[WikiEN-l] Re: Writing with our readers in mind

Sun Jul 10 22:14:04 UTC 2005

Dan Grey wrote

>> When initially starting WikiProject Clinical Medicine, we struggled with
>> this question. The decision was to escalate the level of difficulty, so 
>> all
>> relevant information would be covered. The lay reader would have to drop 
>> it
>> at some point, and none of the participants saw a great deal wrong with 
>> this.

> JFW

>That's a shame, because you basically made the whole thing useless to
average folk (I count myself in that group).

I think that's a misconception, in encyclopedia terms.  For one thing, those 
studying an article with a technical gradient will always get different 
amounts out of it, depending on what they arrive with.  For another, the 
modern trend is to assume anything can be read like a light novel - but that 
hasn't been historically the way with written material, and is a relatively 
new development (about a century, I think, coming with popular journalism). 
And a major point is that WP aims for completeness; if you have to trade off 
between lack of completeness and technical density, you generally choose the 
latter (which can always be improved later).

These points all apply in spades to mathematics, for example.  I think in 
areas like medecine and mathematics and a few others, lay people really have 
no idea quite how much could be said.  So, WP can actually tackle such 
issues, but everyone should see that the time scale is measured in years, 
not days or weeks.

Charles