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> having inconsistent expectations of the reader’s knowledge I come across this one the most and suspect it's the most common reason people suddenly stop follo

by tomxor 5y ago

> having inconsistent expectations of the reader’s knowledge I come across this one the most and suspect it's the most common reason people suddenly stop following an explanation. Whether it's in a book or a Wikipedia article. I guess when the author already knows something, it's a difficult skill to maintain the full perspective of the audience - some things they obviously don't know and are easy to explain, so they nail it, then for others they are difficult to explain and it may not even be clear to the author how they came to understand it in relation to the primary subject - which is when they tend to drop the ball and do some hand waving. Multidisciplinary subjects probably make it harder still, since there is relevant knowledge that the target audience may or may not know due to their different backgrounds.

IshKebab 5y ago
Wikipedia maths articles are really bad for that because articles are often written by people trying to show how smart they are so they write stuff in an extremely generic technical way using no examples and lots of unnecessary jargon. I've seen people try to improve things only to be shut down because they view Wikipedia as a reference manual. To pick a random example, imagine trying to understand matrix multiplication from this: > In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the second matrix. The resulting matrix, known as the matrix product, has the number of rows of the first and the number of columns of the second matrix. The product of matrices A and B is denoted as AB. Binary operation? Why is it talking about details like column numbers before it even explains what matrix multiplication is for? It should be more like this: > Matrices are 2D grid or arrays of numbers that can represent an operation on a vector. For example scaling or rotating it (or both). Two matrices can be multiplies together to form a new matrix that represents a combination of the operations of the input matrices. For example if A is a matrix that doubles the scale of a vector and B is a matrix that rotates it by 90deg, then the product AB will be a single matrix that both rotates and then scales the vector. > The matrix product is calculated by summing the dot product of corresponding rows and columns of the inputs as shown in this illustration And then jump straight to the Illustration section which is easily the most understandable part of the article. But that edit would probably be reverted because some pedant will point out that matrices aren't only used for manipulating geometric vectors or whatever.
- tomxor 5y ago
  Oh yeah, a lot of wikipedia intros are what I like to call "code golfing" in human language, someone attempting to fit a comprehensive description in 1 or 2 sentences. Which they technically achieve, but it's only intelligible by people who already understand it, so it's also pointless. But they aren't all like that, wikipedia varies in quality greatly.

by tomxor 5y ago

IshKebab 5y ago

Wikipedia maths articles are really bad for that because articles are often written by people trying to show how smart they are so they write stuff in an extremely generic technical way using no examples and lots of unnecessary jargon. I've seen people try to improve things only to be shut down because they view Wikipedia as a reference manual. To pick a random example, imagine trying to understand matrix multiplication from this: > In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the second matrix. The resulting matrix, known as the matrix product, has the number of rows of the first and the number of columns of the second matrix. The product of matrices A and B is denoted as AB. Binary operation? Why is it talking about details like column numbers before it even explains what matrix multiplication is for? It should be more like this: > Matrices are 2D grid or arrays of numbers that can represent an operation on a vector. For example scaling or rotating it (or both). Two matrices can be multiplies together to form a new matrix that represents a combination of the operations of the input matrices. For example if A is a matrix that doubles the scale of a vector and B is a matrix that rotates it by 90deg, then the product AB will be a single matrix that both rotates and then scales the vector. > The matrix product is calculated by summing the dot product of corresponding rows and columns of the inputs as shown in this illustration And then jump straight to the Illustration section which is easily the most understandable part of the article. But that edit would probably be reverted because some pedant will point out that matrices aren't only used for manipulating geometric vectors or whatever.

tomxor 5y ago
Oh yeah, a lot of wikipedia intros are what I like to call "code golfing" in human language, someone attempting to fit a comprehensive description in 1 or 2 sentences. Which they technically achieve, but it's only intelligible by people who already understand it, so it's also pointless. But they aren't all like that, wikipedia varies in quality greatly.