On 2/28/07, Jake Nelson duskwave@gmail.com wrote:
We need to work on readability, especially in the first sections of articles.
Definitely. The first section of every article ought to summarise the whole topic for a lay person. The rest of the article can descend into geekdom.
That said, I frequently have difficult with maths-ish articles. I don't know whether to call it a problem, but there often seems to be more maths than is justified. Look at the mathematical derivations on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker_probability for example. But it would be harsh to criticise this: the mathematications who wrote that have done a lot of good work for Wikipedia, and obviously they find the derivations and proofs very interesting.
Maybe we need a little hideable "Warning: This section contains extreme, possibly offensive use of mathematical formulae." template. :)
Steve