Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the web. Right now, as I am writing this, Wikipedia sits 9th on Alexa’s list of the most visited websites in the world. Wikipedia has articles in over 253 languages, but, again as I am writing this, the number one language is English with over 2 million articles.
With its huge database of articles, the English Wikipedia is a great resource. However, Wikipedia articles are written in neutral language, which is not normally taught early in ESL/EFL studies, can be quite long, and are full of information. So Wikipedia is not the best for learning English.

There is, however, a better solution: Simple English Wikipedia.

Simple English Wikipedia is just like the regular Wikipedia, except that Simple English Wikipedia uses easy words and shorter sentences. The Simple English Wikipedia articles are a great resource for intermediate and advanced students who are looking for reading materials that are interesting but not too difficult.

The key here is interesting. Even though the 20,000 pages on the site aren’t even close to the 2 million on the main English Wikipedia site, everyone should be able to find articles related to their interests on Simple English Wikipedia. For me, and probably a lot of other people, my language skills progressed faster when I wanted to learn something from the text that I was reading. Textbooks and teachers can’t provide the breadth of materials found on Simple English Wikipedia.

Simple English Wikipedia is not perfect. Anyone can edit Simple English Wikipedia, so the information is not always accurate and the grammar is not always correct. But Simple English Wikipedia is an excellent place to find short articles about things that interest you.

Tomorrow, I will present a few ideas for using Simple English Wikipedia to learn English.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under EFL, English, ESL, Study Tips, Reviews, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.