On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Ms. Anne Frazer frazera@bigpond.comwrote:
However, when I read your words, the essence of your comments is clear in that part of your message is couched in attacking good prose because it is too difficult to read and understand. I remind myself that you don't mean to engage in a call for the dumbing down of articles in the 'Wikipedia Encyclopedia' when you suggest that they are too difficult to comprehend by 'the man in the street', (my phrase, and a commonly used one) by which I mean the 'ordinary citizen', the 'ordinary person'; it is a much used phrase I sardonically use in tandem with an apology to women. But here I have strayed from the clear and concise message I would like to be able to convey to you; so back on track...
Good writing requires attention to good rules on writing; to a degree this is the rule rather than the exception. The magnificent work-in-progress that is the Wikipedia encyclopedia becomes much-lauded because people from all over the world and from all walks of life will and do contribute to it growth. If we begin to consider lowering the bar of excellence to some point of middle acceptance we are acting exclusively; we are not acting in good faith; we are not acting inclusively.]
The issue is not with the high standard of prose, the issue is with reader comprehension. I'm a fairly bright person at this, and I cannot make heads or tails of the theoretical properties of the Higgs boson[1], much less what the caption of the second image means[2] without about twenty minutes of reading. For a reference work, that's a bit iffy. It's supposed to be a jumping point to grasp the subject.
Really, it's not about style. It's about understanding, because without out that you cannot teach.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_Boson#Theoretical_properties 2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One-loop-diagram.svg "A one-loop Feynman diagramhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram of the first-order correction to the Higgs mass. The Higgs boson couples strongly to the top quark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_quark so it might decay into top–anti-top quark pairs if it were heavy enough."