VI.A.iii. OUR AUDIENCE.

Articles, and particularly introductory and general articles, should be readily comprehensible to nonspecialists and nonacademics generally, and all purely technical terms should be defined.  General articles are to be written for an average college graduate or for an intelligent high school graduate.  Articles on technical and abstruse subjects and on current topics of debate among specialists may be fully understandable only by some people with advanced degrees in those subjects, but they should always be linked to more general articles where the subject is discussed on a more introductory level, at least briefly.  Nonetheless, all Nupedia articles are meant for the consumption of educated adults and are to be written so simply, clearly, and with such liveliness that others will have relatively little trouble understanding them wherever the complexity of the material itself does not prevent this.  This does not imply that vocabulary and sentence construction are to be simplified for the purpose of being easier for beginners such as schoolchildren to understand; Nupedia materials can, under our open content license, be adapted for them in all sorts of ways.

The responsibility for ensuring that articles are well-written for our audience falls to all our contributors--editors, peer reviewers, copyeditors, and of course writers.