On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 01:23:56AM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
Best to start out with an understandable, accurate (but probably slightly imprecise) definition, then get into the nitty gritty later on.
Our better articles use the lede for this purpose. If you can't read the body of a technical article, but can get a rough idea from the lede, then the article may have achieved its purpose.
There is a tension, when writing technical articles, between helping the naive and the experienced reader, between pedagogical writing and encyclopedic writing, and between repeating information and linking to other articles. We can't expect that the consumer's surplus article, for example, will give a definition of the term economics.
Carl