I appreciate your help on peer review! I think there are plenty of fields in which layman assistance is essential to keep Wikipedia's audience as broad as possible, and I find thorough reviews by non-astronomers of my astronomy articles very helpful in that respect. Just remember that astronomy is the father of all science, and only bad writing can make an astronomy article less than utterly fascinating :)

Cheers, WT

-----Original Message----- From: Ryan Norton [mailto:wxprojects@comcast.net] Sent: 05 October 2005 4:11 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

Hi there :),

Ouch! Do you mean astronomy is boring, or my writing about astronomy? I do try to write articles that are interesting for people who might only have a passing interest in astronomy but it's easy for a scientist to forget what's interesting to people not in the field. That's partly why I sought peer review for Herbig-Haro object, because I was half afraid I was going to spend lots of time on something no-one would be interested in. Astrocruft, if you like. Please tell me if I'm heading that way!

The general point is that for many featured articles, only one person might be interested in writing about a subject, but its appeal should be broad based if it really represents the best of Wikipedia. I'm not particularly fussed about architects in colonial New Zealand, for example, but Giano's articles on Benjamin Mountfort etc are interesting enough to keep me reading right through.

WT

Don't get discouraged! You're articles are some of the best around here! I think often though with technical subjects like this it can be tough to write for the layman :). Anyway, I'm still offering responses on your peer reviews :).

Thanks, Ryan