In this article, we will focus on a case study, dissecting Wikimedia’s philosophy on human-readable terms of use, making it easy to comprehend for the wide public.

Human-readable refers to something that is naturally read by humans and is usually defined by shortness and simplicity, avoiding intricate, entangled/ambiguous and highly academic language. What can be said with complicated vocabulary and syntax, can surely be transformed into something more simple, easily reachable by people.

Wikimedia has a beautiful and simple summary of their Terms of Use, according to the modern philosophy of the less: less is more! And indeed, modernism means “functionality goes first”, in this situation, simplicity means functionality. And we must admit it, we, human beings, like simple things because we won’t get headaches!

They took the effort to cut off the complexity of their ToS and put it into a handy reference for the users’ sake. They do mention that what’s in the blue square is just a summary and right under it, users can find and check out the long version of the Terms of Use, but even that is not difficult at all to read and understand.

Their disclaimer says that their ToS summary is not a legal document, but a handy reference to enable users to understand the full terms, so it becomes a user-friendly interface to legal language. After all, why bother reading miles of text when you can just go check out the main ideas?

What comes next?

Their briefly presented intentions and invitations encourage people from all the world to participate, since their approach stands for global sharing for a better world. And indeed, life tells us that great achievements won’t come by themselves, we must bring in our contribution to the world’s knowledge, enriching the public domain – information out of charge, since knowledge is power to the people.

Seeing is believing, so have a look and consider their text as a positive example to follow when building your own ToS contract and we’re pretty sure your users won’t quit reading it saying it’s tedious or something similar or won’t be disturbed by the amount of time they invest reading it.

Go have a look at Wikimedia’s ToS.