintenance templates
Another option is to consider articles which are marked with relevant templates. Specifically, in enwiki I found two templates which could indicate a need for simplification:

• {{Confusing}} "This article may be confusing or unclear to readers."
• {{Technical}}: "This article may be too technical for most readers to understand."

Next step: Identify the set of articles marked with these templates

Appendix:

• List of average readability scores for different topics (articles from enwiki)

Weekly update:

• Performed detailed analysis of 3rd option using Maintenance templates
• Identified all articles in English Wikipedia using the template {{Confusing}} or {{Technical}} (or any if its redirects) in the lead section of the article (some articles contain these templates only in specific sections; those were discarded in this case).
• this yields 3708 articles
• the average readability (FKGL) of those papers is 14.0. This is substantially higher than the average readability of all articles (11.7)
• Thus, the two selected maintenance templates seem promising options to identify articles that could benefit from simplification.

Next step: writing up findings about different options for prioritization and adding code to the repo.

weekly update:

• wrote up findings with 3 different options for prioritization on meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Develop_a_model_for_text_simplification_to_improve_readability_of_Wikipedia_articles/Prioritization_for_simplification
• next step: share with interested folks and look into potential follow-up questions