[WikiEN-l] What makes a good article?

[Steve Bennett]

On 2/28/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. Readability is more important than accuracy and precision for the
first few sentences. Why not something like: "Smith's theorem states
that there are no six digit prime numbers. More precisely, it states
that there is no real number n, 100000<= n <= 999999 such that...."?

> Actually this happens a lot in political science articles too, in my
> experience.  The first sentence defining a fairly simple topic will
> often contain at least several jargon words I don't know, in the
> interests of treating with extreme precision some legal obscurity
> (especially legal fictions).

As long as there is both a readable summary and an accurate, concise
summary in the opening paragraph, everyone's interests are served.

Steve