On 2 June 2010 18:51, David Lindsey <dvdlndsy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> FAs are frequently all but unreadable to the
casual reader. How
> feasible would it be to add "intro clear to casual reader"? I realise
> some topics are just never going to be that clear ... particularly
> with the tendency for FAs to be about specialised topics.
Yes, Intro to X articles would be nice. There are a
handful floating
around, such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relativity, but often
attempts to create such articles are criticized as content forks, which is
unfortunate.
The sharp end of physics has special qualities:
1. Our articles on it are very good and very up-to-date (as I noted).
2. Even the obscure stuff is utterly undeniably encyclopedic and we
have lots of high-quality sources. (Even the cutting-edge discourse -
arXiv preprints and physics blog posts - is good enough for many of
our purposes, particularly as backgrounders on the abstruse technical
peer-reviewed papers.)
3. Actually understanding it is beyond almost anyone reading. (My
maths sputtered to a halt in the middle of second-year engineering.)
But the overviews are sufficiently comprehensible and quite
fascinating.
So intros are very clearly reader-useful, and procedural types can be
asked why both can't be kept ;-)
Perhaps intro articles could start in similar high-science fields.
It would be *ideal* for both to be a single article, but that would I
suspect lead to unwieldy novel-length articles.
- d.