[WikiEN-l] Accessibility of technical articles

[Charles Matthews]

On 17/02/2011 17:09, Carcharoth wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 4:58 PM, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>  wrote:
>> On 17/02/2011 13:19, Carcharoth wrote:
>>> To take the Poincare conjecture example, compare the Wikipedia article
>>> to this accessible explanation. Should the Wikipedia article
>>> incorporate explanatory aspects similar to those used in the SEED
>>> magazine article?
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_conjecture
>>>
>>> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/what_is_the_poincare_conjecture/
>>>
>>> I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I found the SEED magazine
>>> article more accessible and I learnt more from it.
>> Unfortunately the magazine article completely ducks the issue of what
>> the conjecture is. Even on a charitable view, it confuses a necessary
>> with a sufficient condition, which would be the *whole point*. This kind
>> of this is actually why this one has not been solved yet on WP: we
>> (rightly) don't allow people to waffle around the facts in order to
>> claim they are explaining. (If you think we do badly, have a look at a
>> standard mathematical encyclopedia: http://eom.springer.de/p/p073000.htm.)
> Hmm. Tricky one. Would you put a link to that magazine article in the
> external links? It might be missing the point, but it does give a
> different perspective and a less dry one.
>
Actually I wouldn't in that case; but I might in the case of a more 
"Scientific American"-style treatment.

By the way, I'm not saying that the exposition of mathematical articles, 
and in particular the lead sections, cannot be improved, because in most 
cases it can. There is the issue of finding some "middle ground" between 
an accurate factual treatment (with wikilinks of technical terms) which 
is what a mathematician from another field would want, and a more 
popular treatment.

Compare for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_%28mathematics%29, 
and in particular the fourth paragraph of the fourth section on 
"Representation theory", with http://www.aimath.org/E8/. The latter 
treatment is a decent example of the media coverage that a certain 
computation received not that long ago: but you can't extract from it 
exactly what was done (just that people thought it was exciting, and 
some general context).

Anyway, I think this issue is going to remain with us. My experience 
with expository writing is that, no matter how much effort you put into 
the basics, there will always be someone who thinks you should do more.

Charles