Steve Bennett wrote:
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.
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.
Actually this happens a lot in political science articles too, in my experience. The first sentence defining a fairly simple topic will often contain at least several jargon words I don't know, in the interests of treating with extreme precision some legal obscurity (especially legal fictions).
-Mark