[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.