6 ms·

I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

by oneloop 10y ago

flashman 10y ago
Good. It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles, two or three links deep, to have any chance of understanding just the parts without mathematical formulae. And before anyone accuses me of wanting to dumb down Wikipedia: yes, that's exactly what I want. Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists. edit: I can't say it any better than this article: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-writing-tests-show-its-too-sophisticated-for-its-audience/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-wr...
- oneloop 10y ago
  Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point. And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.
  - flashman 10y ago
    Here's a complex biology article that contains a lot of technical terms and links, yet still manages to be readable to a general audience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks. > you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.
    - oneloop 10y ago
      > I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks. You are absolutely right, because writing quality original work takes effort, and writing quality original maths work takes 100x more effort. > This is kind of a cop-out Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that some subjects are more complex than others. Complex matters take more effort to write about, and there's fewer people qualified to write about them. When these two factors come together, you see regurgitated stuff. If you think that everything is equally simple if you explain it the right way, you're sorely mistaken about the nature of reality. All this reminds me that I shouldn't be spending my own effort on HN :D
      - euyyn 10y ago
        He didn't really say nor imply it'd take an equal amount of effort.
    - nonbel 10y ago
      I 100% agree about wikipedia and math/physics topics. They give the distinct impression that either 1) The person writing them does not understand the topic or 2) The people working on the topic are not doing anything connected to reality. However, I must disagree with your claim that the scientific press will do better. As part of their coverage of the physiology prize they made up a new term "cell recycling" that will waste the readers time when they try to look up what it is about. As long as they are technically correct, the math wikipedia pages are at most useless.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Although even that Leaf article highlights some unfortunate Wikipedia tendencies such as the tendency to unnecessarily insert pseudo-academic jargon. Take the third sentence: "Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves collectively." With two footnotes even. This could easily have been worded as something along the lines of "Leaves are collectively referred to as foliage, as in "autumn foliage."
      - wahern 10y ago
  - davidivadavid 10y ago
    I think the main issue here is not so much in choosing between including every prerequisite in every page or not, but in adding a meta-level of information that allows people to consume the prerequisites more easily. When you open a Wikipedia article about a complex subject, it's expected that you're going to do a lot of background reading. The problem is that you start surfing Wikipedia with a BFS/DFS approach, when it would be a lot more efficient if the articles were organized more systematically to lead to a gradual understanding of the subject.
- okket 10y ago
  > Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists. Until this has been done (feel free to help), I prefer that the specialists view is in place, rather than nothing. Or worse, a tabloid one sentence placeholder.
  - oneloop 10y ago
    Exactly. And furthermore, the more niche and complex a topic is, the smaller the pool of people qualified to massage a specialist topic into a generalist audience.
- kj01a 10y ago
  >It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles I don't see why this is a bad thing. I often do this for fun, and when I do it's never information I need to get on in my day to day life. These are extremely complex topics. If you don't want to understand them in their complete complexity, do you really want to understand them at all? What's the point of dumbing down a subject for the layman if the subject can't really be understood at that dumbness level?
  - jerf 10y ago
    The problem is that there's no way to know whether your search process is going to terminate in a path from what you understand to what you don't understand, or if it's just going to wander around in specialist subjects, each referencing each other, with no obvious way back down to non-specialist topics. Or, potentially, no way at all. For all you know the "explanatory links" on a given specialist topic actually point to topics that are yet more specialist. My dream someday is to see these things organized into a "lattice", where links are clearly labeled as going "down" or "up" the lattice and you can have a clue what's going on.
    - stevetrewick 10y ago
      Something not entirely quite unlike this http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/ http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/
- imh 10y ago
  I disagree. With anything technical, there's going to be many ways to explain it, and the best way depends on the audience. I don't think every article should be written for the same audience. Some pages will likely be visited by all sorts of people, and some only by experts. If you're writing for experts and don't assume they already know a bunch of things, it's going to be many times less concise and clear than it should be. You would have to repeat fundamental math and physics education on every page like this one if you wanted to explain to a general audience. An article like "Kosterlitz–Thouless transition" is not even being seen by a general audience anyways, except for when some news-worthy event like this happens, so why write like it's being read by someone it's not? It's not like writing this stuff is easy.
- wyager 10y ago
  Not every topic can practically be reduced to a layman-friendly explanation.

I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

by oneloop 10y ago

I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

Good. It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles, two or three links deep, to have any chance of understanding just the parts without mathematical formulae. And before anyone accuses me of wanting to dumb down Wikipedia: yes, that's exactly what I want. Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists. edit: I can't say it any better than this article: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-writing-tests-show-its-too-sophisticated-for-its-audience/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-wr...

oneloop 10y ago
Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point. And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.
- flashman 10y ago
  Here's a complex biology article that contains a lot of technical terms and links, yet still manages to be readable to a general audience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks. > you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.
  - oneloop 10y ago
    > I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks. You are absolutely right, because writing quality original work takes effort, and writing quality original maths work takes 100x more effort. > This is kind of a cop-out Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that some subjects are more complex than others. Complex matters take more effort to write about, and there's fewer people qualified to write about them. When these two factors come together, you see regurgitated stuff. If you think that everything is equally simple if you explain it the right way, you're sorely mistaken about the nature of reality. All this reminds me that I shouldn't be spending my own effort on HN :D
    - euyyn 10y ago
      He didn't really say nor imply it'd take an equal amount of effort.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    I 100% agree about wikipedia and math/physics topics. They give the distinct impression that either 1) The person writing them does not understand the topic or 2) The people working on the topic are not doing anything connected to reality. However, I must disagree with your claim that the scientific press will do better. As part of their coverage of the physiology prize they made up a new term "cell recycling" that will waste the readers time when they try to look up what it is about. As long as they are technically correct, the math wikipedia pages are at most useless.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Although even that Leaf article highlights some unfortunate Wikipedia tendencies such as the tendency to unnecessarily insert pseudo-academic jargon. Take the third sentence: "Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves collectively." With two footnotes even. This could easily have been worded as something along the lines of "Leaves are collectively referred to as foliage, as in "autumn foliage."
    - wahern 10y ago
- davidivadavid 10y ago
  I think the main issue here is not so much in choosing between including every prerequisite in every page or not, but in adding a meta-level of information that allows people to consume the prerequisites more easily. When you open a Wikipedia article about a complex subject, it's expected that you're going to do a lot of background reading. The problem is that you start surfing Wikipedia with a BFS/DFS approach, when it would be a lot more efficient if the articles were organized more systematically to lead to a gradual understanding of the subject.
okket 10y ago
> Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not by specialists for specialists. Until this has been done (feel free to help), I prefer that the specialists view is in place, rather than nothing. Or worse, a tabloid one sentence placeholder.
- oneloop 10y ago
  Exactly. And furthermore, the more niche and complex a topic is, the smaller the pool of people qualified to massage a specialist topic into a generalist audience.
kj01a 10y ago
>It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of the attached articles I don't see why this is a bad thing. I often do this for fun, and when I do it's never information I need to get on in my day to day life. These are extremely complex topics. If you don't want to understand them in their complete complexity, do you really want to understand them at all? What's the point of dumbing down a subject for the layman if the subject can't really be understood at that dumbness level?
- jerf 10y ago
  The problem is that there's no way to know whether your search process is going to terminate in a path from what you understand to what you don't understand, or if it's just going to wander around in specialist subjects, each referencing each other, with no obvious way back down to non-specialist topics. Or, potentially, no way at all. For all you know the "explanatory links" on a given specialist topic actually point to topics that are yet more specialist. My dream someday is to see these things organized into a "lattice", where links are clearly labeled as going "down" or "up" the lattice and you can have a clue what's going on.
  - stevetrewick 10y ago
    Something not entirely quite unlike this http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/ http://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/
imh 10y ago
I disagree. With anything technical, there's going to be many ways to explain it, and the best way depends on the audience. I don't think every article should be written for the same audience. Some pages will likely be visited by all sorts of people, and some only by experts. If you're writing for experts and don't assume they already know a bunch of things, it's going to be many times less concise and clear than it should be. You would have to repeat fundamental math and physics education on every page like this one if you wanted to explain to a general audience. An article like "Kosterlitz–Thouless transition" is not even being seen by a general audience anyways, except for when some news-worthy event like this happens, so why write like it's being read by someone it's not? It's not like writing this stuff is easy.
wyager 10y ago
Not every topic can practically be reduced to a layman-friendly explanation.