[WikiEN-l] Accessibility of technical articles

[David Gerard]

On 17 February 2011 14:16, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

> So some might object to your use of the term sophomore, but the rest I
> agree with. You need people who have experience explaining things to
> make things like that accessible, but I would suggest technical
> writers and those who are good at popularising and explaining science
> and maths topics.


Yyyesss. A working subject matter expert who also happens to be a
brilliant and lucid writer would be *ideal*, but in practice someone
with sufficient broad knowledge and writing skill to do a reasonable
piece of (what is effectively) science journalism is what we actually
have in the best case. And really, that's pretty good. Channel your
inner Isaac Asimov.

More often, we get (as Fred describes) an interested student who
hopefully can also write a bit, and *that's not bad*.

At worst we have a semi-opaque technical data dump, but that's still
better than no article at all, and Wikipedia is after all a work in
progress ...


- d.