[WikiEN-l] Three cheers for Wikipedia's cancer info (or two and a half)
David Gerard
dgerard at gmail.com
Wed Jun 2 18:39:48 UTC 2010
On 2 June 2010 18:51, David Lindsey <dvdlndsy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> FAs are frequently all but unreadable to the casual reader. How
>> feasible would it be to add "intro clear to casual reader"? I realise
>> some topics are just never going to be that clear ... particularly
>> with the tendency for FAs to be about specialised topics.
> Yes, Intro to X articles would be nice. There are a handful floating
> around, such as
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relativity, but often
> attempts to create such articles are criticized as content forks, which is
> unfortunate.
The sharp end of physics has special qualities:
1. Our articles on it are very good and very up-to-date (as I noted).
2. Even the obscure stuff is utterly undeniably encyclopedic and we
have lots of high-quality sources. (Even the cutting-edge discourse -
arXiv preprints and physics blog posts - is good enough for many of
our purposes, particularly as backgrounders on the abstruse technical
peer-reviewed papers.)
3. Actually understanding it is beyond almost anyone reading. (My
maths sputtered to a halt in the middle of second-year engineering.)
But the overviews are sufficiently comprehensible and quite
fascinating.
So intros are very clearly reader-useful, and procedural types can be
asked why both can't be kept ;-)
Perhaps intro articles could start in similar high-science fields.
It would be *ideal* for both to be a single article, but that would I
suspect lead to unwieldy novel-length articles.
- d.
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