Dan Grey wrote
> When initially starting WikiProject Clinical
Medicine, we struggled with
> this question. The decision was to escalate the level of difficulty, so
> all
> relevant information would be covered. The lay reader would have to drop
> it
> at some point, and none of the participants saw a great deal wrong with
> this.
JFW
That's a shame, because you basically made the
whole thing useless to
average folk (I count myself in that group).
I think that's a misconception, in encyclopedia terms. For one thing, those
studying an article with a technical gradient will always get different
amounts out of it, depending on what they arrive with. For another, the
modern trend is to assume anything can be read like a light novel - but that
hasn't been historically the way with written material, and is a relatively
new development (about a century, I think, coming with popular journalism).
And a major point is that WP aims for completeness; if you have to trade off
between lack of completeness and technical density, you generally choose the
latter (which can always be improved later).
These points all apply in spades to mathematics, for example. I think in
areas like medecine and mathematics and a few others, lay people really have
no idea quite how much could be said. So, WP can actually tackle such
issues, but everyone should see that the time scale is measured in years,
not days or weeks.
Charles