Steve Bennett wrote:
On 2/28/07, Jake Nelson <duskwave(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
We need to work on readability, especially in the
first sections of articles.
Definitely. The first section of every article ought to summarise the
whole topic for a lay person. The rest of the article can descend into
geekdom.
That said, I frequently have difficult with maths-ish articles.
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.
Actually this happens a lot in political science articles too, in my
experience. The first sentence defining a fairly simple topic will
often contain at least several jargon words I don't know, in the
interests of treating with extreme precision some legal obscurity
(especially legal fictions).
-Mark