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?"

Comments

The more accurate the better

[zoomshorts]

Quality of knowledge is important. Readability is second.

Re:The more accurate the better

[MarkByers]

Exactly. If you want a 'Beginners Guide to Physics' go to the children's library. Wikipedia is something that the authors of the beginners guide can use to make sure that their facts are right (but unfortunately too few of them do this).

Re:The more accurate the better

[Eudial]

Quality of knowledge is important. Readability is second.

Agreed.

Personally, I think that using wikipedia as a tool of learning a subject is unfair to you, the one doing the learning: You're doing yourself a big malfavor in not buying a proper book, or attending a class in the subject. Wikipedia should not be a cheap substitute for a proper education.

Re:The more accurate the better

[MolarMass]

While I definitely agree that the quality of knowledge is the most important aspect, I think that readability is nearly just as important.

General understanding of science suffers because it is not accessible (meaning understandable) by the layperson. This is not always because topics require a great deal of background knowledge to understand, but because it is explained poorly or in ways that only somebody familiar with a topic will be able to easily follow.

What use is knowledge if people who will benefit the most cannot understand it? I do not believe in "dumbing down" anything, but sometimes different levels of explanation are necessary, and this is something that wikipedia lacks for most science entries.

Re:The more accurate the better

[Kamots]

mm... readability is important too, however, readability isn't what the author really seems to be attacking...

A lot of the article's complaints are focused around wikipedia providing you the technical terms that are *necessary* for you to know if you wish to explore something in-depth. Basically they're focused around wikipedia working at providing more than simply a very high level overview of something.

Yes, if you want that cursory ten thousand foot overview I can see it being somewhat intimidating; however, usually when technical term is mentioned there's a link to the appropriate wikipedia page, so if you don't know what that means you can go find out.

The reason that I love wikipedia is that I can start by looking for general information, then drill down to the level of detail that I want. If wikipedia doesn't have all the info I need, then I at least go away knowing what the technical terminology is, and can use that to hit up other sources. If we followed the recommendations of the opinion writer, wikipedia would, at least to me, lose a large portion of it's worth.

Re:The more accurate the better

[bcrowell]

Readability isn't opposed to quality. Actually, WP has a policy that all articles are supposed to be written for the general reader. It's just that the policy is often ignored when it comes to science articles. Some of my favorite horror stories:

1. Kepler's laws ... highly mathematical, and includes a ton of irrelevant mathematics (e.g., analytic geometry equations that belong in the conic sections article); the math is way too heavy, and starts way too soon
2. photon ... completely unintelligible to the general reader, and makes the mathematics even less intelligible by defining lots of unnecessary notation, and presenting various equations in more than one notation
3. special relativity ... violates WP policies by splitting off the nontechnical stuff into a separate article

Of course, people will tell me that if I thought there was a problem with these three articles, I should fix them. Actually, I tried in all three cases. (And in #3, if you look on the talk page, people have been commenting for years that it was inappropriate to split the article.) Also, note that in all three cases, the articles include external links to web pages that do a better job of explaining the topic for the general reader, so it's not just that these topics are inherently impossible to explain simply. (Special relativity, despite its reputation for being a difficult subject, can actually be developed with nothing more than simple algebra. In fact, Einstein wrote a popular-level treatment that did exactly that.) The problem is that most science geeks are not good at explaining science to nonscientists. I do it for a living (I teach physics at a community college), and it's hard. A lot of the people working on these articles appear to be young grad students who have no experience teaching the subject, and just haven't learned to communicate with people who don't have the same background.

Re:The more accurate the better

[smallfries]

No, I'm afraid to say you're completely wrong.

Wiki is meant to be authoritive - that means all the way from a beginner's entry to the subject to the accurate detailed facts about the topic. This thread is a false dichotomy. Wiki should not have to lean towards one extreme or the other - the only reason to do so is because of lack of space. Remember "wiki is not paper".

Re:The more accurate the better

[BufferArea]

When you present knowledge in a readable form, the quality of the knowledge is intrinsically tied to its readability. The point of putting knowledge in a written form(or presenting it in any form to another person) is to communicate ideas. If its not readable its pointless. That being said, it is not that these wikipedia articles are unreadable, just that these particular ones are unreadable by the intended audience. The intended audience is not versed in theory and terminology, those that are already either a)know the material well enough to not need to refer to wikipedia or b) already have much better references. It the article wants to gradually introduce the terms and concepts or break the entry up in such a way that novices and experts could refer to different sections, that would be fine. Unfortunately, many people like to show off their knowledge and don't really care about expanding other's people knowledge. Quite often, these are the same ones yelling at people to RTFM when those people ask questions. In these cases though, how are people supposed to RTFM?!

Re:The more accurate the better

[tloh]

Well, to be fair, science is hard. It may not be a bad thing that getting the most out of wikipedia requires a "layperson" to put a bit more effort into it. Language use can certainly be tweeked for better readability in a few wiki articles, so I agree, to some extent, with the points raised by the blogger.

But sometimes the goal of disseminating good information runs counter to the goal of convincing the public. Just yesterday, we had an armchair scientist wannabe ranting and raving about ideas as if he's an expert here on /. when in reality he is complete clueless. The guy was so completely bewitched by a slick british documentary on global warming (of the "alien autopsy"/"moon landing hoax" variety) that a full day of arguing with those who know better only succeeded in showing everyone how stubborn he can be.

I may be treading on a tangent with the direction I'm taking with this comment, but I think it is important to distinguish writing laymen style for understanding versus writing laymen style for pursuasion. I think it is critically important for resources like wikipedia to maintain scientific discipline and accuracy at whatever the cost and not pander to political or ideological motives. This includes simplifying dificult ideas to fit a non-expert's conceptual grasp. If resources like wikipedia become too diluted, people will get the dangerous idea that real science as done by scientists is somthing of trivial complexity or arbitrary objectivity. Nutjobs and crackpots would be able to use Wikipedia in ways completely counter to it's purpose. The best thing that Wikipedia can do for the layperson is act as a conduit for anyone sufficiently motivated to really learn the material by link hopping or following the references cited by contributors. Other wise, a simple "authoritive" exposition might just end up missleading or missinforming the intended audience.

I think your advocacy of doing away with length requirement is a noble attempt at the solution to this problem. However, with many complex ideas, voluminous information often ends up being convoluted and confusing. Think about it: in an article on modern file systems or database design, do you *really* want to delve into the finer aspects of sorting algorithms?

Re:The more accurate the better

[anaesthetica]

I can't help but think that you're missing the point of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is expressly made for non-experts so that they can get a general idea of what a subject is all about. It's a tertiary source--digested primary and secondary sources served up in a non-threatening, approachable manner.

Wikipedia oughtn't be an expert-level source right off the bat--the average joe should be able to look up something, and with a high school level education at least have the basics of something explained to them before the Wikipedia editors go batshit crazy with Math LaTeX markup writing impenetrable proofs all the way down the page.

I've tried, on occasion, tagging excessively obtuse math/science articles with {{importance}} or {{technical}} in an attempt to get editors to explain what a formula or theory does and why it's important in layman's terms, but they've been not only recalcitrant, but downright hostile.

And before you say that I should get an education or learn more about wikipedia, I am a PhD student and an admin on Wikipedia (disclaimer: I am not Essjay).

This is one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Just as the English wikipedia has certain systemic biases due to its contributors' backgrounds, the science and math articles suffer from a sub-systemic problem, insofar as their articles are written principally by and for a self-selecting group of experts.

If people want an expert resource, use Google Scholar and look up actual journal pieces. Wikipedia is a place for tertiary knowledge before expert knowledge. This is not to say that expert knowledge should be refused, it's merely to point out that having only expert knowledge does next to nothing to further to goal of building an encyclopedia.

Re:The more accurate the better

[hedwards]

You can't have it both ways. Either it is an authoritative source or it is simple enough for your average lay person to read the majority of the articles and understand.

There is a reason why most authoritative literature is typically in large tomes that are dense and full of technical terms. It is impossible to write and article on DNA which is authoritative without getting into technical terminology and sometimes difficult to understand chemical reactions.

As soon as you start to talk about complicated issues of neurobiology and such in a manner in which a layperson could readily understand, you have already typically thrown accuracy out the window. Even the majority of texts for aspiring scientists are watered down enough that they shouldn't be considered to be the authoritative source of information.

So no, you can't cover something both simply and accurately in all cases and the wiki should be shooting more towards accuracy if it wishes to be the source to use for settling the sorts of disagreements that they seem attempt to settle.

Re:The more accurate the better

[MoxFulder]

Bingo. Here's one particularly good quote from "Wiki is not paper" (emphasis mine):

The purpose of a normal encyclopedia is to provide the reader a brief overview of the subject, while a reference book or text book can explain the details. Wikipedia can do both. Because Wikipedia is not paper, it can provide summaries of all subjects of interest and also provide exhaustive detail on those subjects, conveniently linked, categorized, and searchable for readers who want more detail.

Ideal Wikipedia articles ought to include introductory material for lay people and detailed information for specialists who want more. In fact, if you look at the Biology or Physics articles which have been chosen as Featured Articles (based on a consensus that they are of very high quality), you will find that these do an excellent job of achieving this goal; they target a broad audience AND provide depth.

Of course, since Wikipedia is effectively unlimited in space, and is growing rapidly, not all articles are up to that high standard yet. The important thing to me is that it seems to be quickly and consistently improving.

Frankly, I don't understand what the Wired article has against the mitochondrial DNA and fluid dynamics articles... I am not a specialist in either and had no problems understanding either one. I found them pithy, precise, and concise. The other thing his excerpts omit is the fundamentally cross-linked nature of wikipedia: if you don't understand a word like "continuum" (which the author complained about), you can just click on it and get a more thorough explanation on Wikipedia. With related information so easily accessible, it's less important to define every single related term in an introductory paragraph.

Re:The more accurate the better

[JebJoya]

As some of you may know, I'm a mathematician, and I have to say that there can be space on a particular topic for a mix of high and low level content. Taking, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Sets, the Wikipedia Article on Julia Sets, we see a fairly readable intro which admittedly uses the words "complex dynamics" and "holomorphic function." Now, the average reader who doesn't know what these are will skip over these, perhaps picking up on "complex" and "function," depending on how advanced a mathematician they are. However it goes on to say that "informally consists of those points whose long-time behavior under repeated iteration of f can change drastically under arbitrarily small perturbations" and that the behaviour of the function on J(f) is "chaotic." Now, for the user who is reading this with some vague interest, this description should be reasonable. Wikipedia cannot be aimed at people with absolutely no knowledge in the area - how would this article be written? "A Julia Set is a kind of Fractal which is made from some Function..." and then we kind of peter out of ideas for the layman?

One of the articles that the article itself points out as a bit rubbish on the layman readability front is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion. As a mathematician, I've always had an issue with Biology, but I can still pick out some phrases which give me reasonable information to what a Mitochondria is: "In cell biology, a mitochondrion" tells me it's a part of a cell, "Mitochondria are sometimes described as "cellular power plants," because they churn out energy for the cell", the cell structure part gives a nice image of a mitochondria, and the mitochondrial functions section gives me more information on the energy conversion and its other uses. I would say that this article is a good example of a Wikipedia article being readable to the layman (with a basic degree of Biology knowledge, otherwise why would they look at it) with enough information for the expert.

In conclusion, I don't agree with the original article's sentiment, and believe that Wikipedia Science articles are, in general, readable enough to laymen, and have enough information for experts.

JebJoya

Re:The more accurate the better

[Fred Ferrigno]

Depends on the topic. At some point, for a given entry one needs to make an editorial decision, whether to make the content high level or low level. For instance, some mathematical topics simply require calculus to fully understand. Do you dumb down the article to conceptual level so that a relative layperson might understand it or not? This is the false dichotomy. You do not need to make that choice on a wiki. You can have different articles on the same subject or different sections in the same article for different audiences. Witness Evolution and Introduction to evolution.

Re:The more accurate the better

[anaesthetica]

You've got it backwards. Wikipedia shouldn't be cited or referenced. It's a starting point. It would be better if the Wikipedia editors (and I'm one of them) took a clue from Beginner's Guide to Physics and wrote a comprehensible explanatory overview of the topic citing that book along the way.

I think the best analogy here is commenting in one's code. It's rather unfair for me to write a thousand lines of complex perl, completely undocumented, and then hand it off to others to maintain. Is it their fault when they don't know where to start, and have to essentially decipher everything I've done in order to figure out what the code does? Absolutely not.

Writing a math/science article on Wikipedia follows the same logic. Write it with expert knowledge and academic-level accuracy, but for god's sake, explain what's going on to people who don't know the subject inside-and-out already.

Re:The more accurate the better

[anaesthetica]

Yes, you can have it both ways. Wikipedia is not paper, it's not a limited resource, or constrained for space.

You write an overview intro section explaining what the topic is, how it relates to other topics, why it's important/relevant, and how it is applied to things.

After you're done with the layman explanation, feel free to dive into complex jargon, LaTeX proofs, and every other academic obscurity you can muster. But don't completely dismiss providing any utility at all to the layperson. Not only is that elitist, it's contrary to the very purpose of an encyclopedia--to be a tertiary source of knowledge suitable for general readership.

Re:The more accurate the better

[Mr Z]

Before I start, I pretty much agree with you, and would like to throw my 2 cents into the ring.

Science and math are hard, which is precisely why you shouldn't throw unnecessary roadblocks up on the path to understanding.

For instance, I sometimes have to look up some mathematical construct for whatever reason. If I find it on Wikipedia, many times the entire article is fairly short and laden with a bunch of mathematical symbology. While all that may be obvious to a mathmetician, it's entirely a foreign language to me. I came to the English language Wikipedia. Would it hurt to describe topics in English rather than compress whole paragraphs down to 3 symbols I haven't seen in 10 years?

This is quite different than writing brain-candy documentaries such as the ones you complain about. Those are just sensationalistic pablum using science as a backdrop.

As for your comment:

Think about it: in an article on modern file systems or database design, do you *really* want to delve into the finer aspects of sorting algorithms?

That's what factorization is for. None of that information should be in-line in a filesystem article, but if you really wanted to cover the topic competently, you ought to link to articles on relevant classes of data structures and algorithms. For instance, it makes no sense to define and describe B* trees (such as HFS uses) in the article, but it makes complete sense to mention that on-disk directory structures include various tree structures. It might also make sense to include a survey table of popular filesystems and structures they use. Or, even save that for filesystem-specific articles.

As Wikipedia is more a reference than a textbook, it doesn't make sense for it to try to teach algorithm design, but it does make sense for it to compare the merits of various sorting algorithms at a high level, and perhaps compare the cost of various actions on a sorted data structure (key insert, key removal, etc.).

As an engineer, I often have to explain complex topics to people who are highly technical, but not experts in the specific area I'm operating in. For example, many people are competent programmers, but not experts on the specific nomenclature and behavior of a cache hierarchy. A competent programmer in most cases only needs to know to keep their working set "small enough for the cache," and not, for example, the difference between an inclusive vs. exclusive cache hierarchy or the difference between an LRU and Pseudo-LRU replacement policy. But, if I'm writing a comprehensive reference (or worse, writing a useful errata description), I sometimes need to convey these concepts to interested non-experts. Is it better for me to explain it with a terse equation, or with a couple paragraphs of standard English that goes light on the jargon? The complaint is that Wikipedia often tends towards the former.

--Joe

by the very nature of the media

[superwiz]

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.

There are limits to simplification

[digitalderbs]

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.

Re:There are limits to simplification

[so.dan]

There are two kinds of science articles I read on Wikipedia (and I go to Wikipedia alot): 1. Articles in a science related to my research field, and 2. Articles in some other science. In the case of articles in my field (quantum gravity), I have read up on topics that (a) I am enough of an expert to make minor edits, if necessary, and (b) I hardly know anything about but need to understand - usually quickly - in order to get on with the task of understanding of some more-important-to-my-thesis-work concept.

In all three of these cases (1a, 1b, and 2), Wikipedia has, in all cases (no exaggeration) been (i) far better pedagogically in giving me an introduction to the concept than by far the majority of review articles which would help introduce me to the concept or topic, and (ii) although good textbooks generally give a much more thorough intro to the topic/concept better in terms of the amount of time I need to spend to get a good introduction to the concept/topic than textbooks, if I don't have enough time to read the best textbook which contains good info on the concept/topic. (Although, perhaps obviously, (iii) far less helpful than my supervisor per unit time, in helping me to understand some new concept/topic).

When I haven't had the much background on the topic (1b and 2), the little introductory blurb at the beginning always gave me an intuitive and very rough understanding of the concept. Clicking the links of the terms in the introductory blurb with which I was insufficiently familiar gave me far smoother understanding. And then reading the more in-depth explanations gave me as good an understanding that I can imagine getting (and more than I would have hoped to get before Wikipedia came into my life) per unit word I read on Wikipedia in my attempt to understand the concept. It is generally only after reading the Wikipedia article that I try to read review papers and texts on whatever it is I need to know (and then only if I need more than a rudimenary understanding). I went to the mitochondria and the epigenetics articles that the author disparages, and I have little background in biology (i.e., Biology 101 and Organic Chemistry in undergrad), and I seriously don't understand what the author finds so difficult about them.

Honestly, I think the root of the author's complaint may just be due to the fact that science is hard . It takes a lot of time to understand a single concept. Other fields (e.g., history, literary criticism) are about inherently more complex topics and sciences (especially physics) are about much, much simpler systems. As a result, it has been possible to develop individual concepts in science much more deeply than in non-scientific fields; in which (non-science) researchers are able to deal with a breadth that no scientist (except the odd person like the unbelievably broadly- and deeply- educated von Neumann) is able to reach.

Thus, whereas it is possible to read up on a small topic/concept more quickly in a non-scientific field and have a decent understanding of it, it takes much longer to do the same for a concept/topic in science. (And researchers in non-scientific fields are thereby required to have knowledge of many more topics/concepts in their fields than scientists do).

Furthermore, the complaint that at least one poster made regarding the use of complex mathematical equations in WP entries in topics in physics(such as Kepler's laws and photons) is insufficiently grounded for the following reason: Both of these posts give the highly mathematical description after giving only as much of a description of each in plain English, as is reasonably possible, and yet informative at the same time. Anyone who likes can choose to read only the parts written in English. I myself find that there are occasions when I only have time for the plain-English descriptions, and there is nothing wrong with reading only that. Anyone who wants to know more can read t

*sigh*

[pytheron]

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 !

The term encyclopaedia

[Flying pig]

Literally means, I believe "surrounding children", meaning that it is supposed to represent a body of knowledge that can be used to give children an all-round education. Correct me if I am wrong on that.

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.

Dumbing Down

[drooling-dog]

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.

Disagree

[Relic of the Future]

Disagree strongly.

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.

Re:Disagree

[DevStar]

The point of an encyclopedia is to get experts to write accessible entries for the lay person. It's no so that someone who just learned quantum physics could change the entry on it to something they understand (which would probably be wrong).

Wired?

[misleb]

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

Then edit it

[Toe, The]

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.)

Re:Then edit it

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

That's the same fallacy that the FOSS zealots are prone to. They say, if you want a feature, or don't like a bug, write it or fix it yourself. Well, not everybody has the knowledge or time to do that.

Same goes for Wikipedia articles. How can you fix an overly esoteric article if you don't understand the subject in the first place (and that's why you came to Wikipedia)? Answer: you can't. Even those who can may not have the time, and those who do have time may not have the ability to write about it coherently.

So for those who write FOSS or Wikipedia articles: cool. Awesome. You contribute to the community. But, please, don't blame inadequacies on those of us who don't/can't contribute. That's weak.

Re:Then edit it

[anaesthetica]

So... if you find something wrong... FIX IT.

No, no, a thousand times no. We're not talking about the [[Chair]] or [[Hurrican Katrina]] entry, in which any average joe can google CNN stories and add to or improve an article. A great deal of the advanced math topics are things that it would take more than one university course in order to understand. Most expert content (journal pieces) is hidden behind paywalls (e.g. JSTOR).

Non-experts editing obscure articles to make them more readable is silly. If the copy-writing is bad, sure, you can go ahead and split up sentences, add commas, fix dangling participles. But if I want to edit Residue class-wise affine groups, I have no fucking clue where to begin in order to explain the concept in layman's terms.

Expert articles need experts to explain them. A layman really cannot be expected to undertake the massive research effort to teach themselves all the math necessary to understand what a "residue class-wise affine group" is in order to write an explanatory piece of intro text such that the next poor slob doesn't have to engage in a month-long research project in order to understand an encyclopedia article.

Just think how utterly absurd that is: engaging in a research project simply to understand an encyclopedia article? It defeats the entire purpose of having an encyclopedia in the first place. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source of knowledge--primary and secondary sources broken down for the casual reader. Readers Digest:Books::Encyclopedia:Academia

Re:Then edit it

[drsquare]

That doesn't make sense. Some math subjects are esoteric. There is no way one can explain it simply without first explaining five years' worth of math theory. No way. If you want a simplistic article on an esoteric subject, you are asking the article to be 500 pages long. That would simply be redundant.

In which case, that topic should not be in an encyclopaedia, it should be in a maths book.

Make it readable

[wurp]

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.

Re:Make it readable

[Dun Malg]

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.
To be fair, that was one of the most impressive aspects of Feynman's genius, and one which he worked very hard at. To quote Wikipedia , "His principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood". To expect the vast teeming majority of Wikipedia editing schmoes out there to display the genius of Feynman is really expecting too much.

Re:Make it readable

[Coryoth]

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. Heh. You think that's bad, try looking up fibration, pre-sheaf, sheaf cohomology, adjoint functor, or topos. Compared to the category theoretic material, a lot of the math articles are positively comprehensible. There are efforts underway, within the WikiprojectMathematics, t try and make things more accessible. For instance the manifold page is relatively low level, and tries to give a general explanation of the ideas, with the technical details left to more specific articles like differentiable manifold and topological manifold (although, to be honest, both of those are in need of some work).

Ultimately, however, it is hard because math is a very layered subject. Each idea builds upon the previous abstractions. You can bootstrap yourself straight into things via an axiomatic definition, but that fails to provide much in the way of context or motivation. I'm trying to slowly build my own explanation of more advanced mathematics at my website, The Narrow Road, building piece after piece and trying to keep track of the big picture and motivate things as we go along. That's a very slow process however: I'm only barely starting to scratch group theory and the beginnings of calculus -- algebraic topology, category theory, and topos theory, which are among my eventual goals, are a long way off yet.

At some point you have to recognise that without appropriate background context with which to explain things, explanations of advanced mathematics are going to be excessively long. I think providing better context for modern mathematics would be a good thing (check out Conceptual Mathematics by Lawvere for instance, a high school level category theory text). In the present, however, most people have been exposed to concepts of number and arithmetic sufficiently that they have an intuitive idea o those abstractions, but the basic abstractions of, say, group theory (while not necessarily that much harder) aren't generally encountered so people tend to lack the context. I agree that the current Wikipedia articles could use some work, and cleaning up some of the unnecessary use of technical terms as a crutch (as so often happens) would be good. Still, there's no substitute for having a grasp of the abstractions upon which the particular idea you're looking at is based.

Re:Not just wikipedia problem

[scapermoya]

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.

No.

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

You couldn't be more wrong.

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:

Antigen (peptide) is presented by MHC class II on an APC to a CD4 TH cell with a TCR that recognizes a particular MHC classII/peptide complex. The TH cell is stimulated to undergo clonal expansion. If it encounters a B cell with the same class II/MHC peptide complex on its surface, it stimulates that B cell to clonally expand and produce soluble antibody...

[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.

Quality is good. Readability should be paramount.

[Anonymous Freak]

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.

Dumb it down?!?!?

[Secret Rabbit]

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.

The problem of heavy linking

[DollyTheSheep]

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.

Quite the contrary

[El Cabri]

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.

Re:Science is hard?

[ceoyoyo]

I used to teach calculus to students who knew only basic algebra, and weren't very good at it. It's not that hard. If you can't go from basic algrebra through limits to calculus you don't really know what calculus is.

Short/sweet, or detailed as you keep reading

[NouvelleChimie]

I didn't have any problem with the articles either, but it took a bit more concentration to string the words together. Then again, I go to an engineering school where I'm learning a little about my friends' majors by ranting about classes. When they say "layman" do they mean...someone who has an inkling of knowledge about the article in question? or just random guy off the street?

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....?

Wiki isn't paper, but people forget that.

[Kadin2048]

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.)