'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.

Comments

Simpler?

[RichardDeVries]

Simpler.

Not worth the effort

[itamblyn]

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.

Re:Not worth the effort

[omnichad]

I try to fix typos and get my changes reverted. It's a lost cause already.

Use Simple Wiki

[brianerst]

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.

Statistics Too...

[Thelasko]

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.

Everything Explained That Is Explainable.

[westlake]

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.

Re:Science is hard

[Baloroth]

As an example, today I looked at the Higgs boson [wikipedia.org] article and the talk about the rest mass in GeV/c^2. This is a bull shit unit.

No, it's not, not even a little bit. It is, in fact, the standard unit in the field (all particle physics and related fields, like particle astrophysics or cosmology). If I read a scientific paper in those areas that didn't use eV or eV/c^2 for particle masses I'd be not only a bit confused, but actually question the competency of the authors. "Not SI" is the bullshit: SI as a universal standard is all fine and good, but it's not natural to a lot of fields, and those fields can (and should) use whatever system of units is natural to them (preferably metric, but even that is not necessary). Also, the units on the info box on the top right do link to an explanation page, so you know, I'm not sure what you're talking about.