alt Hacker NewsI find math topics to be insufferable. They are written to be as theoretical as possible and borderline useless if you do not already know the topic at hand.
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Out of interest, would you consider these articles to be approachable to a non-mathematician?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relati...
They were created because the main articles are, as you say, difficult for a layperson to read.
Absolutely. I do not know the current status, so don’t kill me if now is much better, because is just an example from many. But take fourier series. I remember going into the article, and instead of starting with something lime “helps to decompose functions in sums of sin and cos”, started with “the forier transform is defined as (PUM the integral for with Euler formula) continues: is easy to show the integral converges according to xxx criterion, as long as the function is…” you get the idea. Had I not know what FT is, I would’ve not undestand anything
Articles in biology, from which I understand nothing, are a wall for me. I could never understand anything biology related. Also for example, in Spanish, don’t ask me why, any plant or animal is always under the latin scientific name, and you have to search the whole article to find the “common” name of the thing.
I agree with your comments on mathematics. The articles are seemingly accurate in that field, but not usable by laypeople.
The same principle applies to IPA transcriptions. I know some IPA but often find that it is less intelligible than the originals in some cases.
I find it the other way around. I remember vividly that the textbook I was using for proving Gödel's first incompleteness theorem was insufferable and dense. Wikipedia gave a nice and more easily understood proof sketch. Pedagogically it’s better to provide a proof sketch for students to turn it into a full proof anyways.
i don't know how many upvotes you've gotten, but it's not enough. or to put it mathematically, megadittoes!
To give a different opinion, the math topics are actually what I like most. When I'm looking for something on Wikipedia, I want to get a precise definition and related concepts. I don't think it's Wikipedia's job to teach me the material, there's other resources for that.
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.
Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive; but there are many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.