From: "David Goodman" <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:02 PM
As I read their announcement, the intention is to have
the Wikipedia
article be non-technical. The first paper being reported there seems
to be appropriate to Wikipedia. But then, its a comprehensive paper,
on a suitable broad topic. If it is their intention to apply ttheir
proposal to imilar papers, such as ones presenting t he genome of a
particualr orgnaism, then all shouldgo well.
But most scientific papers even in good journals are by far too
specific to be suitable as Wikipedia articles. If they start trying
to insert those, our reaction will probably force them to come to the
realization that there is a difference between an encyclopedia and a
summary of primary research papers--in which case they might want to
consider having their own site for t he summaries they want. Some
journals, such as PLOS, already do publish lay summaries.
It is nice to know that someone likes our work over there, and I do not see
that more fingers is necessarily going to be taxing. If you hav a mind for
what is either hard or tedious (if not both), and I do not see that even ten
percent of Nature subscribers are going to read and heed that call, then
welcome...I estimate that much less than ten percent of subscribers also
write for Nature, even counting letters.
There are welcome templates. If you learn about a newbie from their
ignorance of policy, then make sure they get the pillars or something
besides the specific piece they are ignoring.
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Carl Beckhorn
<cbeckhorn(a)fastmail.fm>
wrote:
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 08:50:28PM -0500,
Jonathan Hughes wrote:
Of course
some people will complain that it's too technical, but
that's an issue to take up at WP:PEREN.
I'd imagine a simple solution would be to ask if the authors can tone
down
the technical language a bit. Something along the lines of "we layman
be
not learned enough to understand".
Yes, that's a reasonable suggestion.
The debate about "too technical" has been going on for years and will
not stop anytime soon. The question on the other side is, "if you don't
already know what these basic terms mean, how can you understand what's
being said in this article?".
If the authors just remember to link all the technical terms that may be
unfamiliar, that would be a good start. Also, keeping the lede as
untechnical as possible is a good practice. Even if someone cannot read
the rest of the article, a good lede conveys the basic points as a
sort of micro-article.
- Carl
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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