Talk:Humus

Your changes to the Humus article

Your changes to the Humus article[change source] I see you have reverted my edits once again. If your changes were an improvement to the article I would welcome them but your changes were not an improvement.

The Simple English Wikipedia should be written for very youngest people and those who are learning English as a second language. I use a utility to parse the writing to determine the reading level of that text. You will find it here: http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp Please consider using it.

I ran your version of the article through the above utility and it returned a Gunning Fog index of 11.5 years of formal education would be required to understand it on the first read. In other words, it requires a high school education to understand it.

I ran my version of the article through, and found it returned a Gunning Fog index of 7.4 years. On that basis alone my version is more appropriate.

In addition to that, it is obvious that you do not know what humus actually is. Dead leaves, twigs and such are called "raw organic" matter. When that material is eaten by microbes and such, the undigested, and largely indigestible remains is called "humus". To be more precise the remains are humic and lignic acids, waxes and other material that is largely impervious to the digestive enzymes of microbes. While it may have little in the way of energy, nitrogen, or minerals available to such microbes, it is nevertheless, still of utility to the soil as it helps to bind the soil together into a larger structure, and it has the ability to absorb large quantities of nutrients and water. The nutrients and water that humus absorbs is not a molecular part of the humus but is simply contained within the humus just as a sponge absorbs water.

Make improvements, not just changes, and the first and foremost improvement would be to reduce the reading level to something that is appropriate to the Simple English Wikipedia. Thank you. Zedshort (talk) 18:34, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

• Since you have elected to ignore what I have said above and have failed to improve the article I will restore the work I performed. Zedshort (talk) 18:41, 1 May 2016 (UTC)