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

That's what wikilinks are for

[Toe, The]

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."

Science is hard?

[tomstdenis]

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

All the world's info, or the world's info for all?

[Zadaz]

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.

Re:The more accurate the better

[Mr. Underbridge]

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

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?

Most well written articles start out general and conceptual for a summary, and then have technical portions that are, well, technical. I think that's a good format - the layperson reads what is effectively an 'executive summary'; the expert keeps reading.

Another option is to have a sort of 'moron babelfish' with parallel entries for a given story, with a link that replaces the 'hard parts' with less technical sections.

Re:Then edit it

[Toe, The]

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.

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.

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.

Again, I completely disagree. I find this exact process to be the best learning experience I have had. I have edited hundreds of Wikipedia articles about things I did not know much about. I start reading the article, and as I come across things that don't make sense to my level of understanding, I change them. Sometimes this requires that I do a good deal of research to be able to make that edit. So it may take me a whole hour to edit a 2-page article. This is an awesome way to learn. By the time I am done, I have a tremendous understanding of the subject... and I have helped the next person get a good understanding much more quickly. Everybody wins.

Try it sometime. It may take you an hour or two (hint: most Wikipedia articles have an "External links" section that is tremendously helpful), but you will find that you have expanded your understanding enormously. Isn't that the highest goal of an encyclopedia?

Re:Make it readable

[Coryoth]

I so agree. I'm not a math person and I've tried to look up math topics I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject! Math is hard for two reasons: the first is that it is a highly layered subject, with abstraction built on abstraction, so that it can be hard to get a firm grasp of later concepts without solid understanding of the earlier ones; the second is that with mathematics the devil is often in the details -- without the nitpicking details, which are often tedious and complicated, things tend to unravel quickly. The latter point tends to mean that people often get caught up in the details (indeed, in my view math education is utterly detail obsessed), and the facts about mathematics, and lose sight of the bigger picture -- providing that bigger picture is hard though. I'm working on a project along those lines, The Narrow Road, in which I try and build up an explanation of advanced mathematics from simple beginnings, keeping an eye on the motivations and broader outlook wherever possible. I haven't gotten to calculus quite yet, though we are starting to get close, so if you like start at the beginning and see if it provides the sort of explanations you're looking for (it may not, different approaches work differently for everyone); if so, then hopefully I cna provide you with some explanations for calculus in the coming months.

Re:The more accurate the better

[jbengt]

I think the submitted article has got it wrong.

I've read (or, tried to read) some Wikipedia articles that were way over my head. But TFA lost me with it's first example of epigenetics. I never had biology past freshman high school level, but I found the quoted paragraph to be easy to understand.

Now some subjects, like fluid dynamics, are inherently hard. The fluid mechanics article includes tough math, especially if you follow the links, and you wouldn't expect most to fully understand. But that shouldn't mean you should leave the math out. Learn to live with it and read around what you don't understand, or use the resources available to learn more. The quoted bits of the Fluid Mechanics article that TFA complains about are not bad at all.

I agree that some articles can be improved by making some of the language more accessible to laymen, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The author of TFA just comes off as spoiled by quoting understandable text and saying it's too confusing.

You can only dumb things down so far before you're no longer telling the truth.