George Herbert wrote:
My concern is that "the average reader" will be overwhelmed by it. There's a reason that there's a spectrum of writing, from informal blogs, to popular magazines and newspapers, more formal magazines, expert magazines, professional journals, and then things like PhD thesies and the like. Most normal people stop reading a paragraph or less into the type of article that you see in professional journals. The style and info density is not something they want to deal with. Compare and contrast "Popular Science", "Scientific American" and "Nature" (or worse, a less-overview specialist journal in any field).
Somewhere between PopSci and Scientific American tends to be at what I suspect "the right level" is for Wikipedia, though the articles in the latter are generally longer than ours should be.
This will vary wildly from field to field and topic to topic. All generalizations are false. 8-)
It is ironic to observe that the relative roles of "Popular Science" and "Scientific American" are reversed from what they were in the 19th century. At that time "Scientific American" was emphasizing newsy reports on new inventions that were going through the US Patent Office; "Popular Science" was producing long thoughtful articles about significant questions in science. The 1873-4 series of articles by [[John Stallo]], "The Priimary Concepts of Modern Physical Science" is only one example in a magazine that is far diffeent from what we know today.
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