Does Wikipedia Suck on Science Stories?

An anonymous reader writes "An editor from Wired writes on his blog that Wikipedia sucks for science stories — not because they are inaccurate, but because of what he calls the 'tragedy of the uncommon': Too many experts writing about subjects in ways that no non-expert can understand. Would this be the dumbing-down of Wikipedia — or would it be a better resource for everyone?"

Well it seems to me...

[alexultima]

...that it is not too hard to understand the current Wikipedia articles. But I'm sort of science minded.

However, we could do with putting it into simple terms, for those not science-minded. Then, we could have a section in Wikipedia of each article making sense to science minds.

Not just wikipedia problem

[Hypharse]

This is a problem across all academics, not just wikipedia. I write research papers and I get criticized by those above me if they don't "sound" sufficiently intelligent. They won't say it publicly, but privately they will readily admit that the more confusion you add to the paper by using big words and clumping them together in obtuse ways will make the paper seem more professional. Also adding mathematical equations that a purposely very abstract and hard to understand are good, rather than bad. It drives me nuts personally, as I agree with the author of this article that the simpler something is to understand the better it is, especially when you are trying to TEACH someone that thing.

It is not just a science problem either. Look at literature where some of the literary works are written in such an obtuse way that people just consider them genius works because they can't understand them.

I have often thought of making it a lifelong goal to change this and simplify the way they teach many "difficult" subjects. However, the current way is way too ingrained into every part of academics that it would take a miracle to accomplish it.

It's a Wired problem, not a Wikipedia problem

[Animats]

Dumb Wired writers, expecting instant gratification. Wired used to have reporters who actually went out and covered real stuff. Then they laid off most of the reporters and kept the "editors". Now they're just wannabe pundits. Saves on travel expenses.

That Tired writer isn't coming across as someone who spent long days digging something out of library stacks or public records. Or travelling around asking people questions to find out what really happened, like a real reporter. This is a lightweight. If you want a children's encyclopedia, you can still get World Book [worldbook.com].

Wikipedia has many problems, of course. Most of the good articles were in the first 500,000 created. What's coming in now is mostly junk - "State Route 92", "Star Wars Furry Adventure #6659", and similar crap. Wikia offers some hope for an amusing reason. Wikia took over Wookiepedia, the repository of Star Wars fancruft, which generates most of Wikia's traffic. They're monetizing the fan base. Over time, maybe all the popular culture stuff can be moved to Wikia. That would be a win.

Re:The term encyclopaedia

[Toe, The]

Once again, Wikipedia comes through.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia [wikipedia.org]

The word encyclopedia comes from the Classical Greek "(munged)" (pronounced "enkyklia paideia"), literally, a "[well-]rounded education," meaning "a general knowledge." Though the notion of a compendium of knowledge dates back thousands of years, the term was first used in 1541 in the title of a book by Joachimus Fortius Ringelbergius, Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kyklopaideia (Basel, 1541).

It is debatable if well-rounded means comprehensive or just general as opposed to specific.

Re:Disagree

[Kagura]

Have you ever seen this [wikipedia.org]?

It's easier to criticize than to help

[Toe, The]

Yes, it's easier to criticize than to help. But helping out Wikipedia is much more useful than complaining about it.

One does not in any way need a deep grounding in a subject to be able to write a brief description of what that subject is. It just takes a little work.

This is not in any way comparable to writing new code. One has to be a good programmer to fix OSS. One does not need to be a scientist to fix an article about a scientific subject. I have contributed a lot to the Marine Biology article on Wikipedia, even though I am not a biologist. I can't write the whole article, but in just a few minutes I can figure out enough to make the article more accessible to the layperson.

And as someone notes below, Wikipedia is a living document. Over time, these sorts of things will work themselves out. Just complaining about it doesn't do much (except perhaps motivate others). In a short period of time you can at least learn how to do this:
1. Click the Edit button on the top of the page
2. Place this code at the very beginning, followed by a carriage return: {{cleanup}}
3. Click the preview button and see that the cleanup box appears at the top
4. Click the submit button

This tells the community that this page needs cleanup. There. You've contributed, and it took you 20 seconds.

Re:Then edit it

[zippthorne]

You're missing the point. It's not, "if you can't understand it, write it so you can." It's more like, "If you can understand it, but think it's a little too complicated, don't just whine about it, write something."

In the same vein, all the contrasts between wikipedia and conventional encyclopaedias that compare errors have been flawed. When they describe the wiki's errors they don't say "former errors" because they didn't bother to correct them.

But the wiki is a different kind of resource. If you see an error, fix it. If you can't fix it, write in the talk page so someone with better fixing skills will be aware of it. If everyone that finds errors does something to fix them, and everyone that understands articles but thinks they're too complicated does something to help rewrite part of them, then everyone else will have a good chance of finding an article that they understand and contains few errors.

Re:Authoritative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia IS MEANT TO BE authoritative. It often fails. But that's the ideal.

Wikipedia seeks to be authoritative only in the sense that it should cite authoritative sources. They don't accept original research or polemics, and Jimbo Wales himself says you shouldn't cite Wikipedia as an authority--only use it as a reference to reliable primary sources.

So it's probably better to say that Wikipedia aims to be reliable, rather than "authoritative."

Re:Dumb it down?!?!?

[iabervon]

The general idea of a metric space is totally intuitive to practically anybody. It's a set with a way of measuring distance that has the basic properties you'd expect of a distance (the distance between something and itself is 0, the distances there and back are the same, and going through some third spot isn't shorter total than going directly). People are familiar with Euclidian distance in 2 and 3 dimensions, and non-directed non-weighted graph edge distance (Kevin Bacon).

The thing that makes metric spaces tricky to most people is that any text that bothers to mention that something is a metric space is using either an unexpected set or an unusual distance, generally with only a brief description ("2D Euclidian figures, with the Hausdorff distance"). It's mathematical articles that use the term "metric space" and expect this to mean something to novices (without a distracting side track) that are confusing, not an article actually on the topic of metric spaces.

Re:The more accurate the better

[Rakshasa Taisab]

And it goes on to say:

* Irreducibility in this case means that the polynomial cannot be divided by any polynomial except itself and 1 with zero remainder.
* Reducible polynomials can still be used, but their error correcting and detecting capabilities will be less effective. Some applications may choose to use reducible polynomials under certain conditions.

So what is your complain? It's part of the very technical section on how to design an CRC algorithm, and it explains the term.

Re:The more accurate the better

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

In it, they refer to the need for the seed to be "irreducible." Checking further in the article, this is just a $64 word that means "prime." If the number needs to be prime, just say so, don't use a word that nobody will understand, followed eventually by an oblique definition that's hard to understand.

Except that they're not talking about a prime number, they're talking about irreducible polynomials, and that is in fact the proper term. The definition is similar to the definition of a prime number, but they're not the same and they don't have exactly the same properties. Also, the term "prime polynomial" is perhaps avoided because it is too easily confused with polynomials that generate a lot of prime numbers. So irreducible polynomial is definitely the proper term.

I would rather a Wikipedia article be correct first, and easy to understand second.

Re:The more accurate the better

[masterzora]

If you do a google search for "prime polynomial" (quotes included), the first result is from Wolfam MathWorld leading to Prime-Generating Polynomial, which is certainly different! I could very well be wrong, but in my mathematical education thusfar (freshman at Harvey Mudd College) I don't remember hearing the term "prime polynomial" to describe irreducible polynomials and, quite frankly, as MathWorld shows us, that could be quite confusing.

Re:The more accurate the better

[arodland]

It doesn't say that because it doesn't mean that. What a surprise. Polygons have a perimeter, but circles have circumference. Closely related, but different. Integers are composite or prime, but polynomials are reducible or irreducible. To say that a polynomial is prime is as accurate as saying that golfers carry baseball bats -- they're sticks that you swing to hit balls, right?

Re:The more accurate the better

[Anonymous Coward]

And how, pray tell, does that differ in any way from being prime?

Well, if you want to get really technical, it is always true in any integral domain that prime implies irreducible. However, it's quite possible for an irreducible element to not be prime. So, it is not ever always the same thing. However, if you want an irreducible element to be prime, your ring needs to be at least a unique factorization domain.

However, it's just the standard mathematical convention to refer to the 'primes' of a polynomial ring over a field to be known as primes, which in this case works.

So ya, blame the mathematicians for that if you want.

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