Dan Grey (dangrey@gmail.com) [050711 01:13]:
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.
The article validation topics include "clarity" for this reason. This can be used to flag articles for rewriting better.
(now all we need is the feature ;-)
Info like that can't be binned, of course. Maybe we could have sub-sections for it - "In depth" or something.
That can work very well indeed. All this is, after all, an editorial decision.
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 :-).
This is a very real and wide-ranging issue Jguk raises - and it would IMO be as ridiculous to assert that BC/AD is required for "clarity" as to assert that BCE/CE is required for "NPOV". But that's not at all what I read in the original statement.
- d.