On 28/02/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Sometimes a proposed introduction rewrite to be more
accessible to the
layperson will receive some resistance from people who know more about
the subject because it ends up being imprecise. Compromises
occasionally get hammered out, usually consisting of an introductory
sentence or two that uses the word "informally" to signal that this
isn't technically the correct definition, but more of a hand-wavy
intuition about the subject. I think that can be done for more
articles, but it's kind of a slow process, and the mathematicians do
have a point that we don't want to write inaccurate pop-math either.
The "In [subject]," introductory phrase can act as a suitable warning.
If an article starts "In computer science," that's enough fair warning
to the non-technical reader.
I'm a big fan of good intros. The intro section of an article should
be a concise summary article in itself. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lead_section .
- d.
- d.