[basch]

>a "Wikipedia article" has a worldwide recognition and trust

For the average person, Wikipedia exists as a mix of trust and distrust, with its distrustful image preceding it.

It still carries the reputation of something you cant cite in school, that anyone can edit. The name itself is thrown around as a pejorative, even by people who behind closed doors consume it.

This is also a surprisingly hard claim to google, for sources. "wikipedia used as a pejorative -site:wikipedia.org -site:wiktionary.org -site:wikipedia.nd.ax" etc returns nothing I want.

[romwell]

Perhaps it's a surprisingly hard claim to google because it's not something that happens often? :)

I personally don't know anyone who would use it that way. Yes, people are aware that articles on controversial topics can fluctuate, but generally, people love using Wikipedia as a starting point of finding out about things.

When someone wants to find out about West Indian Manatee, they don't go to Britannica.

[frosted-flakes]

For some things, maybe. But it seems that more often than not, the Wikipedia article is just a jumble of incomprehensible technical terms and mathematical formulae, and I end up looking elsewhere. At least for anything remotely technical.

For example, Fitts's Law[1], which is a super simple concept that the further away a target is, the bigger it needs to be to quickly and accurately reach it. It's super relevant in any sort of graphical user interface design, particularly mouse-driven ones, and you don't need to know the math behind it to understand it. But this is how Wikipedia introduces it:

> Fitts's law is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. This scientific law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.

And it jumps right into a bunch of complicated-looking math from there. If you're not already familiar with the topic and you're also not a mathematician, the whole thing is complete gibberish.

That was only the first topic I thought of, and I've never seen that particular page before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

[romwell]

It's hard for me to see anything bad with this article, but I am a mathematician :)

I agree that there are problems with Wikipedia getting too technical and dry, but that's kind of expected of an encyclopedia.

Still, there is a consistent expectation, even if it's "technical mumbo jumbo".

It's very different from whatever other Wikimedia projects offer. And that's the problem.

[frosted-flakes]

It reads like a research paper, that's why it's bad. It could start off something along my description of the topic in layman's terms before getting into the technical details which are often not relevant.

Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopedia, not directed towards any particular group of people. But many articles are written towards people that are highly-educated in the field the topic is in, which kind of misses the point.

[efreak]

I think we need more levels of Wikipedia. Simple.wikipedia is quite useful for simple explanations, but often it's not really what you're looking for. I know a large number of science-related articles in various disciplines are overly technical--maybe we need a new technical.wikipedia for more technical versions of articles with formulas and equations instead of descriptions. Or maybe use namespaces instead would work better, though then you'd have to decide how to match with the talk: namespace.

[hk__2]

What is preventing you from improving the article?

[frosted-flakes]

Nothing, except there's no reason for me to do so, improving every bad Wikipedia article I come across would be a full-time job, my edit would probably get reverted by some other overzealous editor who thinks he owns the article, and I can't say that I know very much about most Wikipedia articles I look at (because if I did I wouldn't be looking at them).

That last one might be part of the problem: the only people who edit those kind of Wiki articles are subject experts with some external motivation for doing so.

[hk__2]

Improving an article from time to time is a lot more helpful than complaining about it.

[basch]

>Yes, people are aware that articles on controversial topics can fluctuate

From the perspective of my comment, youve already drifted too far into the population who know too much about the inner workings and trends of the site. A person saying "whered you read that, wikipedia" probably wouldnt know about site controversies, or specific biases.