On 2 June 2010 18:51, David Lindsey <dvdln...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:00 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> FAs are frequently all but unreadable to the casual reader. How >> feasible would it be to add "intro clear to casual reader"? I realise >> some topics are just never going to be that clear ... particularly >> with the tendency for FAs to be about specialised topics. > Yes, Intro to X articles would be nice. There are a handful floating > around, such as > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relativity, but often > attempts to create such articles are criticized as content forks, which is > unfortunate. The sharp end of physics has special qualities: 1. Our articles on it are very good and very up-to-date (as I noted). 2. Even the obscure stuff is utterly undeniably encyclopedic and we have lots of high-quality sources. (Even the cutting-edge discourse - arXiv preprints and physics blog posts - is good enough for many of our purposes, particularly as backgrounders on the abstruse technical peer-reviewed papers.) 3. Actually understanding it is beyond almost anyone reading. (My maths sputtered to a halt in the middle of second-year engineering.) But the overviews are sufficiently comprehensible and quite fascinating. So intros are very clearly reader-useful, and procedural types can be asked why both can't be kept ;-) Perhaps intro articles could start in similar high-science fields. It would be *ideal* for both to be a single article, but that would I suspect lead to unwieldy novel-length articles. - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
