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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
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.
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I don't know how many times i have used wikipedia to find out some arcane information to help my kids with high school chemistry or physics, which is kind of the level that I find for those subjects on wikipedia. I think the 'just for researchers' is hyperbole on the part of the OP.
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There's a difference between a difficult subject and obfuscation for a pretense of erudition.
so then, if it's a tree of knowledge, maybe its structure could be clearer - it's often the case that there are circles in the graph where you keep clicking for explanations and get back to the page you started with, which, if you understood, would let you recurse and understand it.
I took a look at the article on the Electroweak Interaction. As a layman, I could more-or-less follow the overview, but I didn't even try to follow the math, because I know it's too deep for me. There was one thing missing that would have made it a much more satisfactory experience for me: a brief explanation of just what the significance of this is, and why physicists find it important. And, that's not uncommon in technical articles; the people writing them tend to forget that laymen who don't already understand the subject are coming to Wikipedia to get a better idea of what it's all about, in words they can understand.
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Writing for someone not a specialist in the field is not at all the same thing as dumbing down. It's also not an exclusive relationship. Writing a section for the layman does not preclude writing another for the domain specialist.
I'll just leave this here:
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Albert Einstein