[WikiEN-l] Accessibility of technical articles

[Carl (CBM)]

Here is my attempt at a historical explanation for the way things are
at the moment.

First, mathematicians in general are often reluctant to say things
that are mostly right but formally incorrect. It's part of the culture
of the field, which was reinforced by a certain writing style that
became popular in advanced mathematics in the later 20th century.

Second, for a few years there was a lot of pressure on Wikipedia to
tighten up the referencing on math articles. Writing techniques that
were commonly accepted in the early days, like inventing examples or
making up informal analogies, were suddenly deemed "original
research".

Edits like this [1] are not rare today, where someone thought that a
section that seemed easy and informal must actually be OR. Fortunately
the examples in that section are actually covered in many textbooks,
so I could just add a citation. But if the example was written just
for Wikipedia, it would be very hard to maintain if someone seriously
challenged its inclusion.

The current state of many math articles reflects a combination of
these trends. When we were asked (not always nicely) to make math
articles stick to the sources, which are usually written in a dry,
technical way, math editors mostly agreed. After all, we can read the
sources, so we can read articles that resemble them.

Recently, there has been talk of making articles more accessible. But
many of the tools that we would use in other writing aren't available.

* We can't just leave out the technical bits, like most popularizations do.

* We can't invent examples and explain them in detail, because of the
original research policy and because Wikipedia isn't a textbook.

* We can't freely use analogies and informal explanations, for the
same reasons (see [1] again).

Many math editors care about accessibility, of course. But the
confines that we are asked to write in are very tight, which makes it
a particular challenge.

- Carl

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kleene%27s_recursion_theorem&diff=413952471&oldid=413931670