[WikiEN-l] Foundational rumblings

[stevertigo]

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> So it tells you what QFT does, not what it is (unsurprising, with the jury still out).

Hm..  "Quantum field theory (QFT) *is* a claimed theoretical framework
for constructing quantum-mechanical models of systems classically
described by fields of of many-body systems."  "Alleged.." might work
too.

'Jury still out?'  For 80 years?  Maybe the folks working on String
Field Theory (SFT) can suffice as a kind of 'jury' on QFT?

> But neutrality means, surely, that treatments
> that are really "introduction to X from the POV of Y" are out of place,
> or at least to be seriously deprecated.

WWIN might be the actual place to say that 'Wikipedia is not a place
for introductory-level articles.'

It's a valid argument, even if it confronts our natural desire to
explain things, but is it another paradox?  Does our encyclopedic
constraint put a severe limitation on the educational potential of our
articles? Does the "sum of all *information*" limitation represent an
obstacle to explanationism?

If the subject matter is too high-level for someone, then the real
issue for editors is  that just stating its constituent concepts is
probably not enough for those readers. Well-edited topic-boxes serve
quite well to at least get a sense of the conceptual scope, and that
helps. What might work in such cases is maybe outlining all or most of
the prerequisite concepts in maybe a separate standard type of
"Prerequisites" section, which shows link-trees/branches/chains for
the main required prerequisites necessary for understanding most of
the subject. This might fulfill the "introduction" concept to some
degree, even if that kind of article "section" would be an innovation
as far as encyclopedias go.

WP:Concept deals with most of the rest.

-Stevertigo

WP:The real 'discovery' channel