Talk:Literacy

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Imfromthepresent.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 February 2021 and 22 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Emzrohm. Peer reviewers: Eileen Lynch.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:12, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KAnds42. Peer reviewers: Mjiang94.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Changes to the opening section

I suggest the opening section be changed in the following areas:

1) Numeracy: I have already changed this because there appears to be no major organizations that include "numeracy" as part of literacy.

2) "Updated and expanded definitions": The alternate ways that literacy is represented should be explained more clearly. For example, "health literacy", "computer literacy" and "ecological literacy" are not subsets of literacy (in my view), they are just another way of using the word literacy (as defined by various dictionaries).

2) Measurement: Regardless of the fact that some organizations give a "social and cultural" slant to literacy, it should be acknowledged that the only way literacy is measured is as reading or writing or comprehension.

3) Readability: The first section has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 17.7 (College Graduate and above). I feel it should be rewritten so the average person can understand it.

I am happy to start this unless there are objection. John NH (talk) 12:32, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

I have made changes to the opening. If you have concerns, please post them here or send me a message. Thank you. John NH (talk) 13:05, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: Compositionist's assertion that Wikipedia is not a dictionary and readers need research-based consensus:

Just about every Wikipedia article starts with a very basic definition of the topic that closely matches the dictionary. (ex: "Writing is a medium of human communication that involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols.")

Dictionaries are not typically outdated or inaccurate, and I think the vast majority of people would generally agree that literacy is the ability to read, write, understand, and evaluate, as per Wikitionary. If you want to go into detail into what one particular literary theorist wants to argue about literacy, that can go later in the article.

I would not call the current definition of "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" meaningful. I feel like, outside of academia, it's fairly obvious that people read and write in the context of understanding or expressing things, and the level of nuance presented is neither necessary for an opening paragraph nor elaborated upon later in the article.

You could workshop that to say something akin to "Literacy is the ability to read and write in at least one language, with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form." This definition, like the rest of the article, assumes that we're talking specifically about the ability to read and write, as opposed to computer literacy, media literacy, etc. That said, it gets the point across while also not starting the paragraph with an extremely awkward dig at dictionaries.

InvisibleUp (talk) 05:53, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Re: InvisibleUp's suggested amendments: I'm happy to collaborate on a more accessible and less nuanced version of this introduction, perhaps starting with the proposed workshopped version. We do need to start with *some* definition -- agreed. But I don't see why we need to start by rounding up *dictionary* definitions as such. There are plenty of useful definitions of the term "literacy" that originate in empirical research on the topic, which are useful even outside academia because they help explain *why* terms like "health literacy", "computer literacy", etc. seem to proliferate. They proliferate *because* there is no such thing as the "ability to read and write" outside of some particular application of reading and writing something for some particular purpose. If people understood that better, which I hope this article would be helpful for, then perhaps we would need fewer such neologisms. Compositionist (talk) 15:16, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Native American subsection needs help

Almost none of the information in this subsection is in its sole citation, nor does this section seem to have much to do with literacy as defined in the rest of the article. None of the definitions given can be entirely detached from written language (even those definitions that include other skills), which this article in its present state does in the section on Native Americans. It seems to me, and apparently all of these diverse organizations cited by the article for definitions of literacy, that competency in oral traditions represents a different skill from literacy. Is the topic of how written language being brought by colonizers to people without a written language affects the native culture relevant here? I guess I don't know, this being a topic way outside my areas of expertise. It's certainly interesting, but possibly it would best be placed in a different article. In any case, it ought to at least be taken from reliable sources and be consistent with the terminology of the rest of the article. Ashorocetus (talk | contribs) 23:25, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Language and Literacy Acquisition and Development

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2022 and 21 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): LehmanGirlMD (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Literacystudent, SavvyWriter58.

— Assignment last updated by LehmanProf (talk) 23:42, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

The stated literacy rate of Edo-period Japan contradicts the source it cites.

In this article, it says "In Edo-period Japan, literacy in the three major cities has been estimated at 70% for men, 40% for females, but 1% in the country areas."

But when we look at the quoted source: "Maturing of a Literate Society - Literacy and Education in the Edo Period (17th-19th century)" by Tsujimoto Masashi, it clearly says:

"In my judgment, it seems certain that in the middle of the eighteenth century, the male literacy rate in the three great cities of Edo (now Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka was 60 percent or more at a low estimate, and the female literacy rate about 40 percent. An estimate of over 70 percent male literacy in the cities at the beginning of the nineteenth century is not at all unreasonable. In the countryside, levels were probably about 10 or 20 percent lower."

So there is absolutely nothing written about 1%, and the literacy rate was far higher. イシュタム (talk) 10:28, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

This is a case of an article containing citations that don't verify the text. You might want to tag the citation with a template or rewrite the sentence to properly reflect what the source is saying. Newbzy (talk) 18:05, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

@Newbzy Already corrected it a while back myself.

I'm sorry, I only made my first account when I saw that one error. So have no idea what the correct way to editing/pointing out an error on Wikipedia is. イシュタム (talk) 20:46, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Whoops! All good. Newbzy (talk) 21:24, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

"Analphabet" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Analphabet has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 February 28 § Analphabet until a consensus is reached. Suonii180 (talk) 16:59, 28 February 2026 (UTC)