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'Maybe Wikipedia Readers Shouldn't Need Science Degrees To Digest Articles About Basic Topics' (vice.com)
Wikipedia articles about "hard science" (physics, biology, chemistry) topics are really mostly written for other scientists, writes Michael Byrne, a reporter on Science beat at Vice's Motherboard news outlet. From the article: This particular class of Wikipedia article tends to take the high-level form of a scientific paper. There's a brief intro (an abstract) that is kinda-sorta comprehensible, but then the article immediately degenerates into jargon and equations. Take, for example, the page for the electroweak interaction in particle physics. This is a topic of potentially broad interest; its formulation won a trio of physicists the Nobel Prize in 1979. Generally, it has to do with a fundamental linkage between two of the four fundamental forces of the universe, electromagnetism and the weak force. The Wikipedia article for the electroweak force consists of a two-paragraph introduction that basically just says what I said above plus some fairly intimidating technical context. The rest of the article is almost entirely gnarly math equations. I have no idea who the article exists for because I'm not sure that person actually exists: someone with enough knowledge to comprehend dense physics formulations that doesn't also already understand the electroweak interaction or that doesn't already have, like, access to a textbook about it. For another, somewhat different example, look at the article for graphene. Graphene is, of course, an endlessly hyped superstrong supermaterial. It's in the news constantly. The article isn't just a bunch of math equations, but it's also not much more penetrable for a reader without at least some chemistry/materials science background.
Then feel free to "translate" it for Simple Wikipedia
Simpler.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
If the Wikipedia material is too over the top, I would get a Dummies book. For example, "Neuroscience For Dummies" is enough to get you started as a brain surgeon.
Maybe not everything needs to be dumbed down to Popular Mechanics levels. I for one enjoy reading difficult articles on Wikipedia: even if I don't understand a quarter of a half of a them, I always learn something new one way or another.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Anytime I have tried to edit an article, my changes get reverted (without recourse) by a bot or some random wikipedia fanatic that refer to a set of rules I never agreed to or was consulted about. I don't have enough time in the day to deal with an internet edit war. If people want an easier to read article, change the edit policy.
First problem, Wikipedia. Not saying it cannot be fixed, but the way that articles are edited and the ability of an editor to win by simply out-camping everyone else is a problem.
Second problem, some topics do not readily lend themselves to easy explanation. Perhaps Wikipedia should include more overview paragraphs, but unfortunately to understand some topics one really does need the underlying education.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So punish the 90% who can use the information for the 10% who are 'just curious'. Frankly I don't care if the general public understands what electroweak interaction is. If they really want to know they have to do the heavy lifting needed to understand something. BTW I don't think electroweak interaction or graphene are 'basic topics' whether they are in the news or not.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Wikipedia is ran by a cabal of admins and twinkle users who write articles that conform to their world view based on "reliable" (controlled by admins) sources. Most admins are morbidly obese, unemployed and are Rick and Morty fanboys. Anyone who uses Wikipedia as a serious source should be kicked out of college or have their degree revoked.
If you go to simple.wikipedia.org, you get much simpler articles on this sort of thing.
There isn't a specific page for electroweak interaction, but it redirects you to Weak interaction, the text of which describes the electroweak interaction.
The Simple page for graphene is decent enough.
they're for me, hope this helps
Troll Bait.
Get lost.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
You can't even sum them up very well unless the person doing that is well read and understands the topics. Wikipedia is good for a lot of things, is this one of them?
I think we mat have reinvented a famous german encyclopedia in which the article about your subject was masterfull, and all the others completely obscure... for any given subject.
davecb@spamcop.net
Well, what's supposed to happen is that someone should step in to edit the article and correct it. Many years ago, I was reading Wikipedia and thought an article could use some more information, and clicked edit and happily added helpful facts. I was contributing to the sum total of human knowledge! I was so proud.
Much like the time that you tried to edit Wikipedia, the same thing happened. I checked the next day and my information had been deleted. I was, honestly, kind of hurt. I never found out what happened until years later. See, to edit Wikipedia articles, you need to be a "Wikipedian". A Wikipedian is someone who participates in the Wikipedia community. The general public isn't really welcome, despite all the high-sounding rhetoric from Jimmy Wales. Perhaps once long ago, when Wikipedia needed to be filled out, this might have been partially true, but now that it's basically finished, contributions from the public are less welcome than ever. The article owners can be very jealous about "their" articles.
I thought about becoming a Wikipedian, but it just seemed like too much effort. Plus from what I've seen other Wikipedians seem like hypersensitive nerd jerks, the kind I escaped from. I just checked the page I tried to help, and sure enough it looks like it hasn't been updated since 2008. Tons of broken links and outdated information. I'd include the link here but it's a highly specific topic and you might be able to puzzle out who I am.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Not every detail of every topic can be summarized for the GED-equivalent layperson. The examples provided, graphene and electroweak interaction, are usually covered in upper division chemistry and physics college classes. These classes take several years worth of prerequisites classes to prepare for. You cannot expect anyone to summarize several years worth of education into a single Wikipedia article.
I want the details, not some pop science. Wikipedia articles are a very good source for looking things up. I hope they stay as they are, an overview in the beginning and then the compressed details afterwards.
The Wikipedia article for the electroweak force consists of a two-paragraph introduction that basically just says what I said above plus some fairly intimidating technical context. The rest of the article is almost entirely gnarly math equations.
What is a good description of electroweak force that avoids 'intimidating technical context and gnarly math equations?' Also note in his equation-less and techno-less 'description' of electroweak force there's no description of what the force is, what it does, or what bosons move it around per the Standard Model.
I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I find the average science article on a subject that I don't already know to be way too technical. They usually lack any sort of overview for non-experts.
I do like technical detail in the article-- but not instead of the article.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I read the Wikipedia article on the electroweak force. It wasn't bad, the formulation and lagrangian sections are understandable by anyone with an undergraduate understanding of calculus, you don't even need a background in physics (though you would to understand the implications). It's actually less arcane in my opinion than some other sources that do a poor job of defining each variable rather than assume you can figure it out on your own. That said there is room for a basic tl;dr of the article which is absent from most technical articles on Wikipedia.
I've read some pages concerning statistics that have math operations I've never seen before. I've done differential equations in the past. I know what a mean and standard deviation are. I'm familiar with many math concepts. This was completely foreign to me. There was little to no explanation as to what it was.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Maybe there's a niche for gasp popularized science writers that actually get paid. I know I know crazy idea right? I have a friend who is a recognized expert (decades of dead tree books published) on a particular historical niche. When I mentioned cleaning up the wikipedia page to him he just rolled his eyes. He does have to pay rent and eat. I get that the entitled post Napster generations just figure everything that doesn't come in a box from Amazon should be free but whining about a free encyclopedia not providing introductory level browsing material for the general public is a new angle.
The Wikipedia article linked is exactly what you would expect from an encyclopedia entry. A few paragraphs of introduction about what the electroweak force is, the people who wrote the theory and the experimental evidence which backed it up. Then it launches into a more detailed description of what EW interactions are, EW symmetry breaking etc. which has to be at a more technical level because otherwise you are leaving out information which is not what an encyclopedia is supposed to do.
If you want explanations of topics which are accessible to the general public then you do not go out and read an encyclopedia you go and read a book designed to simplify complex topics enough that non-scientists can digest them. So if you want a general public level explanation of EW interactions on the web go to something like the particle adventure and they'll have what you want there.
The abstract should be enough for the laymen. Real scientists and those whom are experts in their field or are studying it have much to gain from those equations and 'mathematical jargon' as the summary dictates.
Don't expect Wikipedia to teach you, it is a reference and nothing more. It is however free to edit so if you have the time and patience to simplify these complex topics, then by all means go ahead. But do not expect everything to be served to you on a silver platter.
I don't read AC
There are topics that cannot be understood without at least some scientific background. Dumbing them down is a disservice to everyone. Maybe people that do not have that scientific background should realize this is a limitation on their side and stop demanding that others simplify things for them? While the arrogance smart and educated people often display is pretty bad, what is worse is people that assume that they are capable of understanding everything, and that if they do not, then it is the fault of those explaining it. Understanding complex things takes a lot of work. Invest that or shut up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Jargon has a definite place in the world.
1) It allows to you discuss things with the immense level of accuracy needed for discussing complex topics. Business talk about 'enterprises' so as to include both corporations and non-profit organizations.
2) When talking to other experts, it demonstrates familiarity and knowledge, proving expertise. When talking to other computer experts, if you mention SaaS (Software as a Service) they know you are technical, while if you say Cloud, you are more likely corporate.
3) When talking to non-experts it makes them think you are an expert - irregardless of whether you are one or not. Con men and smarmy types love to abuse it in this way. But if they run into a real expert they get laughed at.
Wikipedia is supposed to be for the general population, not an expert. As such, using jargon (and math) is excessive. It should be limited, or at least placed after a full non-technical explanation.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Says the drooling fool who doesn't understand them...
Like particle physics.
Since when was that a basic topic? Yeah, those things referred to as atoms, so small most people can't comprehend how small they are, it's a topic about the even smaller things that make up the things that make atoms, and how they interact with each other to do that.
It's totally a "basic topic"
It's a lot of work to write an article about a very complex subject, clearly and concisely. Expecting people to do that for free may be expecting a little too much. Not saying it will never happen - just that the effort required to review, clarify & iterate on the topic would have to be a real labor of love if you're not going to pay anything for the hours of work that would take.
-B-
Try understanding -any- topology article. It's like the author is randomly making up every fifth word. Example:
As a product of scrunchy Blorp spaces, the Minkybink cube is itself a scrunchy Blorp space as a result of the Grumpalump theorem. The scrunchyness of the Minkybink cube can also be proved without the Axiom of Choice by constructing a continuous function from the usual Splorp set onto the Minkybink cube.
Every subset of the Minkybink cube inherits from the Minkybink cube the properties of being both tromplizable (and therefore T4) and second countable. It is more interesting that the converse also holds: Every second countable T4 space is homeomorphic to a subset of the Minkybink cube.
Utter.
Fucking.
Gibberish.
About how wikipedia should not be dumbed down, then I had a look at the electroweak description, but yeah, that article quickly devolves into just a listing of relevant formulas with no in depth explanation of what is being calculated.
These days I have been using wikipedia articles on my website http://clearlyexplained.com . Mostly to try and make the topic look less overwhelming, it's not perfect or as detailed but at least I can keep my edits.
"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Albert Einstein
I have found this to be true in my life. Sometimes I think I understand something, but when I try to explain it in a way a child (or even teenager) can understand it I find that I really don't understand it as well as I thought I did. If I then go back and study it further and really try to understand it myself I find that eventually I understand it well enough that I am able to explain it in terms that are comprehensible at most age levels. This often means using analogies and simplifying to the level of the listener, but it is doable if I understand the topic well enough. I suspect the problem with wikipedia is that authors of the articles understand the material just enough to write an article, but not well enough to write it so it is accessible by a lay person (say an 8th grade reading level).
I'm a career scientist and I often use wikipedia to get some basic information on a topics where I'm not already familiar. its quite useful to have real technical information in the articles rather than just an basic introduction.
Many articles do have basic introductions - but sometimes that isn't all that practical. Expecting a simple layman's introduction to electro-weak interactions may be too optimistic. There are probably a few people who could explain it that way, but most experts would not be able to do so.
As another poster said, anyone is free to add non-technical introductions to articles.
Take this one, for instance.
This is a topic of potentially broad interest; its formulation won a trio of physicists the Nobel Prize in 1979.
Winning the Nobel prize means the work was one of the most IMPORTANT advancements for mankind. That does not mean that the general public and people with limited physics or math background should be interested or could meaningfully understand the work or much of the motivation behind this without getting their feet wet in other topics first -- you should be a college Physics I or Physics II student, before you've delved far enough down the rabbit hole and learned enough basics for topics like this to be of much interest to you.
Generally, it has to do with a fundamental linkage between two of the four fundamental forces of the universe, electromagnetism and the weak force.
Yes, and I thought you said general interest... the moment you speak of "electromagnetism" you have lost 50% of your audience scared away by the crazy word electromagnetism... of the remaining half, 90% of them have no idea or a very confused idea of what electromagnetic or weak force refers to. So maybe 10% of readers make it past the first sentence of the simple intro.
BUT That does not mean the entire physics section of WP should be dumbed down to "Explain it like the reader is a 5-year-old".
The mathematical formulation is definitely a huge part of this. And a lot of scientists don't keep their textbooks, but a reference for such encyclopedic knowledge is useful.
Perhaps a longer introduction or explanatory section would be useful to guide newbies in their studies; If you really want to understand it though, you can't avoid the technical details --- your understanding would be done harm by withholding the maths.
Maybe we could just do it with cartoons, so that everybody didn't need to read English. Think of how the audience would be expanded!
It doesn't have to be all one or the other. Perhaps another tab can be added, next to "Talk" tab, that attempts to give a pedestrian explanation.
Table-ized A.I.
Who thinks that more of the articles are too simplified to begin with. I want more gory detail, not less. More harder science now!
If you want explanations of topics which are accessible to the general public then you do not go out and read an encyclopedia you go and read a book designed to simplify complex topics enough that non-scientists can digest them.
The Encyclopedia Britannica in its prime was written for the adult general reader and not the specialist scholar or professional ---and attracted some very good and accessible writers whose academic credentials were perfectly sound.
Some comments:
- Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia. You should not write original material for the wikipedia. Wikipedia takes information from reliable sources and rewrites it for the articles. If there are not divulgative articles on the EW force, then it is not possible for the Wikipedia to offer such content. However, there are many serious books on EW symmetry.
-Writing divulgative articles is difficult, and nobody pays for it. It is a time-consuming activity, and many of those artiicles are written with a target audience of someone familiar with physics. If you are a physicist and write a divulgative article, then it would be nice to use it for Wikipedia, but there are not many people doing that.
- Many divulgative articles use examples that outright lie to the reader on the base that he cannot tell the lies without knowing the equations. Wikipedia should not be home to misleading information.
- Every physicist would love to have less equations into the theory, and work hard to simplify it. However, this is not always possible. In some cases, there is simplification of the equations at the expense of more complex mathematical concepts.
Dumbing everything down for Americans has been proven to be the wrong approach time and time again.
STOP IT!!!!!
... isn't that some of the articles are too technical---some are by necessity. My complaint is the references found at the bottom of the articles. Authors lard up the article with links to other external web sites/pages and that's great---you tend to want to read references to help clarify articles. (Okay... I do). The problem arises when you try and follow the supporting links and they are simply not available any more. You wouldn't lose a lot of bets about citations in newspapers or other "popular" press not being available---or, almost as bad, now being behind a paywall. Maybe those links were "live" at the time of the initial appearance on Wikipedia but would it kill authors who are actively checking articles and backing out other peoples' changes to check if the references are still available and fix the articles when they're not?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I totally agree. The more detailed information, the better.
In reality the crux of the complaint here is that "Hey, we need to dumb down Wikipedia because I am too lazy to study and learn on my own." Perhaps what is really being argued for is a Wikipedia for Dummies". The reality is that there is nothing stopping anyone from "solving this problem", except, of course, their own innate laziness.
I love having detailed information, particular with respect to concepts and topics in mathematics. Yes, many ideas are very hard to learn and to understand no matter how often I read them. Nonetheless, having information out there that I can strive to understand, perhaps by additional reading or additional resources is critical to learning.
If you are too lazy to study and learn, then you shouldn't be surprised that you don't understand much. The universe and everything in it is complicated. Sadly, simply proclaiming "God Did It", isn't of any use, since that can always be said about everything and any convenient moment, without providing any explanation whatsoever. Sure, its easier, but essentially uninformative. Nonetheless, we now have people in the US arguing that topics such as Physics and Biology shouldn't be taught in schools because they are simply based on "theory" and are just too hard thus creating embarrassment to parents and students. Should we get to this point, then we might as well hand the future over to foreigners and others, as surely they will own it.
Maybe if you can do better, you should hit that "Edit" button and do so! Or you can continue to bitch that other's should work the way you want them to, for free. I don't think the latter will get you far.
But if you don't know it to a simple level without the WP "hard mode", you should not be writing the simple wikipedia version.
Why can't they understand basic topics on Wikipedia.
When a lion grown up in captivity was sent out into the wild without properly being taught how to survive, it will for sure die. The problem there is not that the wild is cruel, it's the lack of training for the lion due to the wrongheaded imagination of inherent ability of wild animals. Here the situation is similar. Not making a young person spend his/her time toward a basic understanding of the science and social topics is the failing of the school system and the wrongheaded imagination of only useful education is good education.
All the talks about education preparing youngsters for the work place is putting the emphasis on the wrong foot -- as matter of fact, NOTHING, repeat, NOTHING that the school teaches can be directly applied to any workplace, and NO ONE, repeat NO ONE could stay in the same workplace for his/her whole life. With the current state of technological advances, there is no reason to expect that the school education even should bear the role of job training. It should precisely bear the role of making students do the USELESS things of trying to understand the basic topics, that would seem far fetched from the so called real life, because real life is so well packaged that nothing really can be understood by just looking at it. This again can be related back to the situation of captive lion, where the wilderness is so well packaged in captivity that nothing important can be learned from it unless somehow extra efforts are made.
There are lots of super basic articles and videos on science that use no math at all
There are graduate level articles and videos using difficult math that the student is assumed to know
I find it very difficult to locate articles and videos that gently introduce the math to an engineer like me who knows engineering math, but never studied things like tensor calculus
Status: closed
Resolution: wontfix
Good quote, but maybe out of context.
The word "understand" probably means quite different things in your quote and in the context of Wikipedia.
That's not what this is about. An encyclopedia is supposed to contain introductory material that covers a topic in a comprehensible way for anyone. As a minimum, the article should have this introductory material. It is not optional. As has been stated perfectly by ebyrob above: "There's a difference between a difficult subject and obfuscation for a pretense of erudition."
Perhaps the idiots are the people who don't know how to communicate effectively.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
If you go thru an Encyclopaedia Britannica you find a lot of science articles full of equations , so if the Britannica is a metric for Wikipedia it equations make sense in the articles. So do you want Wikipedia at the level of Funk and Wagnals? i.e dumbed down, which I have noticed over the years Scientific American has become.
Every math article has always been like that since the beginning
Why is an ignoramus playing reporter for the science section of a news outlet? Did he get bored of the playdough and crayons (or eat it all)?
Go back to flipping burgers.
Maybe /.readers shouldn't have to put up with this constant stream of clickbait horseshit from websites (i.e.- motherboard.com) that are owned by their former mutual corporate parent (dice.com), which /. editors insist on posting, despite the richly-deserved, universal scorn they elicit from those readers.
When you look up "nothingburger" on urbandictionary.com, Slashdot Media's logo ought to be the primary illustration these days - and that's a fucking tragedy ...
Check out my novel.
Just look at the end of the Wikipedia article for Bremsstrahlung : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is the biggest equation I've ever seen, followed by "However, a much simpler expression for the same integral can be found in [25] (Eq. 2BN) and in [26] (Eq. 4.1)." The two references are to unlinked (and probably paywalled) papers...
As a college lecturer in a technical field, early in my career I thought that I could use analogies and simplify concepts for students to "get by" with it. What I've found over the years is that the details do matter... some day, at some point. Maybe not any time this year. But next year, or the one after that, my brightest student will become confused by something, ask a question, and I will have to admit the confusion was due to my making some simplified version of statement which is technically false. Then I have to backtrack, and they have to dig up and hopefully correct and initial faulty understanding.
In summary: Every time I try to cut corners it always winds up biting me in the ass at some future date. If I'm going to write lecture notes for public distribution, then I have to get the details right. If I don't, someone for whom those details matter will suffer for it later on.
If we tone it down won't the article just become the intro anyway? As a Ph.D. Chemist I pull up those articles all the time to find equations when I'm not near my books. Having a ready repository of knowledge for multiple levels of skills is a desirable trait for Wikipedia, not a detriment. Perhaps a clear delineation of basic vs advanced information would be useful, but all should stay.
"And your both 6 months pregnant by Billy Ray Sirus" "Then why is mom showing and i'm not?" - Married With Children
I appreciate the articles not being pap. When I am working I frequently have to look up technical details on various subjects, and its nice to have descriptions that actually have some technical details. It is, to me, what makes it useful.
Keep the level as it is. If there is a need for more basic descriptions, expand the introduction.
Wikipedia articles about "hard science" (physics, biology, chemistry) topics are really mostly written for other scientists
Correct, and it's a brilliant point of difference. We already have more than enough "here's a pre-digested, dumbed down explanation largely devoid of content" type webpages. Wikipedia differentiates itself by giving you as much detail as you desire.
Of course I'm probably "that person" TFS posits doesn't exist. Physics training to honours level at uni, researcher in a very mathematics-reliant field (sadly not physics), ongoing and active interest in physics.
the difference is you need expertise to post, not to read.
Wikipedia has a big problem with science and math—their "no original research" rule prevents editors from doing much beyond basic summarization of 3rd party sources. That seems to chill attempts at good communication.
Scholarpedia is written by people who want to communicate things they understand to people who don't already understand those things, rather than being a database of facts like Wikipedia.
These articles are difficult to read because they are poorly written, not because they contain too much detail or technical jargon.
It's a random collection of facts, without a reasoned theme or narrative that ties them together.
A high school student with an assignment to write a term paper could do a better job.
But that's wikipedia for you.
Mike
Much of the article made sense because I have devoted the last 20 years of my life trying to realize some benefit from writing software in object-oriented form.
To a non-code writing lay person, or even to me if I had been unfrozen from suspended animation since the mid 1990's, the article is pure gibberish.
The article appears to only superficially deal with OOP in the form of message passing (Smalltalk and Objective-C to some degree) and what passes for OOP in the form of C++ and Java. This is the software side of the difference between the Xerox Alto and the reproduction of what Steve Jobs thought an Also was all about in the form of the Lisa or the original Macintosh.
Perhaps what we call OOP is a kind of Cargo Cult version of what was created at PARC? That it recreates the forms of the American military occupation of the South Pacific islands without being the WW-II American military? The Wikipedia article doesn't even begin to get into this.
Scientists do not get paid for producing anything useful, only for being smart. This means other people must not know their stuff, or else the "art" would be lost. They must appear smart and superior at every turn.
Much of mathematical principles could be explained in plain language. Something really simple could be made look daunting if converted into math. But that would be no fun.
And thus you get the story of the tower of babel, where scientists starting using their own symbols and jargon (new chinese characters, new compound words; the babel concept predates the bible) to describe them, that they completely lost touch with the commoner. What resulted, was that when the educated class was executed, those remained had texts, and some knew words, but the original information was effectively lost; with little chance of resurrection.
To take that further, as people invent their own words, and not use current vocabulary properly, and without documenting it, or sharing this information around, you end up building your own isolate and the net result is that the communities can't understand each other, and at somepoint, what was once individual style becomes current-jargon, which becomes commuity dialect, which if left untended to, becomes a new mutually-incomprehensibel language.
Wikipedia has its problems, but it is a walk in the park compared to Mathworld, where every definition for a term you are trying to understand links to an endless cascade of other terms you've never heard of. You get sucked down deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. The effect is so extreme I have often wondered if the entire MathWorld site is a giant parody, because anyone seeking to do a parody could do no better / no worse.
I just picked one definition on MathWorld purely at random to highlight the point:
"Anosov Flow
A flow defined analogously to the Anosov diffeomorphism, except that instead of splitting the tangent bundle into two invariant sub-bundles, they are split into three (one exponentially contracting, one expanding, and one which is one-dimensional and tangential to the flow direction)."
Just to keep track, altogether there were four hotlinks in that definition. And isn't it cute how they define a term (Ansov Flow) that I don't understand in terms of something that sounds and that they state is suspiciously similar ("analogously to the Anosov diffeomorphism"), except they then say its different from the analogy they just made ("except that instead of"). But OK, lets go with that nonsensical start. Lets try to dig deeper and see if it helps:
"Anosov Diffeomorphism
An Anosov diffeomorphism is a C^1 diffeomorphism phi of a manifold M to itself such that the tangent bundle of M is hyperbolic with respect to phi. Very few classes of Anosov diffeomorphisms are known. The best known is Arnold's cat map.
A hyperbolic linear map R^n->R^n with integer entries in the transformation matrix and determinant +/-1 is an Anosov diffeomorphism of the n-torus. Not every manifold admits an Anosov diffeomorphism. Anosov diffeomorphisms are expansive, and there are no Anosov diffeomorphisms on the circle.
It is conjectured that if phi:M->M is an Anosov diffeomorphism on a compact Riemannian manifold and the nonwandering set Omega(phi) of phi is M, then phi is topologically conjugate to a finite-to-one factor of an Anosov automorphism of a nilmanifold. It has been proved that any Anosov diffeomorphism on the n-torus is topologically conjugate to an Anosov automorphism, and also that Anosov diffeomorphisms are C^1 structurally stable."
That has 22 links. The analogy they have draw in defining "Anosov flow" is to something so rare, "very few classes ... are known", but of those known, the best known is Arnold's cat map. This pretty much proves my point that the site might be a giant parody of someone searching on the Internet for understanding. For as we all know, every site eventually links to cats, so what better than a cat map - well, better still, Arnold's cat map? And if you are wondering who Arnold is and why he made a cat map, then they have successfully suckered you into another click ... don't take the bait!
all the way down.
You must make it simple enough so that a Women's Studies major can understand it! If you don't, Wikipedia amounts to nothing more than a tool of oppression of the white patriarchy!
I am a physicist (as are many commenting on this article... which makes sense).
The article on the electroweak force is not too technical, it's just bad. The Lagrangian derivation may be important to someone, but it is NOT the physics of the electroweak force, it's just the math. Why is it a big deal to combine two fundamental forces? How was this measured or observed?
Instead of "Lagrangian", you could just as easily have a detailed discussion of "Gargamelle", the experimental apparatus used to prove the interaction between the electromagnetic and weak forces on this page. Actually, go look that page up on Wikipedia, it contains a better summary of the Electroweak interaction than the page on Electroweak interaction!
Ok, so it's Wikipedia and we can all go change things... the problems with that are well detailed here. I fight my wikipedia battles on the graphene pages.
Breaking society with endless divisive stories isn't enough, now they want to make science harder for scientists? Wikipedia already has a simple mode, science isn't for the retarded and Wikipedia is the world's leading encyclopedia, of course it goes into detail with equations. God damned liberals.
I took two terms of physics at a top university that covered basics. This is basic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetism, and there are links to more mathematical pages. The terms Standard Model and electroweak interaction never came up, no mention of anything relativistic, and if the word quantum came up at anytime other than talking about photons and Plank's constant, I missed it.
Cherry picking is super easy - pick a topic that is reasonably esoteric and complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_gradient_descent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_theory, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%E2%80%93Scholes_model. It also helps if a Nobel Prize was awarded for topic
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. "On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933). Maybe NOT everything can be reduced to something a layman can understood. Maybe we need some education to, hopefully somehow, understand something. I have a Physics PhD. But that not matter because there is a whole world outside there that I dont' know. If I need to know something I have to work to do it. I have to read. To prepare. I have always try to make things simple but, over the years, teaching from primary school to graduate, I have learnt that it's not always an easy task, both for the teacher and the pupil, and sometimes that it's not possible. I have not other choice but try hard working. "You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. ...The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought." Richard Feynman, as quoted by K.C. Cole, Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (1985)
Yes, just be clear when you do that. Look at the pde article header. I knew what a pde was going in, now I'm confused. Also, the link to differential equation is useless and distracts.
Would know better than to go to Wikipedia for the information, and would probably know that parts of it were wrong or politically motivated balderdash. But it at least keeps a certain population of self-stroking jerks off the street most of the time.
Yes, that's because it's not a real encyclopaedia at all. It's a more or less random mishmash of largely plagiarized notes from unemployed people who are unemployed for a reason. The editing hierarchy actively discourages and deletes entries from people who know what they're doing, using "original research" or "PoV" as excuses. The writers are anonymous and unaccountable except to others in their editing cliques and lists of citations (which I could get from a Google search) take the place of analysis and balance.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Absolutely. Wikipedia should cut the salary of volunteers writing about difficult topics because they are not writing well. That can make a refund possible for your free reading of Wikipedia.
'Nuff said.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
This article, and most of what I see on forums people are supposed to read, leads me to believe the world is getting dumber.
If the linear math shown in the "electroweak interaction" is "too hard" for you because you can't be bothered to look up symbols you never learned - all I can do is quote the movie Idiocracy - 'If you have 1 bucket with 2 gallons and 1 bucket with 4 gallons, how many buckets you got?'
48% of the voters picked that idiot Trump. That's a lot of people.
They can't even process general visual field information correctly, much less make sense of the written word. They saw "grab 'em by the pussy", abuse of wheelchair-bound people, appeals to "the 2nd amendment people" to do harm, and more idiocy and fuckery along those lines, and their conclusion was "hey, let's make THAT guy president, it'll be better!" JFC.
Dumbing down is not the answer. You can't fix stupid.
One good general introductory paragraph, well-linked for underlying concepts, is usually plenty. If it takes more than that, you're already not writing for a huge number of people. They probably never read this stuff anyway, preferring to get their "information" from Alex Jones and other like-quality resources.
I'll agree that there are some places on WIkipedia that are unnecessarily technical. Sometimes fairly basic mathematical ideas are expressed in terms that are inaccessible to someone without a high level of mathematics education.
With that said, you can only simplify a topic so much before your explanation turns into analogy, and analogies are the seeds of misunderstanding. Quantum mechanics is necessarily complicated and sometimes there's no "ELI5" way of explaining things that occur at that scale. Analogies fail especially hard when it comes to quantum mechanics because things at that scale don't behave in ways that we can easily relate to or visualize--analogies rely heavily on being able to draw those sorts of comparisons, which means it's necessary to use some jargon and assume the reader has a certain level of understanding beforehand.
Some of them are very good. It's the ones that aren't, and particularly the ones that fail because of the lack of an introduction, that are the subject of discussion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
FFS, just ask Siri to explain it to you like you're a Kardashian.
USB, USB, USB!
Slashdot user Tablizer will vehemently disagree, but there are some domains that are a natural fit to OOP. GUI programming comes to mind. In a sort of corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Law (Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.), any attempt to implement a GUI framework with structs and functions contains an awkward, clumsy and ugly implementation of an OOP language and runtime. Think of straight C programming to the Windows API after Charles Petzold's books or think of Gnome under Linux.
Some people actually prefer C-language Windows API programming to the travesty that is C++ programming in Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), which combines OOP with generic programming (C++ templates) with you-can't-touch-this automatic code generation. I think part of what is wrong with MFC is the "M" part (Microsoft). Every organization seems to promote a certain coding style -- think of the stodginess of IBM, the Berkeley neck-beard influence on Unix, whatever attributes SUN contributed to Java -- and Microsoft has its own quirks. The other part is that the Windows API itself with all of its "handles" as references to objects maintained by the OS, along with the ability of the OS to call back into application code to modify or extend the behavior of such objects, is a kind of OOP. This OOP is a Cargo Cult version of what Bill Gates saw on his visit to PARC where he must have been awed by what he saw yet didn't quite intellectually grasp, especially with respect to the underlying software scaffolding and infrastructure to make it happen. Even so, this deal with the "window handles" is an OOP that has a serious impedance match to the C++ OOP, and the Dune-novel plans-within-plans-within-plans of abstraction layers in MFC are an attempt to get the two OOPs to fit.
One of the problems that OOP addresses is the one encountered by deep module hierarchies in imperative-style programming. In a prompt-user response style of console-mode user interface that used to be common before GUIs took over, the code side has called so deeply into a sequence of function calls that the software burps on some unexpected user response. There was some name people gave this, I remember something like the "Cuba Lake effect", but I see nothing on a Google search as the discussions of this took place in Dr. Dobb's Journal long before the Internet became popular. OOP supplies a solution to this in the form of facilitating up-calls or call-backs or whatever-you-want-to-call this back up the hierarchy. A worker can ask his boss a question if he gets stuck. In the absence of an OOP like C++ or Java, you end of simulating this by populating your struct with function pointers to make the up-call.
This business of object class hierarchies where you have an Animal parent class, a Mammal subclass and Dog and Cat subclasses of Mammal, and that they each inherit and modify the Poop() method from parent class Animal to do their business, that the domains addressed by software systems are organized that way is the nonsense part of OOP. The real world doesn't have such neat hierarchies of structure, and to force OOP on that requires such awful things as multiple inheritance that can become ambiguous, interface inheritance that can require duplicating code, object composition that can be clunky in forwarding so many function calls, or something that probably already exists in Common Lisp (Greenspun's Tenth Law!). Me and many others have backed away from (deep) inheritance hierarchies and moved in the direction of object composition, but the tons of statements forwarding function calls is so tiresome.
nuf said
well dont fucking read it if you dont understand. fucking clueless fuckstick
Republicans don't even read Wikipedia. They consider it the granddaddy of fake news.
So, why dumb it down for an audience that only consumes Breitbart, Fox and Friends, and Leviticus?
I've said it before, and can reiterate here: Our society is missing out on very important education!
I suggest that these article NOT be dumbed-down.
Rather, we, as a society, focus far more resources into education.
Generally, most folks are mere "monkeys with a machine gun". No real understanding of what they have or how to ethically use it.
Personally, I find those challenging aspects of most of those article a call to bump up my education.
If I want to understand something, I need to study about it.
I know quite a few politicians that could use a great deal more education.
They are legislating without adequate knowledge of the very particular things they are legislating about.
If we ALL took the time to educate ourselves about things - e.g. climate change, and EPA matters - we MIGHT be around long enough
to correct and survive disastrous events; perhaps even get smart enough to avoid creating more of them.
e.g. If even a small percentage of the voting US population had a better education, Trump would Not be in office,
and we'd all have free education and fully functional and affordable health care!
https://qz.com/849256/how-to-m...
Casteism
How is it out there in Tuscany? A housing shortage you say? No possible way for anyone else to move there you say?
Yes, I've raised this point a number of times.
Articles about specialist topics are typically owned by those same specialists, with their own personal axes to grind. Don't bother attempting any copyediting, reorganizing text for better exposition, or anything of the sort. Definitely don't use tags like {{list}} or {{clarify}}. The experts' text is pure gold, and you are not worthy of understanding them. Never mind that that's the point of an encyclopedia.
After spending too much time fighting this battle time and again, I finally gave up on Wikipedia.
As an non-expert with a life to lead, the barriers were too high. I was told that to contribute I should rewrite the article, which is a bullshit request to make of a non-expert. When I did, and pointed out the reasons for changes I made, my rationales were denied and ignored, and the "experts" closed ranks to revert my changes, only to bicker amongst themselves over the same issues for the next 6 months--the problems were never fixed.
But if I offered to help with making the text more accessible, for readers "one level down", I was dismissed as well.
So it ended up being a no-win for me. I gave up. Should have done so sooner.
I still want to contribute, and often left articles much better than when I found them, but I won't contribute to Wikipedia any more. I'll wait for a git-based system to replace it before I contribute again.