Abstract
Table 6: Readability in different topical categories
['Category', '[ITALIC] FMain', '[ITALIC] FSimple']
While these results are clearly indicative of the main tendencies, for more reliable statistics we need larger samples. To this end we sampled over ∼50 articles from 10 different categories and averaged the readability index for the articles within the category. The numbers make it clear that more sophisticated topics, e.g. Philosophy and Physics require more elaborate language compared to the more common topics of Politics and Sport. In addition, there is considerable difference between subjective and objective articles, in that the level of complexity is slightly higher in the former: more objective articles (e.g. biographies) are more readable. Since we can locate destructive conflicts in Wikipedia based on measuring M, a computation that does not take linguistic factors into account, we can check independently whether linguistic complexity is indeed decreased as the destructivity of the conflict increases. To this end, we created two similarly sized samples, one composed of 20 highly controversial articles like Anarchism and Jesus, the other composed of 20 peacefully developing articles like Deer and York. The Gunning fog index was calculated both for the articles and the corresponding talk pages for both samples. We see that the fog index of the conflict pages is significantly higher than those of the peaceful ones (with 99.9% confidence calculated with Welch’s t-test).