On 28/02/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Sometimes a proposed introduction rewrite to be more accessible to the layperson will receive some resistance from people who know more about the subject because it ends up being imprecise. Compromises occasionally get hammered out, usually consisting of an introductory sentence or two that uses the word "informally" to signal that this isn't technically the correct definition, but more of a hand-wavy intuition about the subject. I think that can be done for more articles, but it's kind of a slow process, and the mathematicians do have a point that we don't want to write inaccurate pop-math either.
The "In [subject]," introductory phrase can act as a suitable warning. If an article starts "In computer science," that's enough fair warning to the non-technical reader.
I'm a big fan of good intros. The intro section of an article should be a concise summary article in itself. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead_section .
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