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

[Daniel Ehrenberg]

I've been thinking about what you call "Educational biases" for a while.  And they don't just apply to cultures, they apply to anyone wanting to learn something who isn't in the middle of a class on a particular topic.  Maybe there could be lists of articles that one could read if one wanted to learn about a given topic. Then, at the bottom of the articles that are in this type of series of articles, there would be a link for next, a link for previous, a link to go back to the main list, and a short explanation of what those links are for.  For example, the reverse osmosis article could be in a celular biology tutorial.  Even if we made more links, in the articles, people would still find themselves wading through them in an attempt to learn something.  Wikipedia is well written, just not well-organized.

Rotem Dan <rotem_dan at airpost.net> wrote:3.
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":

(a bit extreme) example: taken from "Reverse Osmosis":
The article starts like this:
"Membrane separation technology in the application for water supply
augmentation has been well recognised and is getting an important role
in water treatment. The family of membrane processes is now very
diverse. They are generally classified as microfiltration (MF),
ultrafiltration (UF), ..."

This is perfect gibberish to anyone not knowledgeable (or even expert!)
in the field. I've noticed most computer-related and social/exact
science articles are suffering from some degrees of it.

What does this have to do with "multi-cultural"?
In different places in the world, education is sometimes being conveyed
differently, or in a lower/higher level of detail then western
countries. In some places, high education (college/university) is not as
common (and affordable) as in western countries. Wikipedia writers
should understand this and be considerate, because these readers will
not be able to comprehend these articles if they are not given a full,
supportive background of the terms and fields.

I will call this type of writing an "Educational bias"



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