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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?"
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.
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.
- 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
- 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
- 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.Find free books.
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.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
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.
My bicyles
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