User:Mugginsx

According to the Wikipedia Survey overview, UnU-Merit Collaborative Creativity Group (March 2010), p. 7: the largest percentage of readers in the study group (37.25%) have a secondary education. The next largest group (25.23%) has a tertiary-undergraduate education, the third largest group (17.24%) has tertiary-Masters educational level and the fourth group (12.08%) has a primary education level only. Those with PhDs comprised only 2.26% while a group identified as "other" comprised the remaining 5.93%.

This means that 49.33% of readers have a high school or less educational level while 44.73% are identified as having a college education of from 1-8 years. As numerous readability studies have shown, the latter group can easily read at the target 8th-9th grade reading level as can most of the former group. As a result, a Flesch–Kincaid readability score of from 60-70 (8th-9th grade level) is the ideal for English Wikipedia articles in general. Certainly the most technical articles on Wikipedia would of necessity be written at a more difficult level with a correspondingly lower expected readership due to subject matter. But the vast majority of articles should ideally be written so as to score 60-70 on the Flesch–Kincaid scale.

https://www.readability.nl/score

http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf

See also:

http://www.readability.nl/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Readability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test

In the public domain.