'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.