Chris Lüer wrote:
Agreed, the article is in sore need of an introduction. It starts out with a technical definition, that's never a good idea. Too many writers still buy into the mathematical textbook way of structuring things based on their formal logical structure. But that doesn't work for an encyclopedia where people jump around between articles.
Yeah, I think this could solve many of the problems---have an introduction that's more in layman's terms, rather than insisting that the first sentence be a lengthy and precise technical definition. (The technical definition should still be there, of course.)
I've most often run into this in biology-related articles on plants and animals. If I want to know what a certain flower is, I'm usually not looking for technical information on its method of reproduction as the first bit of information, even if that's how it's classified. I'm more often looking for basic stuff like where it grows, how big it is, what color(s) it is, whether it has any uses (e.g. food or medicinal), and so on. Then if I keep reading it'd be nice to find the detailed information on its taxonomy.
But really I don't think these are *huge* problems. Good introductions are hard to write, so it's not a surprise that many of our articles don't yet have good introductions. A pretty good percentage do, though.
-Mark