[koboll]

This is such a great description. Compare how Wikipedia describes the same process [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine#Research]:

> The adenosine analog NITD008 has been reported to directly inhibit the recombinant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the dengue virus by terminating its RNA chain synthesis. This interaction suppresses peak viremia and rise in cytokines and prevents lethality in infected animals, raising the possibility of a new treatment for this flavivirus.

Absolute gibberish to someone with limited knowledge of biology.

[aaai]

May be hard to understand for ppl. with no background, but that description includes the crucial bit of information that OPs "easy to grok" simplified description lacks:

> inhibit the [...] RNA polymerase of the [..] virus

If it would just simply stop RNA synthesis (eg. inhibit any RNA-polymerase) or if it would actually break RNA in general, it would kill HUMANS just as well!

The point of antiviral compounds is to selectively inhibit/kill mechanisms/components of the virus and not the human host... there's hundreds of thousands of antiviral and antibiotic compounds that are not very useful because they'd kill humans just as well or give them horrible cancers or god knows what else...

As the saying goes... "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

[kohtatsu]

I noticed that hand waving in the OP too.

Any insight on how it manages not to harm non-virus stuff?

(Not a biologist. Also you're using a lot of italics and it harms the readability at least for me.)

[oefrha]

Scientific articles on Wikipedia aren’t written for laymen, although some could be understood by laymen as a side effect. For example as a physicist/mathematician I expect precise and physically/mathematically accurate statements rather than hand-wavy analogues that the average Joe might be able to make sense of, and that’s how I edit. Now, it’s okay to also include more approachable explanations, but they’re not a must.

[munificent]

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_artic...:

> Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. People who read Wikipedia have different backgrounds, education and opinions. Make your article accessible and understandable for as many readers as possible. Assume readers are reading the article to learn. It is possible that the reader knows nothing about the subject, so the article needs to explain the subject fully.

[nitrogen]

I know Wikipedia has evolved considerably from its original intent, but isn't one of the quintessential goals of an encyclopedia to have an approachable summary of every topic?

[leetcrew]

Wikipedia isn't quite like a traditional encyclopedia in this regard. it covers many technical topics that would be too niche to include in the latter.

random example: take a look at the Wikipedia article for "currying". [0] while quite accessible to someone with a math/cs background, this would be pretty much unintelligible to someone who wasn't familiar with the notion of a mathematical function. perhaps it could be rewritten to be even more accessible, but what would be the point of explaining currying to someone who doesn't know about functions and arguments in the first place? brittannica doesn't even cover this topic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying

[nitrogen]

The concept of partial specialization can be useful in many ways. I could see the concept of applying a process to one process and getting a new process for creating processes as somewhat applicable to business analysis, process engineering, analysis and design of government, etc.

I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help all uses:

- Specialists would more easily be able to refresh their memories of topics they use infrequently before diving into the details.

- People in neighboring specialties can more easily branch out.

- Informed laypeople (e.g. experts in other industries) could more easily find new ideas for cross-pollination into their own field.

As one random example I have recently found application for an algorithm mainly reserved for use in geophysics and cartography to audio signal processing, but learning and applying it took way more research than it really should have.

[acqq]

> I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help all uses

I'm curious how you would rewrite that first paragraph then:

"In mathematics and computer science, currying is the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument. For example, a function that takes two arguments, one from X and one from Y, and produces outputs in Z, by currying is translated into a function that takes a single argument from X and produces as outputs functions from Y to Z. Currying is related to, but not the same as, partial application."

BTW I don't like that paragraph, it looks to me that it completely "misses the point" because as far as I understand currying is not about the sets but about the arguments. If it would be about the sets it would be just "a rewrite to a function that accepts the subset of the previous input set" and it's not about that.

[leetcrew]

from a certain perspective, it's hard to talk about currying without talking about sets. "function" itself is defined as a special type of relation between sets. imo, the first paragraph does a good job introducing both the formal and practical meaning of currying to people who have enough background to find the topic useful.

simple wikipedia does take your approach though:

> Currying is a technique used in mathematics and computer science that consists of changing a function that takes several arguments into a number of functions that each take one argument. Mathematicians Moses Schönfinkel and Gottlob Frege laid the groundwork for this technique, which is named after Haskell Brooks Curry. Currying is used in Lambda calculus. Some programming languages, such as ML and Haskell say that functions can only have one argument. [0]

that's actually the entire article. not sure how useful it is, but at least they tried.

[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying

[aaai]

"Approachable" means that it might require some effort from the reader (eg. in worst case scenario, a reader not familiar at all with the domain would have to look up the definition of every word in a sentence and do that recursively a few steps, until he/she gets some domain familiarity by reading the equivalent of a few hundreds pages or less), but you can approach it, and in exchange it gives precise and rich information!

I like Wikipedia as it is, let's not make it into IdiocracyPedia for the sake of accessibility... if you're not lazy and you're willing to put some focus and time into your research you'll be able to understand quite unfamiliar subjects from Wikipedia, there's nothing blocking you, as opposed to eg. lots of academic articles that may contain un-google-able jargon and unexplained/unmentioned domain specific assumptions.

[Isinlor]

I've done undergrad level mathematics and a lot of Wikipedia articles about mathematics is complete gibberish to me even if I put a lot of effort (hours) in understanding them. My estimate would be that more than 99% of population would not be able to gain anything from reading them.

[SkyBelow]

Wouldn't this be what the simple version is for? One is to be informative to people who know nothing, the other is to be informative to the people who want to learn about it at depth.

[C4stor]

This a the fallacy of choice in action. People who want to learn about a subject at depth are still helped by simple and accessible descriptions. Simple doesn't have to mean wrong, but can rather mean "a human invested a lot of thoughts producing those words so that all others don't have to". This is in my opinion the great way of doing simple, and it definitely has its place on wikipedia.

If you're not convinced, even professional scientists themselves regularly publish and read "review papers" which are pretty much papers doing no research other than summariing and simplifying the current state of the research in their field.

[SkyBelow]

>People who want to learn about a subject at depth are still helped by simple and accessible descriptions.

I don't see this as being always true. For example, scientific papers are written in such a way that normally you need a great deal of understanding in a field to read them. Making them accessible would mean either removing or explaining all domain specific knowledge in each paper. Expecting the reader to acquire the knowledge elsewhere and then read the paper with the knowledge makes a group of papers more accessible than if each paper did either of the options making them simple.

In the same way, the wikipedia page on integration by parts does a better job of explaining what it means than if it took the time to explain what a function is, what a variable is, what an integral is, what a product is, what an antiderivative is, or what the common notation it uses. I bring these up because these are all assumptions made before you even get to the table of contents of the article. If the article was simple enough that someone who didn't know any of those concepts could understand the same information presented in the first paragraph, you would have a significant introduction to mathematics that would slow down those who have some basic calculus knowledge seeking to refresh or get a summary of what integration by parts is.

[C4stor]

But the integration by parts article still starts with a very simple sentence, and has a nice colored graphic for comprehension. This is a clear example of "simple and accessible".

It quickly helps forging an intuition of the new concept, using phrases like "Thus integration by parts may be thought of as deriving the area of the blue region from the area of rectangles and that of the red region." which are not very mathematicallish.

All the while, it's a good article for maths people.

Once again, in a great article, what should be simple and explained is not prior knowledge, but the new concept introduced.

[pnathan]

I have almost no knowledge of biology past a weak high school education and that sentence gives me an approximate understanding. It's not gibberish if you look at what it says and carefully read it.

[m-p-3]

One article among many others that would benefit from being simplified on simple.wikipedia.org

[C4stor]

And yet, 21 hours after making this remark, noone cared enough to edit the article to include the "great description".

Wikipedia isn't magical. If you don't care enough to edit it, it won't include the information you'd like to see.

[a123b456c]

Author called it a dumbed-down description. Are you sure that belongs on wikipedia?

[C4stor]

Sure, why not ? Let's consider for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linezolid , it's quite clear what it's used for but if you dive in the "Interactions" paragraph for example, it's definetely not a dumbed down article overall.

[whatshisface]

Gibberish to someone with limited knowledge of biology, but significantly more informative for someone who is using Wikipedia as a reference source and not a textbook.

[javajosh]

I'm not so sure about that. I've read wikipedia articles about subjects I know well and found the language to be needlessly packed with jargon such that it could at least momentarily dazzle and confuse the inventor of the subject himself!

Rigorously precise language (e.g. "jargon") is almost never needed for a top-line description of a thing, and I think should be discouraged, in general. Yes, highly technical descriptions targeted toward professionals and academics in the field have their place in wikipedia, but ought to be relegated to periodic additions to the body of the article. That's just my opinion, of course, but as such I think its quite correct and admirably justified!

[prewett]

Feynman shared your opinion, so I’d say you’re in good company!

[vikramkr]

I agree in general, but in this case the extra information is sort of irrelevant - do we really need to say "in this flavivirus?" Something much better as an overall description might be "Remdesivir is an adenosine analogue that chain terminates RNA dependent rna synthesis, inhibiting viral replication" or something like that. Use the molecule name instead of a label, general instead of specific, and if you are talking about dengue in particular - why refer to it as a flavivirus? Who cares in this context? Just say "dengue" again instead of "this flavivirus." And, I don't think the drug has been empirically demonstrated to inhibit cytokine storms etc, that should qualify the description of the imputed mechanism of action by clarifying that it's the hypothesized effect the drug will have.