Slashdot Mirror
Does Wikipedia Suck on Science Stories?
An anonymous reader writes "An editor from Wired writes on his blog that Wikipedia sucks for science stories — not because they are inaccurate, but because of what he calls the 'tragedy of the uncommon': Too many experts writing about subjects in ways that no non-expert can understand. Would this be the dumbing-down of Wikipedia — or would it be a better resource for everyone?"
Quality of knowledge is important. Readability is second.
Just as long as they make it simple enough for me to do my scientific school research on it. Wikipedia is the best and most reliable site for that kind of stuff!
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
...that it is not too hard to understand the current Wikipedia articles. But I'm sort of science minded.
However, we could do with putting it into simple terms, for those not science-minded. Then, we could have a section in Wikipedia of each article making sense to science minds.
Because it is wiki, any initial story that is written in too esoteric terms can be further edited by people less in the know and more able to eloquently explain. So by the very nature of the media is better than either peer-reviewed or popular scientific literature in terms of how well the content gets distributed. How well the inaccuracies get caught is a whole different ball game.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In a well-written Wikipedia article, the big words are wikilinked. When one doesn't understand something, one clicks the links for further understanding.
This has always been the promise of hypertext, but it is only fully realized in Wikipedia. I couldn't agree less with the premise that Wikipedia is unaccessible.
Additionally, as the article notes, there is also Simple English Wikipedia.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/
It doesn't have 1.7 million articles, but... of course not. There aren't that many concepts in "simple English."
Dick Feynman's position, for example, is that you can't learn modern physics without the math. Analogies can only go so far, and there's a reason a person requires a PhD to understand some subjects.
Is wikipedia really only source for the lay person? I never thought so.
rather than dumbing down articles, accept that:-
1. There are going to be things beyond your ability to understand.
2. Certain things require learning and research to understand
Wikipedia is just a reference point. If you don't understand the reference, follow it up !! Research !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
You have to use the "big words" [re: ideas, terms, vocabulary beyond a 6th grade level] to be practical. I mean try explaining something like the makeup of the ATP cycle using words an 11 year old would know. Try explaining calculus with rudimentary algebra [e.g. basic linear systems], etc.
I don't think it would be useful to severely dumb down all of the articles. Maybe they just need more "see also" or reading guides?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Any one particular contributor won't be able to write in a style that experts will approve of and yet be completely comprehensible to non-experts. And vice versa. But anyone who thinks that an article is too technical is welcomed to contribute a dumbed-down section. That's the great thing about Wiki. If anyone thinks an article can be improved in terms in readability (or accuracy ), he can just go ahead and do it. There's nothing to stop him.
The problem with Wikipedia and science seems to go deeper than that it is too technical (not pedantic as the writer suggests, but too technical.) I have come across several articles where the commonest meaning of the term under discussion is not even mentioned because the author thinks that a term from his (I am betting it is almost invariably a his, that isn't a failure to be inclusive) discipline is the only or original meaning of that term. That's because it is nowadays so easy to get a degree in science without any kind of general education. It is that production of overly narrowly focussed graduates that I think is the problem for Wikipedia.
Advertising my own university, Cambridge still insists on a fairly general foundation science course. This does not seem to disadvantage its graduates. Unfortunately corporatism doesn't want good generalists because they might threaten the scientifically ignorant business graduates that run companies. They want Taylorised science and engineering graduates who fit into a neat little hole. The outcome is sufficiently obvious, and the results can be seen in Wikipedia.
Pining for the fjords
Unfortunately, you usually can't "dumb-down" a subject without misleading people. You could, e.g., equate chemical bonding with atoms "holding hands" and such, but that doesn't do anyone any good. The advanced reader gets no useful information, and the naive ones don't get anything meaningful that they can build on, either.
People get turned on to science when they realize they understand something for the first time; I don't think that reducing everything to cartoon characters quite does the trick for anybody.
If we only endeavor to seek a minimal grasp of a subject, Wikipedia would be failing us. There are a lot of things that I don't already know when reading a science subject on that site, but thats where all those little helpful links in the article come in handy. It takes you around to the other articles that explain the things you don't already understand. Then the next time you read an article with similar supporting evidence you can skip over the links you already covered. I see the author at Wired maybe not really gasping the idea of why people should use wiki's.
It seems to me that with either a hierarchical approach (either within the contents of one article, or in separate articles addressing terms and specific issues in more detail), one could construct articles where it's easy for a layman to read the outline and the basics of the information as well as for the obsessive nerds to delve into the depths of all the detailed terms and eccentricities related to a given subject.
I've been reading a lot about meteorology lately on wikipedia, and it seems that lots of the articles about things people might hear mentioned on television weather are written with at least introductions in simple terms. However, I can dig deeper and find out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation if I want to.
Anyway, it seems to be that in such instances we should always be striving for an organized and cohesive presentation of all available information, and that having things presented in a way in which the reader encounters as much detail and complexity as they chose. And furthermore it seems that hierarchically branched structure using links and sub articles and so on and so forth, which is so much easier in Wiki format than it was in print, really allows us much greater possibilities for organizing our information for the best possible experience for the reader.
So choosing detail or easy to read average joe type articles exclusively seems incredibly lame.
you cannot dodge the quad laser. jumping is useless.
Seriously, what's so hard about these articles? The power of wikipedia is in its linking system, when you don't understand a phrase or subject, just click it, or if no link is there, search for it, and you'll learn all about it. I read and understood these articles perfectly, while i only had a little bit of theory about DNA and microbiology. What's so hard about them? What can't be understood? Yes, you have to take your time to read them, to understand what they're saying. That's wyh we call it Rtfm. Read it, not look at it (also, ltfm would sound bad :p). Ok, i can't tell you everything they said in the article right now, but that's because i'm too lazy to remember everything. If you don't understand these articles, you don't need to know what's in them.
While having highly detailed and in-depth articles about obscure science subjects is all good and well, if your goal is to be the most comprehensive and usable encyclopedia on the planet for anyone and everyone, accessibility should be your most important goal.
While some articles aren't going to be able to help being a little too arcane for the average reader, I think there are some examples that Wikipedia could do to emulate. A prime example would be A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
I'm an idiot about music theory, so I figured Wikipedia would be a good place to start. But there are so many show-offs trying to one-up each other by trying to sound overly academic, that it took me hours, and way to much cross-referencing, to get a good handle on the subject.
It's an ENCYCLOPEDIA, it's meant to get you started; if you want detailed knowledge, you should go to a detailed source. I'm shocked and insulted that the first 3 replies to your post said, more or less, "if you need something simpler, buy a kids book". What ever happened to "all the knowledge of the world"? Whatever happend to "an educational resource"? And they've been doubly stupid since it's not like Wikipedia is running out of room; we can have the extra-technical information if someone wants it--on a seperate page, or futher down on the page--but the top of the article should describe, in a simple way, what it's about, in a way that anyone who's graduated from elementary school, with no expert knowledge on the subject, should be able to understand it.
Readability first. Details second.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Oh my god. You know Wikipedia must be bad if an editor from Wired, of all the trashy pop-sci magazines, is complaining. What's next? An editor from People Magazine complaining Wikipedia sucks for objective information about celebrities?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
It is not just a science problem either. Look at literature where some of the literary works are written in such an obtuse way that people just consider them genius works because they can't understand them.
I have often thought of making it a lifelong goal to change this and simplify the way they teach many "difficult" subjects. However, the current way is way too ingrained into every part of academics that it would take a miracle to accomplish it.
The article claims that Wikipedia articles like the one on Epigenetics are not accessible to the layperson. But... what's going to cause someone to look that up? Wouldn't they already have some sort of context that leads them there?
By comparison, look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant
I find that extremely accessible while not being dumbed down in any way. It in an enormously informative article, and leads one to wonder and thirst for more. That sounds like an awesome teaching tool to me.
If he cares so much about readability, how come he has that awful color scheme!?!?
the privacy of one's mind is important.
you do have something to hide.
if thy want dumbed down science stories, I suggest they check out this site.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Dumb Wired writers, expecting instant gratification. Wired used to have reporters who actually went out and covered real stuff. Then they laid off most of the reporters and kept the "editors". Now they're just wannabe pundits. Saves on travel expenses.
That Tired writer isn't coming across as someone who spent long days digging something out of library stacks or public records. Or travelling around asking people questions to find out what really happened, like a real reporter. This is a lightweight. If you want a children's encyclopedia, you can still get World Book.
Wikipedia has many problems, of course. Most of the good articles were in the first 500,000 created. What's coming in now is mostly junk - "State Route 92", "Star Wars Furry Adventure #6659", and similar crap. Wikia offers some hope for an amusing reason. Wikia took over Wookiepedia, the repository of Star Wars fancruft, which generates most of Wikia's traffic. They're monetizing the fan base. Over time, maybe all the popular culture stuff can be moved to Wikia. That would be a win.
When I was about 8 my family bought a complete set of World Book encyclopedias. And sure it didn't cover everything, and nothing after 1978, it did offer good basic information that an 8-year old could read and a 50-year old could appreciate.
Fast forward a few decades. The other day I went to wikipedia looking for some basic information on my new dental crown. While I did (eventually) find the information I was looking for, it's full of sentiences like:
"The alloy used for PFMs is of a different variety for those used for FGCs. "
"Because the sprue former stuck out a little bit from the investment material, there is a communication between the outside and the investment pattern."
"When using a shoulder preparation, the dentist is urged to add a bevel; the shoulder-bevel margin serves to effectively decrease the tooth-to-restoration distance upon final cementation of the restoration."
I'm not a moron, I can do the additional research and figure out what all of the words mean in this context, but damn, I wish I had my old World Book encyclopedias.
one does not simply walk into a quantum physics lecture and understands what is being discussed. Surely though you could learn about all of the advanced terminology from the ground-up using Wikipedia, and then understanding the advanced articles should be no problem, right?
Wikipedia's religion articles are also subject to zealous redactionizing by cliques of believers who credential each other and drive content into peculiar realms of fantasy. Oh, wait... That's Slashdot!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
It's disingenuous for the commentator to strip the hyperlinks from the sections he quotes. I don't think it's at all inappropriate that the entry on mitochondrial DNA should assume that the reader knows what mitochondria are. By tucking extraneous background information away in linked pages, hypertext can be very concise.
You are right about how Wikipedia articles should be constructed; and the general consensus of Wikipedians is the same.
So... if you find something wrong... FIX IT. That's the point of Wikipedia.
And, yes, you certainly can fix articles you are unfamiliar with. It takes a little work and a little reading of the conveniently-provided external links, but it is really not difficult at all to learn enough about any subject to be able to provide a 1-2 sentence description of what it is. I do it all the time. I've even written whole stub articles about subjects I didn't even know existed. (And they seem to be written correctly, as future editors have left most of my verbiage in place.)
A lot of the articles assume you know what you are looking up already and just want a refresher of the details. Not always the case though. Good example would be something like the doppler effect; perfectly simple to understand, but the wikipedia article might only talk about the math to get really spot on calculations of it, rather than what the doppler effect acctualy *is*.
No.
There are several problems with Goetz's analysis. First, (s)he underestimates the difficulty of making explanations both simple and correct. Secondly, Wikipedia varies on any metric you'd care to apply to it, and simple clarity is no different. There are a vast number of easy-to-read, simple articles on difficult subjects, and cherry-picking a few that bother you doesn't change that.
And finally, Wikipedia does such a vastly better job of explaining science than anyone else, that I suspect Goetz's expectations are unrealistic. I mean, if you suddenly decided that 500 mph bullet trains from New York to Los Angeles were essential, would that make the lack of them evidence of some sort of tragedy? Compare your expectations to the real world before complaining that you're not getting what you want! Just try to find a textbook on biology that's anywhere near as clear, direct, and correct as Wikipedia is on epigenetics.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
complex enough to have to be written in language that the layman can't understand, you probably aren't a layman yourself and will understand the information anyway.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
encyclopedia article != journal submission
People should keep that in mind when editing.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
well duh, sci fi nerds did most of the authoring... everyone wants to be the next biggest scifi writter.
Americans just suck at science. I'm an undergrad at what is considered to be one of the best science universities in the world, and many (not all) in the science majors aren't up to snuff. Science education in K-12 blows in America, so they can't succeed here, and it will eventually hurt us.
...back to finals....
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
As such, given time each article will get better, more accurate, current, and in depth.
Instead of nitpicking and bitching, contribute!
The danger is when the public or worse the policy makers _take actions_ based on inaccurate information from Wikipedia. But if/when this is about to happen the publicity will prompt the experts to step up and fix the article (hopefully).
I'm willing to bet, proportionally, you'll find more inaccuracies reported in NY Times, CNN, FOX or any other mass media outlets. This represents far more danger, for they actually influence public discussions and policies.
Wikipedia is fine, and it's working as intended.
I think it would be reasonable for the intro paragraph to be simple, much like the comparisons that are given in the blog. I figure, people who want a simple explanation aren't going to read much anyways, so they can just read the first paragraph and leave. Then, people who want more detailed information can hit Page Down.
I have a BS in Mathematics, and quite frankly most of the time I find Wikipedia useless as a reference for Mathematics. This is because I don't understand/remember the terminology they're using! Let me repeat that: I have a BS in Math, and Wikipedia's math terminology is beyond me. (I should point out that I got my degree over a dozen years ago, though.)
As an example, I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on Group Theory. The first paragraph is comprehensible, but virtually information-free. The second paragraph uses technical terms that I would have to look up for them to mean enough to be informative.
From there on out it looks to me as if everything would only mean anything at all to someone who already has a very good handle on just what Group Theory is.
Now, if you skip down to the definition of a group, that's what I remember from my graduate Algebra course and it is more or less readable. Why the hell couldn't that be up top? Moreover, why couldn't the main article for Group Theory essentially be a non-technical rendition of that definition, along with some non-technical examples of where Group Theory is used?
There could be a second Wikipidia article, maybe "Group Theory, Advanced" that reads more like the current main article does.
I've seen some people pointing out that Wikipedia would have to offer some misinformation to be more readable, and that's sufficient reason to not be readable. That's horse crap. Suppose it turns out physics is too complicated for humans to understand accurately without two decades of study. Should we then not teach anyone newtonian gravity, because to avoid misinformation everyone needs to get two or three PhDs to understand it completely?
Read Feynmann's Lectures on Physics. He states up front that he's going to lie to the students a little, so he can present to them some useful tools for solving problems before he complicates it. His audience is physics students at MIT. If Feynmann can simplify things so MIT physics students can get started, Wikipedia can simplify things for their audience of random idiots on the web.
I don't know what kind of university you are at, but that certainly doesn't hold true at major science institution. You can't impress PhDs with 'abstract' and 'hard to understand' math, they don't believe in those descriptors.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Richard Feinman summed up this article rather nicely:
We can make a good, useful record of knowledge without relying on specialized vocabulary. In fact, I'd venture to say we can't make a good, useful record of knowledge WHILE using specialized vocabulary.
Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia. That means a broad overview of topics, introductory material. It's wonderful to be able to provide more in-depth knowledge. However, you can do so without making the rest of the content inaccessible.
As for the guy above who discussed chemical bonds, your response was sarcastic and stupid. You should have been modded down. It's exceedingly disingenuous to say that an introduction to chemical bonds that a lay person or child could understand would require you to refer to the atoms as holding hands. It's just as easy to say that there are negatively-charged particles (called electrons) that orbit the core (called the nucleus) of the atom, that -- just like the planets' orbits -- some orbits are farther out than others, but -- unlike the planets around the sun -- the particles often orbit at the same distance, that we say that particles orbiting at the same distance are in the same "shell," that shells can hold different numbers of electrons based on their distance from the nucleus, that the shells fill up from innermost to outermost, and that when one atom's outermost shell has the same number of openings as the number of electrons in another atom's outermost shell, the two atoms can share those electrons and stick together.
People are subject to laws right now, and laws are written in very specific legalese. Nobody is complaining there, now are they? Ignorance is no excuse, right?
And just imagine how this is going to work when the wiki government takes hold. http://www.metagovernment.org/ I think it's great that we're looking into the accessibility issue of wikis now, so that we CAN transition to a wiki government, where everyone can have input on the law.
Who knows? Maybe we'll find that people have to stop being so stupid.
I say we send one doctorate from every field to 40 Eridani A after it is discovered to be habitable. There they can edit The Great Wiki. and fill it with all the information in every field in all it's technical glory. Then we would have the ultimate source of knowladge forever perserved incase there is all out nuclear war/anarchy/Christianity on Earth.
622677120
OK. So I don't know what an 'organelle' is, but it's helpfully hyperlinked to a page that explains it is to a cell what an organ is to a body (and then goes into a lot of detail that I hope is superflous, so I haven't read it). I happen to know what 'eukaryotic' means, but it too is linked to an article that starts with a brief explanation ("Animals, plants, fungi, and protists are eukaryotes"). The next sentence explains what they do. I don't know what 'phosphorylation' is, but it sounds like a chemical reaction involving phosphorus; it's again linked to an explanatory article.
The article continues pretty much in this vein. If I wanted to I could look up the precise details of what it means that it contains phospholipid bilayers, etc...
I agree that Wikipedia sucks on science, but not because it is not accessible. There is just too little information, information on many many topics is absent, scientific value of existing information is often lacking.
It is because probably there is too few scientists willing to spend time adding information to Wikipedia. We probably need to understand that Wikipedia is public good and make adding to it something like little publishing in scientists estimations, so scientists could assume that adding valuable info to Wikipedia will improve their careers.
Remember: what's the purpose of Wikipedia? Is it a simple repository of articles intending to include every esoteric detail known to the sub-sub-subfield? No, it's an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are not a compilation of research papers, they're a compilation of summaries. Summaries, by definition, do not include everything. The quality and completeness of knowledge are worthless if they can't be spread to others. Science does not advance because of discoveries, science advances because of the spread of those discoveries.
Wikipedia can provide the best of both worlds. It itself is a compilation of summaries, providing basic understanding, but to those who want or need more, there are links at the bottom to more detailed explanations, more thorough information. A Wikipedia with every detail possible would turn away people who want to understand something new simply because of the ridiculous principle that if one is to learn something, one must (futilely) attempt to learn everything at once. Imagine, for example, if someone went to Wikipedia to learn about the immune system, and came upon this:[taken from my bio class notes]
Yeah, it's informative. Great. But who wants to try to understand that if all they want is a basic understanding? Having an article written this way will turn away people who would otherwise learn something. That defeats the purpose of the encyclopedia. That defeats the purpose of Wikipedia.
Leave your elitist "learn everything or you're inadequate" shit at your graduate research lab. Not everyone is willing, or has the time, to wade through what is otherwise white noise to get to the relevant info. Forcing mundane details down the throats of interested parties is doing a disservice to the spread of science.
I was trying to figure out how to use the numbers yesterday, but the Wikipedia articles for them lack useful information for non-astronomers.
I recently did some research on Wikipedia on the Roman Empire. I ran into repeated use of the term "don the purple" when describing the accession of Roman emperors. Yet I NEVER found a description of what "the purple" really meant. Was it the crown? Was it a robe? Was it just an abstract term used with no direct object being referenced?
I asked about it on a talk page, and instead of somebody actually telling me, they said it should be obvious, and complained that I was nitpicking.
I know that when I edit articles in subjects I am knowledgeable about, I try to REMOVE 'jargon' when at all possible. If the jargon is an essential part of the article, then I make sure to explain the meaning in layman's terms, or link the jargon-esque word to an article that explains what it means.
Encyclopedias are *NOT* research journals. They should explain the subject in terms that someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the subject can understand. Yes, 'dumbing down' may create times when an article is technically inaccurate, but such inaccuracies in the name of simplicity should be noted, with a link to a more technically accurate, if less readable, explanation.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I was so disappointed after Discover magazine was dumbed down in 1985 and Scientific American in 2001. Wired has always been dumbed down. When you read those magazines today, all of the articles have literary and visual fluff.
I'm sorry if paid journalists are finding it too difficult to copy and paste from wikipedia, but a science is about accurate information, not creative writing contests.
I'd like to know just how someone would explain what a metric space is to a layman and still have the explanation maintain Mathematical integrity.
The Wikipedia is meant for informational purposes. NOT for presenting introductory material. If an introduction is needed there are tonnes of 1st year texts. If the lay-person wants something dumbed down for them, there is the science section of newspapers.
hey hey hey....... that editor is simple making some crap, for publicity sake i guess........ as far as i'm concerned, wikipedia.org content is really good and i use it a lot to understand crap that we get in our engineering books........ it acts to provide the very basic elemental facts and empowers me with a solid foundation of the subject .......... i'm not a g8t student either.
So, sorry to the wikiphiles out there, but the problem now is that Wikipedia is "TOO accurate"?
Sorry, don't buy it. And, frankly, I think this is a cynical way to divert discussion from the problems wikipedia has with accuracy in general. Focus the discussion on "is wikipedia just too good?" instead of "is wikipedia inaccurate on myriad topics?"
In general, wikipedia is a great introductory information source, but it's not a replacement for detailed, technical, specialized knowledge. It's not. Sorry if the goal is "all informaiton about everything," but wikipedia needs to understand it has a role, and a good one, but it's never going to be the universal source of all learning.
Lest someone confuse me for a wikibasher, I like wikipedia. I use it all the time for an unfamiliar term or a concept I don't understand. It's usually all I need. But it's not a graduate course in, say, quantum thermodynamics.
Many PhDs are not geniuses. Once you step outside their little realm of expertise they can often seem no more intelligent than a smart undergrad. It's the old adage that they know more and more about less and less. Often the paper you are writing is going to be judged (for various reasons) by someone who is not a professional in your own specific field. These are the people that my superiors are aiming to impress because it can be the difference between publication/patent disclosure/conference submission. It IS dumb that this is the way it is, having to impress someone who is not even inclined to understand what you are doing. That is one of the flaws in the current system.
I disagree, I think Wikipedia articles should use the most concise terminology for the relevant subject areas. If you don't know a word, just look it up! I used to read Wikipedia articles all the time with words I didn't know, since I've started looking them up when I see words I don't know, my vocabulary has expanded dramatically and consequently not only do I have to look up fewer words, but I find that those words end up being useful in real life more then I had realized. By only subjecting yourself to explanations in simple terms you deny yourself a superior comprehension of the subject matter.
If you want things explained in more general terms then you should visit the Simplified Wikipedia: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.eol.org/ The encyclopedia of life looks to have the right idea. It will be an encyclopedia of every species of organism on Earth. If you check out their demo pages, you'll see they're going to have a slider bar for species, from Novice to Expert. This allows you to tailor the page to your needs. The more detailed information is there, but you can look at a dumbed down version of the page if you only want rudimentary knowledge. Wikipedia would benefit greatly from a similar structure.
For some science areas (especially physics and mathematics) more introductory entries would be very helpful. Instead they are often high-level and they link heavily to each other, weaving often an undecipherable web for the layman.
Take for example functional spaces like the "Banach Space" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach_space). You are reading and reading and reading about vector spaces, completley normed vector spaces, metrics etc. etc. and you still don't get, whats it all about. This is, because for every keyword mentioned, Wikipedia will link to a different entry.
This is the idea of a hyper-linked encyclopedia, I know. But in this cases, it just doesn't work that well. In other science areas, the problem is not so prominent, I guess.
If we are truly migrating into an information society by offshoring our skilled labor, then we should be getting smarter, not dumber. Otherwise there will be nothing we have to offer to the world.
To date, I have found Wikipedia more helpful than MathWorld.
You may be right about the fact that PhDs are getting more and more specialized these days, but there isn't much of an alternative. Less than two hundred years ago (maybe even less?), it was entirely feasible to be well-versed in the whole of human knowledge. These days, we simply know too much. I have professors that I work with that decry the politics of journal submission, etc. Hell, I have had papers rejected for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me. But I still have trouble believing that filling a technical paper with unrelated (or just obtuse) equations and multisyllabic words will increase your chances of publication. No doubt there are crappy professors or PhD advisers or whatever out there, but at least at my university you aren't going to trick many of the people in charge just because they aren't experts in exactly the field of your interest.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Wikipedia is not billed as an expert's only site, as an online reference for virtually any topic. People visit the site to learn about things they don't have perfect knowledge of! If you have such amazing knowledge of a subject, you should be able to present it in a succinct and straightforward manner before delving into details. Some pages on Wikipedia are completely unreadable to someone who is just looking for a brief overview of a topic..basically a "What is this?" type paragraph. Articles that feature complex ideas that apparently are impossible to communicate without turning towards charts and formulas can always be explained with an overview of what we're talking about.
Wikipedia should be catering to everyone, not just experts trying to one up each other with esoteric knowledge. It's not a contest in the obscure and useless, it's an encyclopedia and every article should start with the basic idea, just like a *real* encyclopedia.
There was a slashdot conversation on fusion started by this thread: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23438 3&cid=19088821 wondering
about why deuterium-deuterium->He4 fusion is not usually considered since there is more He4 than He3 in the universe. These three wiki links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNO_cycle, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-proton_chain_r eaction were cited in the discussion. All of these are clear and informative but the most relevant link within the two stellar process links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis#Big_B ang_nucleosynthesis does not give detailed
reaction chains. So, the answer had to come from a more pedegogical site. There is uneven quality in the wiki that means it is sometimes useful and
sometimes less so. As it evolves things will continue to improve. s -selling-solar.html
--
Get proton-proton fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
While it is debatable that this is how they think unconsciously, I seriously doubt that they are "readily admitting" what you say... even privately. Perhaps you are paraphrasing wrong? Maybe they suggested that you include "big words" that you didn't really understand yourself so you took that to mean that they think you should make your papers "confusing."
Teach someone a simplified version of something and they'll learn a simplified version or they'll think it is a simple topic. Take quantum theory for example. There's plenty of simplified quantum theories flying around popular culture right now and all of them are so far from the actual theories that they're more or less just myths that fill trashy pop-sci magazines like Wired. The fact it is a Wired editor that is complaining about Wikipedia is particularly amusing, BTW. If I were a wikipedia author, I might take it as a compliment that Wired was criticizing my writing for being too hard to understand.
First of all, a lot of famous literature is old. Part of your misunderstanding is due to a difference in the Enlgish language. Words were use differently even 100 years ago. Though people who really know literature can read past that.
But even putting that aside... a multilayered, complex story is just interesting. And ya, you can't always understand it at first pass. And that IS part of its genius because you can talk about it, dig into it to discover the layers... find your own meanings. People forget about simple stories. They don't stand the test of time. But good, multilayered, literature is recognized as genius over time as people discover the layers.
I have often thought of making it a lifelong goal to change this and simplify the way they teach many "difficult" subjects. However, the current way is way too ingrained into every part of academics that it would take a miracle to accomplish it.
Or maybe the subjects really are that difficult (without the stupid quotes). Imagine that. Subjects that require years of dedicated study to understand. Subjects that trashy pop-sci magazines and dumbed down Wikipedia articles will get wrong every time.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
That's what makes Wikipedia a superior source, since experts can discuss a topic precisely and thouroughly without being dumbed down by editors that want to appeal to a large audience for commercial reasons. Space is infinite and hypertexting allows to preserve a reasonnable length for any given article while allowing more details on sub-topics.
...you probably couldn't use the information anyway.
Dog is my co-pilot.
By letting anyone to edit/post about anything will render the result quite dubious - who ever is the last one to edit the topic, will define the end result of it. There are certainly some people willing to correct this article again, but the mere fact that the article is in this constant limbo will discredit the Wikipedia effort.
>Would this be the dumbing-down of Wikipedia -- or would it be a better resource for everyone?
There is plenty of dumbed-down, inaccurate, out of date, stupid shit science out there for everyone. If an article is too difficult for you to understand, educate yourself. My first thought on seeing the title of this was, "Yeah, Wikipedia sucks; it's not technical enough."
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Dictionaries are good ideas for such problems.
OED, for example, has:
(also Tyrian purple) a crimson dye obtained from some mollusks, formerly used for fabric worn by an emperor or senior magistrate in ancient Rome or Byzantium.
( the purple) (in ancient Rome or Byzantium) clothing of this color.
( the purple) (in ancient Rome) a position of rank, authority, or privilege : he was too young to assume the purple.
( the purple) the scarlet official dress of a cardinal.
If you want to do your part, edit the Wiktionary entry for purple to include these definitions, and x-ref the phrase usage on Wikipedia to your new Wiktionary entry. Problem solved.
You can't have looked very hard. I just found the explanation within 2 minutes of starting to look; it's on the page Roman Emperor, which states:
Easy: Make one page for experts, and one page for novices.
Make a disambiguation page, link both articles to each other with a "see also", and everyone's happy.
You can't take the sky from me...
Seeing as how you use "it is debatable" "I seriously doubt" "perhaps" "maybe" "took that to mean" and I used "they will readily admit" I don't think I am the one making assumptions.
There is a difference between a simplified version that hides facts and a simplified explanation that just makes all the facts easier to understand.
You must have never had a bad teacher/professor if you don't believe that subjects can be made more difficult than they really are.
> Wiki is meant to be authoritive
No, this is wrong. That has to be one of the most perpetuated misunderstandings about Wikipedia. Wikipedia is NOT an authoritative source for anything. However this doesn't make it useless. It is a summary of information collected from other (often authoritative) sources, collected all in one place. If you *need* something authoritative, you should find the citation and check it from the original source. Wikipedia is still a good starting place though, to find the other sources.
I still hold my claim that Wikipedia is not and does not pretend to be a textbook for schools. If you want to start such a project, you can do so however, and you can even use the material from Wikipedia as a starting point, since it is freely redistributable.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Non-scientists dont care for details; detailed scientific entries are written by scientists for scientists. Nothing wrong with that. NOBODY can understand EVERYTHING, human knowledge is too wast. For example, in order to understand theoretical physics at current research level you need at least ten years of training, it is virtually impossible to explain anything to people without such a training, they don even grasp the basics.
Of course a scientist would never mention Wikipedia as a reference. Fortunately, most scientific wikipedia entries contain references to real scientific literature which can be used.
... too that. Make up your goddamn minds. For science, as it happens, I've been impressed as hell with Wikipedia. Whether it's my own field (evolutionary biology), a related field (eg gene regulation), or something I'm clueless about (eg quantum chromodynamics), the explanations are clear and factually accurate. No, it doesn't replace scientific journals. And, no, it doesn't replace the Golden Guide to Cats.
To the editor of Wired: Get a life.
The article is complaining about people re-tooling articles , making them ever more precise. This reminds me of "physical" code optimisation: doing this makes the code difficult to read straight off, very hard to grasp the logical concept of what is being done. Or even adding in error handling & exception cases to a main flow. Whilst this detail is better fact is that most people have the outline concepts first & re-tool after, this also needs to be the case for first time readers. Possibly Wikipedia needs to have "generalist" & "specialist" articles.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Apparently they do.
They also seem to suck on Donkey Balls, they haven't even began to cover that subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?searc
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Yes, it's easier to criticize than to help. But helping out Wikipedia is much more useful than complaining about it.
One does not in any way need a deep grounding in a subject to be able to write a brief description of what that subject is. It just takes a little work.
This is not in any way comparable to writing new code. One has to be a good programmer to fix OSS. One does not need to be a scientist to fix an article about a scientific subject. I have contributed a lot to the Marine Biology article on Wikipedia, even though I am not a biologist. I can't write the whole article, but in just a few minutes I can figure out enough to make the article more accessible to the layperson.
And as someone notes below, Wikipedia is a living document. Over time, these sorts of things will work themselves out. Just complaining about it doesn't do much (except perhaps motivate others). In a short period of time you can at least learn how to do this:
1. Click the Edit button on the top of the page
2. Place this code at the very beginning, followed by a carriage return: {{cleanup}}
3. Click the preview button and see that the cleanup box appears at the top
4. Click the submit button
This tells the community that this page needs cleanup. There. You've contributed, and it took you 20 seconds.
What I want to know is, WTF is wrong with the Epidemix web site that presented this article with a purposefully broken font?
I thought maybe it was a Firefox problem, but the font is just as bad in MSIE. So then I looked at the stylesheet, and found that the typography was purposefully broken.
Someone went to a lot of trouble to generate really bad typography that has all the anticharm of a worn-out 9 pin dot matrix printer. That's not easy to do with Lucida and Verdana fonts, but this site has managed to find a way. Even hitting Firefox's Ctrl-+ a few times doesn't improve matters much: sure, it makes the letter forms appear again with the smoothness that the font designers built in, but the intercharacter distance, interword distance, and leading are still too screwed up to make reading easy.
It seems to me that any article about making a web resource easier to use needs to avoid violating the basic principles of good typography if it is to have any credibility. We've got a few hundred years of practical knowledge in how to present material in such a way that letters, punctuation, and even the words become invisible to the reader, and he can devote his full attention, without distraction, to the actual message. We have more than a decade of experience in applying the principles of typography to the web. Many sites do it very well, one example being Wikipedia. But Epidemix is not one of those web sites.
When preparing a publication the first question you'll ask is ``what's the story?''. How do I create a narrative thread running from the beginning of the paper to a conclusion that says ``this is a new contribution of scientific merit''. You need to use the terminology the community is used to (especially important in interdisciplinary research where you may be trying to communicate results to a research community other than your own). You'll need to be aware when your results might prove to be contentious and either downplay the implications or be prepared to back up your results. You may spend hours trying to get the correct phraseology and fiddling with graphs in order to communicate your message more effectively or just make people feel more comfortable.
When you finally submit your paper all sorts of social issues will come in to play. Is one of your referees working on something similar, but in his opinion far superior? Maybe the referee has never seen anything like this before, and for him that's a good enough reason to reject.
Dealing with these issues takes creativity but is important. Unfortunately science isn't pure pursuit people sometimes characterize it to be we have to deal with messy social niggles and arguments just like everyone else.
So very true on all accounts. Encyclopedias are meant to be readable by non-experts. I do wonder though if the hostility by experts in the field has more to due with a sense of elitism about what they do, than anything else, which is downright ludicrious if you think about it since most of the readers on Wiki are non-experts. The only thing the experts are hurting is themselves, by closing off their field to a public that might be interested if only they could understand the material and its importance in their life.
I wish I had the points to mod you up.
Wikipedia science entries are concise, and all of the specialized words are linked
Dumbing-down text, as in the blog's examples, requires simplification of a concept, which is fine for a one-liner. But, if an article is going to flesh out concepts, as in an encyclopedic entry, an over-simplified introduction leads to confusion later on. Discussion is obscured. The article's examples are not even consistent. Wiki "Mitochondrial DNA" vs NIH "Mitochondria?" The Wiki mitochondria entry is pretty clear to me, and I know nothing about biology.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
There could be special guidelines, and automatic monitoring tools could verify that only a controlled, simple vocabulary is used, and that sentences are not too long.
I personally dislike the fact that the parent post essentially uses an ad hominem attack on author of TFA by referencing said author's name and gender. We're not discussing the author, and the author's name is not even mentioned in the summary, so please leave the author out of your commentary.
The author should take his own advice. He begrudges that experts do not write clear enough for the non-expert layperson. Then he hypocritically uses narrow coding lingo like 'fork' and 'oyster fork', when more broad English would be better.
The problem with much of the internet it is still the domain of software nerds who really need to broaden their knowledge horizons. Until software evolves as simple as editing MS word or scribbling on a pad, it's not yet mainstream. And mainstream news journalists still prefer flashy websites over content.
The author though is a hypocrite. He needs writing lessons to organize thoughts away from 'shop talk' and more mainstream. HYPOCRITE!
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
I disagree. A large part of my time is dedicated to personal projects. I won't lie that I'm a jack of all trades and master of none, well possibly one :p. Most of these interests span from WSN research as far as music.
I find that the content on wikipedia is readable, and overall a great resource.
However, when I began using wikipedia initially, the volume of data presented with a hgih level of detail on some topics was quite intimidating.
But over the course of time, this became palatable.
What do people want wikipedia to be?
Can new functionality be added in to accommodate all audiences?
Would you like to see search results like this?
"All about the human brain (500 words)"
There is a big move against this type of thing. Nature, for example, are very particular about the importance of using clear language, avoiding passive voice etc. I think if someone cannot understand the paper then it really is not going to impress them. I would certainly downgrade any paper I was reviewing if the language was excessively obtuse.
On the subject of Wikipedia articles, I have never found them particularly difficult to understand, just that they are often disappointingly short (usually on the subjects I don't really know much about so I can't add anything).
Isaac Asimov, Michio Kaku, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking have all proven this is possible through their numerous books. Einstein himself, wrote a book titled "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand" (ISBN: 0-517-025302, 1961, Crown Publishers).
From the preface (written by Albert Einstein):
Any contributor who says it is impossible to write an encyclopedia article which describes a topic with reasonable accuracy in a way which is accessible to everyone is simply wrong. All they are doing is showing their own inability to fully understand the topic and translate it into common terminology. Any concept can be explained without using mathematics or technical jargon. Perhaps not a full and complete explanation, but certainly enough to allow a person to understand the concepts and how they apply to real life.
As a teacher, I have explained art theory to first graders, physics to 5th graders, and philosophy to 9th graders. I've even explained the basics of computers to a redneck by using a beer metaphor.
Wikipedia is not the Journal Science, nor the New England Journal of Medicine. It's an online encyclopedia. People with the technical understanding to read NEJofM aren't going to be coming to Wikipedia to do research on Asperger's Syndrome. Bob Smith the accountant, however, may. If Bob can't understand what's written, then Wikipedia has failed in it's mission.
However, not having the background - you simply quoted Wikipedia to correct me, adding on a meaningless line "It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific." What was the point? You did not explain my mistake, you simply presented Wikipedia as if it was a fait accompli. That's how too many students nowadays work; they just regurgitate "facts" read on the Internet without understanding or analysis.
The Wikipedia article, in fact, looks as if it was cobbled together by somebody, certainly not produced by someone with a deep knowledge of the development of ideas of proper upbringing, how these changed during and after the Renaissance, and how the project reached its apogee in the Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie.
Whatever the faults of the Encyclopédie, Britannica and Americana, the principle that articles were written by the most authoritative experts of the day and then edited by people who understood presentation was a good one.
Pining for the fjords
I agree in part, scientific writing is a cience on it's own and wikipedia is mostly written by scientists as researchers and not science teachers, thats why it's articles are not right in some cases. When a scientist makes a research it's necesary to publish by the hand of a technical writer, which is more related to the art of writing than to the technical issue, why? because it has to be readable and easy to understand for all the public. That's where wikipedia fails, because the articles are written by scientists not scholastics.
?
I too would love it if someone would do my job for me while I continued to get paid for it.
Its a journalist's job to reformat and present information in the inverted pyramid format. If everybody did that to begin with, what need would we have for journalists?
And by the way, the journalist who did the Wikipedia writeup for the inverted pyramid format did a lousy job. The explanation I got in high school was much clearer.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This is the post that I will reply to.
... Fine.
... Fine.
... Fine.
Most of this discussion is about which audience the original Wikipedia targets. Is it for "Joe Layman" or a moderately advanced user "finding out about the dynamics of convective vs. orographic precipitation"?
I haven't spent much time digging into the "Simple Wiki" yet. The few articles I glanced at are very short.
I would suppose there is room for 3 levels of depth. Simple takes the ground level, for random Net users who really don't want to spend any effort, and want the "15 minute version because they forgot what the chemical formula for alcohol is".
Some kind of Mid-Line version would be this happy medium everyone's talking about here. "There are compromises on this page. But they are meant for clarity".
Then you can have the Expert page, with the Caveat Lector sign. Sky's the limit, and unless it's patently wrong, it stays. If it doesn't say what you'd like it to, add your own.
I bombed Freshman Calc and declined to bomb intro to Organic Chem. Therefore, I don't have the right to complain about any Math or Orgo articles.
However, as a layfellow, let's see what happens if I don't deliberately pick a topic loaded with equations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_making
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprocessing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilineal_evolution Fine.
So, Wikipedia does just fine on "Science", thank you.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How is it assuming to use the qualifiers such as "perhaps" and "debateable?" Seems to me that such language is quite opposite of assuming. It is leaving it open to debate and NOT assuming. What else can I do? You're referencing private conversations and cannot quote anyone. How do I know that what you interpreted and later paraphrased here is what they actually said?
Certainly there is some optimal balance between ease of understanding and completeness in a given situation, but if Wired magazine is any indication of what this Wired editor considers such a balance, it would seem very much skewed towards "oversimplified." And i get that same impression from you. Though I have not read any of your research papers, so I will refrain from assuming, OK?
Certainly there are bad teachers, that much is not in question, but you are accusing academics in general of purposefully generating confusing material as a matter of course. And I don't think that is right.
Just making the material more simple is not the answer. For example, in high school there were two different physics courses. You could take the regular physics course that just gave you formulas which you plug in numbers and get answers to problems, and then there was AP physics which actually had you deriving those same formulas. In the latter, we learned how those forumals came to be, the complexities (well as much complexity as we could handle) of the theories behind them, etc. A lot of which would have been difficult for the kids in the regular physics class to understand because it was full of a lot of equations and "big words." Should they have dumbed down the AP course? Of course not, because then it wouldn't be AP. And it would have failed to prepare you for more advanced math/physics later in college.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This is a call to slashdot editors.
Slashdot is news for nerds. Please stop dumbing down technical terms for us, we have mainstream press for that. Please reject dumbed down summaries.
Stop talking about "microchips" and "rocket scientists", please talk about ICs and aerospace engineers.
Oddly enough I looked up epigenetics in Wikipedia a few weeks ago. I was reading an assignment from my writing professor and the word epigenetics turned up. I typed it into Wikipedia and read the first half of the page or so. I understood what it said; I wouldn't say that I had a full and deep understanding of the concept, but I knew enough to continue reading my homework. Now, I am not a science expert by any means; I've only taken 100 and 200 level biology classes. All in all, I generally get what I need from Wilipedia; there's often far to much information for me, so I take what I need and leave. There have been times when I didn't understand all of the vocabulary in an article, so I looked up the words I didn't know, and then I know them. Dumbing down Wikipedia certainly wouldn't serve me and I have a hard time thinking who it would benefit. Peace, CuriousMe
I've noticed something over the past few days, articles with question marks are usually flamebait
Coming to you live from another dimension.
I've actually run into what the author describes more than once and in fact not to long ago I needed to read the article about mitochondria that the author brings up. Indeed the very first sentence had a word (organelle) that I had no clue the meaning of. That word itself had it's own article though which I promptly opened up in another tab. Throughout doing this I probably opened up a dozen articles to learn what the meaning of words were and learned a great many interesting things all of which made the mitochondria article understandable.
Having it be a bit technical is a small price to pay for having a resource that can broaden my education on so many topics so quickly in my opinion.
Just replace "en" with "simple"
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Pan el_on_Climate_Change
If you go and try to read the entry on the IPCC (ie just released UN report on climate change) to try and get an idea of what the report says, and what problems there might be with it, well, good luck. You get the current conclusions at the top, but with no practical discussion. And then no actual scientific discussion of where the errors are. None. Everything mentioned as "problems" seems to be a pseudoscience flamewar. Problems with earlier reports blend in to be problems with this report. The whole article is a mess.
The report itself is easier to read!
(I do like that someone linked to the Stern Review at the end though. *grin*)
Let's look at what TFA points out (disclaimer: my biology studies ends on secondary 5, equivalent to grade 11 in US systems). For epigenetics, it says:
Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene regulation that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). When a cell undergoes such an epigenetic change, it is the phenotype of the cell which is affected.
Epigenetic events during embryo development lead to differentiation of the fetal cells. The process fetal development with the differentiation of cells and organs is called epigenesis.
In biology, while the subject of genetics focuses on how organisms can inherit traits by inheriting genes from their parent(s), which encode information for cell function as sequences of DNA, epigenetics is sometimes used to refer to additional methods of biological inheritance that do not directly relate to the inheritance of collections of genes, or soft inheritance.
Huh? What's the problem? The single first paragraph effectively says everything that his cited alternative tells except the example. I don't know what is phenotype, but now I learn that it is something about "gene characteristics other than DNA". The second sentence is hard for me, but clearly it is about some mechanisms that give rise to the behaviour, so I blame myself for not knowing enough biology rather than the article. The third paragraph supplements the first that sometimes things outside the gene can be considered epigenetics as well. I guess a normal person who has any training of technical reading should not have problem getting this far.
Now let's turn to the next, Fluid mechanics. Wiki has it this way:
Fluid mechanics is the subdiscipline of continuum mechanics that studies fluids, that is, liquids and gases. It can be further subdivided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest, and fluid dynamics, the study of fluids in motion. Modern applications use the computational approach to develop solutions to fluid mechanics problems; the discipline concerned with this is the CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics.
Exactly one term I don't quite understand, "continuum mechanics". If I just ignore this little problem of terms, the remainder doesn't seem to have a problem to understand. That term is a link, so I click on it, getting this at the beginning:
Continuum mechanics is a branch of physics (specifically mechanics) that deals with continuous matter, including both solids and fluids (i.e., liquids and gases).
The fact that matter is made of atoms and that it commonly has some sort of heterogeneous microstructure is ignored in the simplifying approximation that physical quantities, such as energy and momentum, can be handled in the infinitesimal limit.
Okay, intuitive and I need nothing more. Understanding completed. My guess is that if somebody has problem doing just that (click on a link to find out more about something he doesn't completely understand), he should be having problem surfing web at all.
Now the last one, "Mitochondrial DNA". Its entry looks like this:
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is DNA that is located in mitochondria. This is in contrast to most DNA of eukaryotic organisms, which is found in the nucleus. Nuclear and mtDNA are thought to be of separate evolutionary origin, with the mtDNA being derived from bacteria that were engulfed by early precursors of eukaryotic cells. ...
I find it quite difficult to understand. But then, why I'd like to know anything about "Mitochondrial DNS" if I know nothing about "mitochondria"? It seems to be that clicking on that link will give me some
The point about "ignorance is no excuse" should be Score: 6 Insightful. Sometimes science just can't be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Wouldn't it be great if stupid people didn't have as much say in things (governments, encyclopedias, etc.)?
oh deary me... someone hasn't taken many higher english/philosophy courses
I used to make fun of a friend for the same kind of thing. I joked that there was a requirement that every paper written by anyone in her major include the word "problematize" at least once. I can't remember what the other words on the list were anymore now that it's been a few years, but there were some "good" ones. The scary part is that they really did show up (unnecessarily) that often.
I had a case at work of just this a few weeks back. I had written a technical appraisal which would need to go to professional services people. I asked another staffer to look it over for readability and avoidance of engineering jargon. The result was that a number of technical terms went - which was good - but the rewrite introduced actual factual errors as a result, as well as a number of terms that were actually jargon of my colleague's speciality, but which he did not recognise as such. My mistake, but qualified technical writers are very hard to come by in our field.
I do use Wikipedia from time to time, but with great caution. Often I see errors I would like to fix. But I will not do so because I am not actually an expert in the field and I therefore think it would be wrong to risk fixing one error but perhaps introducing new ones.
Pining for the fjords
Upper management, not wanting to delve into the complicated explanation, has been more than happy to take them at their word and view me dismissively because I presented the material in a simplified form.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
It has more the feel of a computer science article than a math article.
You are dumb. Please stop contributing to anywhere.
Wikipedia's not that kind of girl.
Wow I can't believe the amount of people missing the point here. Do BOTH.
Have an article for the layman, AND an article as an accurate technical reference. Everyone wins.
For geeks, you lot are pretty slow on the uptake!
Let me get this straight...
A random guy said on his blog that wikipedia sucks ? I mean, couldn't we....
Oww right, this is Slashdot. Nevermind then...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Might I suggest that the solution in this instance is for these "laypeople" to become *involved* in the process, as proofreaders and editors with a special focus on readability for laymen? A layman is indeed an expert, in the sense that he better understands the needs of his fellow layman peers than do specialists in other areas.
No need to go from one extreme (scientific accuracy) to the other (stupidified for the non-expert). Instead, leave all the scientific knowledge, but explain the stuff that a non-expert won't understand a little better.
For example, a Wikipedia article I recently read about logic included all sorts of logic symbols in logical formulas and explained all sorts of concepts about logic. Trouble was, I couldn't understand what anything was about because I didn't know the meaning of the different symbols. I don't even know how to punch those symbols into Google to find out. All it would take is a simple succinct one-sentence explanation of each symbol somewhere in the article, without changing anything else, and I would have grokked it in no time flat.
Orale!
Bullshit. The wired reader is just an idiot.
In my first year (Technical university) we had the Thermodynamics book from Moran And Shaphiro (I think it's written like that), but an horrible edition (got a better one for free now). But you could go to wikipedia and seriously everything you needed to know was on it. From cycles to entropy, and much more understandable.
I agree that it might need a layman introduction, but please don't remove the in-depth articles... It's handy to get a grasp on a subject before starting to read the book.
you'll please nobody at all.
Wikipedia censored the site "What Really Happened.com" and the book "America Deceived" America Deceived (book). Wiki only ranks behind Amazon and the Mainstream Media in level of censorship.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
- Albert Einstein
Thank you for the location of a definition. I'll do so.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
My experience with Wikipedia has been that editors may be in disagreement about some item or term, discussing it on the talk page, and as an attempt at compromise, both "sides" are presented (preserving "NPOV") are presented as a wordy mess. And too often these disputes are over the minutiae of a subject rather than its conceptual core. Thus some articles spend several paragraphs clarifying etymology, proper terminology, etc. while paying scant attention to what the subject actually is.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I use wikipedia as a quick source of information; often it is the most comprehensive because there is no basic chemical "dictionary" so to speak that's searchable and fast. Everyone's favorite strong acid is easy to look up... I get the necessary information for the experiment (molar mass, boiling point, etc). If you want to know about the mechanisms its involved in, you read the article. If you really want to know more about it, you go look up a scholarly article on Ebsco or JSTOR something. If you're confused about any part of the article, you click around until you've answered your own questions....?
Analytical chemists do it with fancy and expensive toys
While some contributors get carried away with cross-linking to other articles and the end result just hurts the eyes trying to sort through the alternating blue and black text and underlines, in general it is a fantastic asset to the purpose of Wikipedia.
Actually, maybe it is bad. There's been a lot of times I go to look up info on one topic, and I find myself lost in the bowels of Wikipedia for an hour or more, following a web of interesting topics. I swear Wikipedia is bad for my attention span.
And that also leads me to another thought. The URI structure they use for articles is marvelous. I just type en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_topic_title, and if I guessed right it takes me to the article. If not, it's just one click to search for "Probable topic title." It's not exactly a paradigm-shifting concept, but it sure beats using SQL record numbers and get variables from the user's point of view.
The author's example in the article is not as obtuse as he makes it out to be. I've always managed to learn a thing or two from the science articles in Wikipedia. Specifically, I was working on some biological stuff from a mathematics background. If anything, the problem is that the articles are incomplete. If scientists want to contribute to a community, they'd stop printing in journals and start writing to wikis. But they're more interested in impressing deans at universities and getting salary raises.
I thought encyclopedias had "entries," not "stories." Perhaps this is the source of the OP's confusion? ;-)
Time and again I get frustrated with Wikipedia content when trying to learn about an unfamiliar mathematical term. And it's not just that you have to be a mathematician to understand the article; you have to be familiar with the particular mathematical field as well. In other words, you already have to know what you are reading about :)
For a classical example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor and compare this to the approach taken in the famous Dodson and Poston, Tensor Geometry. I was really dedicated to finding out just what the tensors are about and the Wikipedia article only managed to get me even more confused. Its approach is too much "in medias res": for example, it starts off with saying that a tensor is independent of a frame of reference; this is meaningless to a person trying to find what a tensor is, not what it isn't.
OK, I acknowledge that I may have picked one of the toughest concepts to introduce a beginner to, but it is just one example. More or less, whenever I go to Wikipedia looking for an answer to a mathematical question, I am left as clueless as before I started reading.
I think the problem lies in the extremely high demand on a person writing a beginner's introduction. Such a person needs to know the subject inside out and be able to approach it from many different angles. At the same time, the person needs to have a subtle understanding of the point of view of the uninitiated mind -- something very tough for such an expert.
Personally I think it's about time that literacy was seen as more than simply the ability to read words: you need to be a part of the knowledge, not just a consumer of it. More schools should start having assignments that read "research topic X and write a wikipedia article on it". Then if its good, load it up, not dump it in the trash as school essays always are.
Most academic disciplines have a set of jargon and a language register that takes a while to learn and understand. I reckon there needs to be some sort of scale so everyone can get what they want out of the page. Maybe multiple copies written for different targets? After all, I understand German better than I do my 3M1 lecturer (the point being there's a 'German' wikipedia, but no 'maths' wikipedia).
Perhaps a 'wikipedia for kids', 'wikipedia for adults' and a 'collection of dense, unreadable wikipedia articles for the discerning scientist' could be justified? Even a "zoom-in" button (like that on google maps), so you can set your desired level?
I also think that physicists should be forced to write two copies of their journal articles - a layman's and a physicist's copy. Reading some journal articles really makes it seem like they're putting up 'smoke and mirrors' so only people already in the club can read it. Science and effective communication shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
Is it just me is is that writer using the world's worst font? I couldn't read what he had to say because my eyes were funny after reading the first paragraph...
No sig today...
I'm not really that curious. But ok, let's look at the link: Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene regulation that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). When a cell undergoes such an epigenetic change, it is the phenotype of the cell that is affected.
I must ask, exactly what is it that is so hard about this? Ok, it uses terms that the reader may not be familiar with, but, and it's a big "but", all those terms have hyperlinks to their own articles. I'm a far cry from a cell biologist, but I could understand what epigenetics is within 15 seconds of viewing the article using only the background knowledge I had from biology in high school. If you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, I would expect at most half an hour would be needed. Which, in my eye, is fair. If you don't want to put in some effort in trying to understand a technical subject for which you lack almost any kind of useful background knowledge, you have no right to complain.
Ok, to me they read the same. I think you must work on your reading skills. Wikipedia is intended to be an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias have always strived to be brief and precise. If you want hand holding and a textbook approach, you seem to already have found it, so I'm not sure why you're complaining.
Ok, let's look at wikipedia again. The second sentence reads: Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants," because they churn out energy for the cell [snip]. This is the kind of language you would find in childrens books. I agree that there were other bits that were more technical, but if this isn't enough to put you on the right track, nothing is.
Besides, encyclopedias were never intended to be textbooks. If you really have no idea what mitochondria are, and no background knowledge that helps you understand the terse language of an encyclopedia article, maybe you should look at a biology textbook instead. You know, at school, when they teach biology, they don't use encyclopedias. Textbooks are what they use for teaching people stuff. Encyclopedias should instead be classified as reference works.
Sorry, but that's your problem. You can either click on the link, and learn what it means, or you can ignore it for now, and still get a pretty good understanding. It's "[strange word] mechanics for gases and liquids".
I agree that this is a good idea. I fail to see why every article should be for dummies, though...
Good. If they don't even understand the subject, I don't want them editing the article.
So you're complaining because a Wikipedia article is over-detailed? I mean, those sentences are over three-quarters down the page and are clearly aimed at experts. The first few paragraphs provide a reasonably detailed overview that would probably kick World Book's backside - no way in hell would it have 34kb of information and quick references to other related information.
I'm all for explaining important jargon in layman's terms, and to link to more detailed explanations, but a big reason why people turn to an encyclopedia is that they need to learn the jargon relevant to the field; removing it won't do them any good. Furthermore, jargon is invented for a reason; to speak precisely you need precisely defined terms.
I ran into repeated use of the term "don the purple" when describing the accession of Roman emperors. Yet I NEVER found a description of what "the purple" really meant.
It meant a toga with purple trim.
Before synthetic dyes were developed, some dye colors were very expensive to achieve, and purple was one of them. The source of the dye was sea snails, and the extraction process was a secret. In the later days of the Roman Empire, wearing purple was restricted to emperors. See "sumptuary laws".
and he told us:
"If Wikipedia science references disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."
- Einstein
Unfortunately, the "wiki is not paper" guideline is, in my opinion, one of the most often-forgotten guidelines by the Wikipedia editors and Wikipedians generally. I can't even begin to count the number of unnecessary merges and deletions that I've seen, which seem driven by people combating what they perceive to be a "waste of space."
I really like Wikipedia. I like the concept, and I like the execution insofar as I think it's probably the best effort anyone's done so far on a sort of "universal library." Unfortunately, it's strayed pretty far from the 'encyclopedia of all knowledge' -- information is frequently deleted (and I don't just mean logically deleted, I mean actually expunged, removed forever) because some small-minded person or group of persons thinks it's unimportant. This is sad, because one of Wikipedia's great draws, to many people, is its breadth of information. The fact that you can go into it, and read lengthy, authoritative articles on what might otherwise be considered ridiculously trivial matters, is why it's superior to anything else.
Unfortunately, too many people on Wikipedia, including some editors and administrators, seem to think that anything that doesn't have an article in other encyclopedias, doesn't belong in Wikipedia -- or even worse, anything that they haven't heard about, doesn't belong in Wikipedia. This is terrible, because it means WP will always be a "Britannica" wanna-be, rather than something far greater, eventually transcending and defining what it means to be an "encyclopedia."
It's frustrating, because I suspect almost everyone has an article or two that they could write for Wikipedia -- something that they're an expert on like no other -- but who wants to spend that much time and effort writing an article, if there's a significant risk that some two-bit admin on a power trip, sometime down the road, could decide that it's "too trivial," and delete the page: destroying your work and that information just as thoroughly as tearing some pages out of a physical book and burning them would. (And, perhaps most offensively, in my opinion: Wikipedia even makes use of the 'nocache' tags in its robots.txt files to make sure that systems like Archive.org don't save material that they delete -- so when a Wikipedia page is deleted, unless you or someone else has a personal archive, it's pretty much gone forever.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's not just science articles. Arts articles suffer the same fate, but in the arts way. Their clear introductions (with a simple definition) get replaced with rambling meandering passages that assumes that the reader already know every term in that entire field of study and end up saying very little about the topic at hand. They become excellent references for experts, but completely unintelligible for people with less than a graduate degree.
I'd give an example, but my favourite was cleaned up sometime in the last 6 months.