[WikiEN-l] Making Wikipedia a multi-cultural encyclopedia

[Jason Williams]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 04:07:54PM +0200, Rotem Dan wrote:
> Prior knowledge, background, and education.
> A lot of articles assume the reader is fairly (or even highly in the
> scientific articles) educated and knowledgeable in the subject of the
> article. For each article there should be an extensive background
> paragraph(s), which specifically states what the article is about, it's
> general field and it's uses in "Real life":

Linking is the right answer here, in my opinion. You shouldn't 
have to wade through a thorough grounding in computer science
before reading about how LL parsers work. Instead, [[Computer
science]] and [[Compilers]] should be prominently linked,
along with each technical term used. 

I think -
 * Everybody should be able to understand broadly what an article
   is describing (LL Parsers are a technique used in computer
   science to interpret text, or something. You get the idea,
   I'm sure)

 * Everybody should be able to learn whatever they need to understand 
   any given article merely by clicking within wikipedia. Obviously
   this is a [[platonic]] wikipedia that has the sum of all human
   knowledge contained within it :-)

 * Everybody should *not necessarily* be able to understand an
   article just by reading it

Oh, and many "borrowed" phrases from non-English languages are an
inseparable part of English vocabulary, in my opinion. If I mean
per se, or de facto, or de jure, I should be able to say so. Don't
steal away the richness of the language for the sake of avoiding
making people expand their vocabulary, please!