On 17/02/2011 17:09, Carcharoth wrote:
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 17/02/2011 13:19, Carcharoth wrote:
To take the Poincare conjecture example, compare
the Wikipedia article
to this accessible explanation. Should the Wikipedia article
incorporate explanatory aspects similar to those used in the SEED
magazine article?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/what_is_the_poincare_conjecture/
I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I found the SEED magazine
article more accessible and I learnt more from it.
Unfortunately the magazine
article completely ducks the issue of what
the conjecture is. Even on a charitable view, it confuses a necessary
with a sufficient condition, which would be the *whole point*. This kind
of this is actually why this one has not been solved yet on WP: we
(rightly) don't allow people to waffle around the facts in order to
claim they are explaining. (If you think we do badly, have a look at a
standard mathematical encyclopedia:
http://eom.springer.de/p/p073000.htm.)
Hmm.
Tricky one. Would you put a link to that magazine article in the
external links? It might be missing the point, but it does give a
different perspective and a less dry one.
Actually I wouldn't in that case; but I might in the case of a more
"Scientific American"-style treatment.
By the way, I'm not saying that the exposition of mathematical articles,
and in particular the lead sections, cannot be improved, because in most
cases it can. There is the issue of finding some "middle ground" between
an accurate factual treatment (with wikilinks of technical terms) which
is what a mathematician from another field would want, and a more
popular treatment.
Compare for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_%28mathematics%29,
and in particular the fourth paragraph of the fourth section on
"Representation theory", with
http://www.aimath.org/E8/. The latter
treatment is a decent example of the media coverage that a certain
computation received not that long ago: but you can't extract from it
exactly what was done (just that people thought it was exciting, and
some general context).
Anyway, I think this issue is going to remain with us. My experience
with expository writing is that, no matter how much effort you put into
the basics, there will always be someone who thinks you should do more.
Charles