[WikiEN-l] What makes a good article?

[David Gerard]

On 28/02/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Sometimes a proposed introduction rewrite to be more accessible to the
> layperson will receive some resistance from people who know more about
> the subject because it ends up being imprecise.  Compromises
> occasionally get hammered out, usually consisting of an introductory
> sentence or two that uses the word "informally" to signal that this
> isn't technically the correct definition, but more of a hand-wavy
> intuition about the subject.  I think that can be done for more
> articles, but it's kind of a slow process, and the mathematicians do
> have a point that we don't want to write inaccurate pop-math either.


The "In [subject]," introductory phrase can act as a suitable warning.
If an article starts "In computer science," that's enough fair warning
to the non-technical reader.

I'm a big fan of good intros. The intro section of an article should
be a concise summary article in itself. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead_section .


- d.




- d.