Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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.
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.
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!
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 think you have the ratios reversed. More people are curious than already experts in most fields.
And if you don't care that the general population understands what electroweak interaction is then you are part of the problem, soon to be overwhelmed by the ignorant masses.
Extra points for being dismissive however.
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 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.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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 suspect if you looked at most of the deeper topics the readers are likely students for whom the content is relevant.
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".
Yaknow, I get the idea that what's happening is a lot of non-sciencey types, like journalists, are really intimidated by hard science. They see the hardcore intellectual sweat that goes into articles like this, and it makes them feel bad that they're in a soft profession. They'd appreciate it if the sciency types would tone it down a notch, and say shaming things like "I have no idea who the article exists for". The object isn't to make Wikipedia better, it's to make themselves feel better.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Or perhaps they encountered a reference to something they weren't familiar about, and went to an encyclopedia to try and find out what it was. Which is generally the purpose of an encyclopedia, to give brief overviews on a wide variety of topics. If an average person can't get that overview, the encyclopedia has failed.
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
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-
It isn't that articles need to be dumbed down.
It is that articles need to be structured to be usable by a wide range of users. The hard technical details need to come after a high level summary and a layman's explanation.
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.
As for your second point, whether they are basic topics or not is irrelevant, there should be an overview available.
"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.
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.
Because their idea of 'research only' is really high school level. Not to mention with a subject like chemistry you don't memorize every physical aspect of a molecule. We used to use the Merck index for that but it is easier to just google it now.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Not every detail of every topic can be summarized for the GED-equivalent layperson.
Obviously a summary doesn't include every exact detail, by definition - not sure what you're saying there. But every topic can be described qualitatively such that the GED-equivalent layperson (assuming algebra here) can follow it. It may take a very smart expert in the subject to do so, as Feynman did with much of particle physics back in the day, but it's possible.
I've also been frustrated by the Electroweak Interaction page: frankly, it's garbage. However, the Weak Interaction page is reasonable. Missing from the electroweak page is any sort of summary of the weak force, even just a paragraph directing readers to the weak interaction page for background. There's a link to the weak page, but no suggestion that it's easier to read or more layman-oriented.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
YES., this is the correct solution. 4 sections;-
Basic abstract;-
High-school level discussion.
Boffin-level discussion.
All-level summary/links/etc
The reader can just start from the top, and proceed down until it gets too deep/mathy, and then skip down to the bottom for more links/resources.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
... 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.
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.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Why would 90% of people in this world need to know what electroweak interaction is beyond the introductory paragraph? Why would 99.999%? I mean really, what isn't covered by the introductory paragraph for those who are "just curious" and don't want to put a lot of effort into understanding that concept, which at a deep level relies on understanding 12 other concepts, each with 12 of their own on down the line...
Sorry, but those 90% of people can just STOP READING after the summary. If an article is missing a summary, there's a wikipedia "?" tag which will flag the article as needing one.
It's not like I was walking down the street one day and some facet of the electroweak interaction made me suddenly respect some group I was biased against prior. There's no piece of code that I'm going to write more efficiently because someone converted all the calculus into averaged-algebra.
This is just people complaining for complaining's sake, and thinking they should be able to pick up everything like they do the remote control and master it in one second, and if they couldn't do that IT WAS SOMEONE ELSES FAULT! Those folks should read some articles on mental issues and see if they can self-identify better there.
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
I thought the purpose of simple.wikipedia.org was to be accessible to those who do not fully grasp the English language, like children and students-of-English. Guess I just put too much faith in their self-proclaimed purpose right in the middle of the front page.
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
Exactly. It's not that the article on electroweak interaction is too hard; it's that the article is incomplete. The graphene article is chock-full of highly technical information that only concerns experts in the field but it also has plenty of information digestible by and interesting to the general public. The electroweak interaction article is an introduction and then just bare formulas.
Imagine if the Wikipedia article on object-oriented programming consisted entirely of the overview and a few code examples. No discussion of what OOP tries to achieve and how it attempts to do so. Just the bare code. It wouldn't be a terribly useful article to most people.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Can you repeat your point... maybe using some sort of car... or football analogy?
"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."
Just for you: Weak interactions are involved in some types of radioactive decay. However, the theory of the weak interaction is not renormalizable, since the interaction is mediated by gauge bosons that have mass (W and Z paticles). Electroweak theory combines the weak interaction with electromagnetism in such a way that the resultant theory is renormalisable (by having zero mass gauge bosons). The original weak theory is recovered as an approximation.
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.
That's the nice thing about wikipedia: it has galumphings to the stuff you might not understand.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
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...
That's fine, if you already know that. However, most laymen don't, and unless the article mentions it, much of the significance of the theory is lost on them.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
I don't think the author is criticizing the inclusion of technical details, so much as the lack of a more general overview. What mostly confuses me about your critique is if you have done the "heavy lifting," why in the world would are you using wikipedia as a reference for a technical subject? Is there really no better reference available at that level?
Better may not be what I am optimizing on.
Suppose I am writing a paper and I needed the exact definition of the Weinberg angle. Now, I have references in my downstairs office with this info - I have Weinberg's QFT books, for that matter, so, sure, I can get up, and try and find a suitable reference. Maybe that will take 5 minutes. Or, I can open up a browser page, go to Wikipedia, and what I need is right there. Elapsed time, maybe 30 seconds. I may do this every 5 or 10 minutes, so the saving in time is significant. If I can't find what I need there, there is always NASA ADS and Inspire.
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.
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.
Well I can answer that one for you: Physicists consider it important because its part of the universe, and their job is to describe (not necessarily understand!) the universe.
The weak interaction itself is already a bit hard to intuitively grasp since it doesn't work like any of the other forces (mainly, it doesn't follow the "attracts/repels" theme.) The unified electroweak force is even less comprehensible in any context other than its mathematical description, and its at an energy scale that probably will never exist in our world outside of short bursts within particle accelerators. There simply isn't any real "significance" to it outside of scientific curiosity.
all the way down.
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.
Agreed. It's like we're in a backwards world.
An Encyclopaedia is what laymen (mostly students before the concept of Wikipedia was pioneered) traditionally use to find basic information about something, covering an extremely large array of topics of interest. Due to limits with scope and priorities, for anything much more detailed, they are expected to invest in a different book dedicated to the branch of human knowledge or science that studies the topic.
The threads here exemplify one of the modern problems of the internet: Something scratches the itch of a few people, who spoil it so nobody else who isn't an expert can have nice things. Linux, FOSS and tech support comes to mind.
The end result is the appearance of YT videos and question-answer sites like StackExchange where the laymen / curious 90% of the world just end up posing the same types of questions over and over *because* reading what everyone else is writing requires too much inside knowledge to begin with... "Read The Manual / FAQ / Post history" is not as foolproof and practical as we make it up to be.
Well, I do understand that the weak interaction is responsible for beta decay, and that detecting the unified electroweak force acted as confirmation of the theory that predicted it, but I already knew that. Nothing that I found in the article even hinted at what may well be the most important thing about it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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)
Go look up Kaon
try random variable not that deep of a topic, but whoa is the header a whopper.
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.
That's part of the Dunning-Krueger Effect. It's usually understood as "incompetent people are too incompetent to know they're incompetent", but the DKE also states that very competent people assume that everyone else is also as competent as they are and thus they don't need to explain anything. If they were actually that competent, they'd understand, but no.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So what you're saying is, electroweak is useful for something more than just helping to prove a theory. Thank you; I hadn't known that and was wondering.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
For example, "Neuroscience For Dummies" is enough to get you started as a brain surgeon.
Holy fuck I hope not.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
I always hated that they taught "Geometry" when I was in school. It was just a bunch of memorization of formulas and no understanding of why. By dumbing it down, they prevented both my interest and ability to properly grasp it. Once I took calculus though, and learned how to derive all said formulas. everything just kind of "clicked" into place. Instead of having to memorize 100 different formula, I really only needed to remember how to find the area of a triangle and a semi-circle, and everything else I could derive from that using derivatives/integrals and logic.
Sure, by dumbing it down I got to spend half a year (or was it a whole year? I can't remember anymore...) completely missing the point. Maybe for some people who couldn't grasp calculus, this would give them at least the foundation such that they would know that there wasa formula somewhere they could look up or remember to calculate area, volume, etc. but I personally felt cheated and that I wasted a whole semester for obsolete knowledge.
If I was designing the curriculum, I would have just taught Calculus. Those who could grasp it then could derive and understand "why" behind all the formulas. and those who couldn't could just memorize the formulas. That way my comprehension would get me ahead versus a classmate who couldn't understand, yet we both would end the semester with the ability to use the concepts whichever way worked best for us.
I think in general this is the best way for entries on a site like wikipedia to go about things. Show the "why", explain it, and finish with a bold "summary" (The final derived formula). That way both dude and I would understand the concept, dude could quickly reference the final formula (the extent of his ability/interest), and I could delve further into the "why".
This is maybe a difficult balance to find on some topics, like electroweak interaction, but there's no reason for 99% of things that the articles can't give both the "whaT" (simple) and "why/how" (advanced) in the same article. If the advanced is too much for you, ignore it.
Crappy writing, but the header does explain what they are (in different ways, none of them really good) in simple terms. If you need more For general use, there really is no more you need to know about them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I would never have sent my college students to read that mess. I'd end up having to take 30 minutes having to untangle that mess.
But the body is actually more useful, clearer, and more accessible.
https://qz.com/849256/how-to-m...
Casteism