On 10/07/05, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
This is a much broader issue than that. Our articles can be quite incomprehensible to likely readers.
Fred
Some of the drug articles are quite inpenetrable. I would not be suprised, however, if most of the people who read the drugs articles are people who've just been prescribed them. Pharmacologists are never going to come looking to WP to read up on drugs. So why write at their level, rather than a laymans?
Take, for example, paracetamol:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_Toxicity
What the hell does that mean?! It is, frankly, total garbage. Completely correct, no doubt, but meaningless to the vast amjority of people - and a lot of people want to know why paracetamol can kill them so easily.
What to do? I have no idea.
Info like that can't be binned, of course. Maybe we could have sub-sections for it - "In depth" or something.
But we need human-readable explanations too. Unfortunetly, I can't even begin to convert that into something that's actually understandable to, say, my mum, because I barely understand it myself :-).
Dan