[RadioactiveMan]

"And it's not all physics and math; the entry for the Ka/s ratio, a useful measure in evolutionary biology, assumes you already know a lot about evolutionary biology and the genetic code."

It seems to me that any information - in an encyclopedia or anywhere else - on a subtopic must assume knowledge of the parent topic.

Other gripes by the author seemed to be nitpicks about article quality, which are fair but extremely minor.

[ghaff]

A well-written encyclopedia article should still be able to instruct a generally educated lay reader about what a thing is and why it's notable even if the more detailed explanation heads into depths that someone without appropriate background may not be able to follow.

I had a very similar discussion with someone involved with the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year and he highlighted math/science as having exactly this issue. Way too many articles seem to be written by people who are far more comfortable and interested in using the equation editor than in providing an intelligible explanation.

The problem isn't universal to be sure. But it is widespread, especially in less popular topics.

[madez]

There is a formal language for mathematics because we need it for efficient work. This formal language is intelligible, clear and instructive, given adequate education. This formal language is mandatory to be present in an encyclopedia.

Some articles about mathematics like for example that of determinants are noisy for me because of the well-intentioned “educational” parts. In this example I even think they do more harm than good for people who are struggling with the concept.

The first part of the section “Definition” starts with explaining in horribly ununderstandable natural language english a way to compute the determinant of some matrix. That text is unnecessarily confusing and complex. That text also serves as a good example where formal language can be easier to grasp than natural language. Would you explain quicksort in natural language rather than with a formal description?

If mathematics is taught like in that article, no wonder kids find math boring and hard.

[brownbat]

Yeah, if a "natural language" explanation is just writing out mechanical mathematical steps or formulae in clumsy english, it's completely missing the point.

Use natural language for what it's good at. Where did this mathematical idea originate? Who introduced it? What was the problem this mathematical idea helped address? How much does it help address that problem (assuming the why and how are beyond the layman, just describe how helpful it was.)

The Quicksort intro by gohrt is a perfect example.

You're not using the natural language to do away with the thorough mathematical explanation, you're giving the lay reader an idea of why the concept is important, why they should care, in the most general sense.

[gohrt]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort

> Quicksort (sometimes called partition-exchange sort) is an efficient sorting algorithm, serving as a systematic method for placing the elements of an array in order. Developed by Tony Hoare in 1959,[1] with his work published in 1961,[2] it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. When implemented well, it can be about two or three times faster than its main competitors, merge sort and heapsort.[3]

[detaro]

Next paragraphs as well: they name and link properties it has, but also give a short definition of them, where you'd otherwise have to follow a bunch of links and read the definitions there.

[DanBC]

The encyclopedia articles are not supposed to teach math. And most of the article can be incomprehensible to most people.

Having a plain English lead paragraph that put the article in context is very important, but the leads are often hopeless.

[Osiris]

I've had this problem with Wikipedia also when looking up various scientific or mathematical references I find here. Most do not have a laymen's explanation at the top of the article, requiring me to lookup other unknown terms referenced in the summary.

I really wish more articles had a summary for laymen with a more detailed explanation below.

[Someone]

Some scientific terms are too deep to directly describe them in layman's terms in a reasonable number of words.

Also, what one reader calls a layman's explanation another calls gobbledygook.

That's one of the reasons for inventing hypertext. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemannian_manifold has a nice introduction paragraph, but it presupposes quite a bit of knowledge. If you want to know more, feel free to click some links to learn more.

And yes, things probably aren't presented in a way that is optimal for _your_ learning, but there is no way to do that for every reader.

[technion]

I have read the Wikipedia description, and at least half a dozen other mathematical descriptions, and the only description of the Chinese Remainder Theorem that made sense was described here[0] (in the very challenge that prompted me to research it).

I feel there's definitely room to make the Wikipedia description more friendly when it runs for pages and is unreadable from my side.

[0] http://cryptopals.com/sets/5/challenges/40/

[tshadwell]

I'm inclined to agree with you, but instead I agree with the author's sentiment as represented here -- not specifically on Ka/s however. I spend a considerable portion of my time reading Wikipedia articles and very much enjoy it, however:

despite a strong background in science and engineering I can't make much of the considerable majority of mathematics-heavy articles. Many articles as the author no doubt notes define concepts in mathematical symbols which are left undefined, whose meaning is utterly lost on someone without the relevant academic background. For the rest, I find myself lost in a nigh recursive maze of definition upon definition.

Imagine, for example trying to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_matrix with little mathematical background

[vilhelm_s]

But who are the hypothetical readers who need to understand the camera matrix without knowing math? In general, my feeling is that most Wikipedia articles are pretty well pitched to the people that would be interested in the article topic.

[ollifi]

Camera projections are very common technique in computer graphics and software often refer to this kind of terminology. When I try to get better understanding what they actually mean I often find wikipedia articles lacking. It's like looking up a traditional food and finding only receipe.

[tshadwell]

I'm not sure that the idea that an encyclopaedia should be targeted to only the already well educated, especially one with the goal that Wikipedia has is much short of elitism.

[maus42]

...what exactly is missing?

Okay, the paragraph about projective spaces and degrees of freedom is a bit of mystery to me, but the actual concept seems to be simple enough. Should every article utilizing matrix multiplications to describe linear mappings spend time rephrasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_%28mathematics%29 i.e. a basic linear algebra course?

[jessriedel]

Yea, I'm all for adding as much layman-intelligible context as possible, but you can always make there sorts of gripes if you expect arbitrarily niche science topics to self-contained. The fact is that there's just not that much to say about quantum memory if you don't have the background to know what a Rabbi oscillation is.

I wonder to what extent this is just a humanities/sciences divide. I'd bet that scientists reading wikipedia far outside their specialty are less surprised and frustrated by the level of accessibility than are non-scientists. With important exceptions, topics in the humanities generally just have fewer levels of dependency.

[isolate]

What are the exceptions?

[jessriedel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

(Needless to say, I don't think these levels of dependency imply true intellectual depth...)

[brownbat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism

[Chathamization]

But not only is that not the case, we don't expect that to be the case for most topics. Most people expect to go to Wikipedia, type in Caligula, and get an article about Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus that was titled "Caligula" and which mentions that he is commonly known as Caligula in the first paragraph.

If the people who edited the history subsections had the same attitude as the people who edited many of the math and science pages, there would be only an article titled "Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus", which wouldn't use the name "Caligula" anywhere, but somewhere deep within the article would mention that he had the nickname of "little soldier's boot." Because, hey, you need to have the knowledge of the parent topic, and if you don't even know the guys name then why are you even looking up the article?

I'm sure the math and science people would go nuts if the articles for other topics were written in a similarly opaque fashion. But they seem to mistake the clarity others write with as evidence that those topics are inherently simpler.

[vonmoltke]

> It seems to me that any information - in an encyclopedia or anywhere else - on a subtopic must assume knowledge of the parent topic.

I would argue that any subtopic that requires more than basic understanding of the parent topic is too specialized for a general knowledge encyclopedia.

[ethanbond]

That's why "general knowledge encyclopedia" isn't a good term.

If you mean general knowledge in the sense of "knowledge which is generally held," or even "knowledge which is generally accessible," then a general knowledge encyclopedia wouldn't be that useful, by definition, to most people.

Crucially, it would be useless to the people most likely to use an encyclopedia!

A general knowledge encyclopedia should aim to curate knowledge with no discrimination in terms of category. This is what Wikipedia is, and it's really good at it.

I think there is room for improvement in linking topics and subtopics, even potentially in-line within an article. See a word you don't understand? Click the "+" next to it to expand a sentence that fills its place syntactically and semantically!

[RadioactiveMan]

Try logging in to Wikipedia and enabling Hovercards[1] in the beta features. It creates a pop-up with a summary of linked pages when you hover over the link.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferenc...

[ethanbond]

Oh wow, awesome. I'll give that a shot!

[ivansavz]

> Click ... to expand a sentence that fills its place syntactically and semantically!

proof of concept of something like what you're describing: http://www.telescopictext.org/text/pFjkqQY9bmfvQ (not the best example, but telescopictext is very cool)