Want a Quick Summary of a Complex Topic? Use Simple English Wikipedia

There’s a time and a place for in-depth, sustained reading. But sometimes, you just want to know what a term in the news means. And you want to know now. If you’re curious but short on time, Simple English Wikipedia is the answer.

The premise behind Simple Wikipedia is, well, simple! Let’s say you want to learn more about “blockchains” because you keep hearing about them on the news. If you take a peek at the Wikipedia entry for “blockchain,” it’s pretty technical and fairly long at around 3,800 words. And perhaps it’s worth reading if you’re really curious about blockchain technology. However, if you’re just trying to get a quick summary of a term you read in the newspaper, that’s where Simple English Wikipedia comes in.

It’s a version of Wikipedia that offers articles formatted in two useful ways. First, it uses more simplified language (the writers do their best to avoid overly technical or complex vocabulary). Second, the entries are almost always shorter as a result. The simplified version of the entry for “blockchain” is only around 400 words and offers a very concise (albeit, not in-depth) summary of the topic. Not every article on the main Wikipedia site has a Simple English counterpart, but over 100,000 of them do.

To access Simple English Wikipedia articles, you can start at the main page and use the search box, just as you would on the main Wikipedia site. If you followed a link to the main Wikipedia site from elsewhere and would prefer a summary, you can change the URL. Just change the subdomain in the URL from “en.wikipedia” to “simple.wikipedia” to redirect you like so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain > https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

This simple change puts a world of simple summaries at your fingertips!