Here’s an example. Wikipedia’s article on “charge”, as in, physics. Opening paragraphs:
I put it to you that there is not one person alive that could conceptually understand what is written there, without already knowing what charge is.
But that’s an article about a very abstract, general notion of “charge”, a topic which is only of importance, I would imagine, to people capable of reading that article. If you want to know what “electrical charge” specifically is, then you can click those words, linked right near the top and again several times throughout, and head on over to a more accessible article on that specific topic.
How is this an important/useful article for people capable of reading it?
What do you mean? I, for example, was able to glean some content from it, despite having a very meager physics background. I did not already know what “charge” meant in that abstract sense, and was able to learn a few new things (granted, I had to follow some of the links out to establish some prerequisites first, but that aspect of Wikipedia is a good thing, not something to be shunned). I don’t mean to suggest that it couldn’t possibly be improved, but it wasn’t at all useless.
But, like I said, if you’re only interested in the less mathematically abstruse concept of “electric charge” specifically, rather than the abstract common notion of which “electric charge”, “color charge”, “magnetic charge”, and so on are particular instances, then you should look at the linked article on “electric charge” instead.
[And, of course, I’ve only had a little time to go exploring so far. The longer I keep hunting links down, the better my understanding of the topic gets. You might say “You should’ve been able to grasp the basics immediately, were it a good article you started from”, but that’s a bit like demanding that I should’ve been able to immediately grasp the definition of, say, a “Grothendieck topology” from a good article; abstruse concepts take time to grok, particularly because they do call upon various other prerequisites]
Mainly, I think the problem here is that the article you’re looking at is not about what (I suspect) you think it’s about; it’s as though you were reading an article on waves in general (including sound waves, radio waves, abstract sine waves, and so on) and found it too confusing and technical, because you had been expecting it to be the article on ocean waves in particular.
I’ve gone ahead and added an appropriately disambiguating disclaimer to the top, which perhaps would have been helpful for you.
Just CHANGE IT already.
I’ve changed articles. It’s easy and fun.
If you don’t have time, just add a little box saying something like “This needs to be more useful to novices” Many articles have these warnings. Others I’ve seen are “This needs to be rewritten, it sounds like a press release” and “This needs more background cites”
While not helpful in the particular case of ‘charge’, sometimes simple.wikipedia.org can help.
I put it back to you that there’s more than one person alive who can conceptually understand what is written there, but has for one reason or another never heard of Emmy Noether.
That kind of person could find the article useful.
People are always going ON and ON about Quantum Chromodynamics.
For gods sake change the record will you I sick to death of the subject.
Someone raise a subject that grownups can enjoy.
I’m not sure the article is totally incomprehensible, but it’s pretty close.
A lot of Wikipedia articles, unfortunately, were clearly written solely to make the author sound like a genius, as opposed to communicating information. Since nobody with that level of understanding of the concept of “Charge” would ever go to Wikipedia to get such information, it’s effectively useless.
Wikipedia is hit or miss sometimes, but I generally find it helpful and informative. Often times it IS only helpful to someone who already knows a bit about the subject matter though. To an extent, that’s the point; Wikipedia isn’t a tutorial, but a reference. However, I think there is far too much reliance on embedded links, and not enough explanation of the terms. The links are helpful, sure, but I shouldn’t have to go read 10 more 5000-word articles before I can understand the first one I clicked on. Give me a quick explanation I can use for the purposes of the discussion, please.
Wikipedia is a favorite site of mine and I’m a big fan of telling people to “change it!” when something isn’t right, but even as a regular who has been visiting and editing/writing articles for years, Wikipedia is downright complex to newbies. Everything, from the syntax to the style guide to the tags takes quite a bit of research to understand. Wikipedia’s terribly unorganized style guides and “how-to” articles are strewn about the site and difficult to find.
All in all, the site could definitely use a few upgrades in being user-friendly. All it does at this point is keep people who might be inclined to help and rewrite an article far, far away.
That’s why I never edit Wikipedia pages, even though sometimes I see something I’d like to change. I click “edit” and I see a page of meaningless gobbledygook. All kinds of symbols I don’t know what they mean. My life is too busy than to learn yet another new computer language.
Makes sense to me, and my physics background consists of one semester of classical mechanics. Not every article needs to be entirely self-contained and accessible to a high school graduate.
I have to disagree. The purpose of an general encyclopedia is to explain concepts to the masses. While a certain level of intelligence must be assumed , there is no reason for having such a large disparity between different articles.
Except for one thing: a lot of Wikipedians consider simplifying a text to be the same as original research (which is rightfully banned). To these guys, making an analogy requires cite that that analogy is accurate, rather than relying on other Wikipedians with knowledge on the subject to point out if something is wrong. In other words, if there isn’t an easy-to-find* source that already has simplified the concept, the concept can’t be simplified.
*Why easy to find? Because Wikipedia is supported by volunteers, and most volunteers won’t put in a lot of effort. One of the major flaws of Wikipedia is this combined with what I mentioned above.
There’s a perfectly good reason for having such a large disparity: some articles are on abstruse topics that can’t be meaningfully understood without some prerequisites.
Like I said, what do you think Wikipedia should do with its article on, say, fibred category? Rewrite it so that it doesn’t attempt to communicate anything requiring significant mathematical background? Who would that be useful for? It cannot possibly be understood without that background; its very definition is inextricably tied to that background. Thankfully, the article provides enough of a description and links out that one can figure out what background one needs, absorb it, and then come back to the article if need be. But if one isn’t interested in learning the technical background, then one can’t really be interested in learning about the topic of the article either (for it is a purely technical concept building upon it); so it was with the article the OP linked.
The OP claimed there is not one person alive who could conceptually understand the article they selected without already knowing about its topic, but ultrafilter and I have both served as counterexamples. The problem was, the OP picked an article on an abstract mathematical concept and was surprised that it called upon abstract mathematical background. Like I said, though, I suspect entire problem here is that the article the OP was looking at was not the one they wanted to be looking at, just one with a similar name which misled them. I imagine they wanted this article, which was linked within, instead. Blame the physicists for using the same name for both a very abstract technical concept to which few laypeople are ever exposed, and a particular, commonly discussed instance of it which has filtered into ordinary language (although this is perfectly natural and frequent linguistic practice and not really something to be chastised for). But the articles themselves seem fine, particularly with suitable disambiguating links inserted.
Which, of course, isn’t to say I’m opposed to making things easier to understand; how could I be? But often, the best or even only way to make something understood is by explaining some background leading up to it, and rather than doing this redundantly in every article calling upon that background, the cleanest organization is to have those articles simply link to that background material, to be read as needed. And this is exactly what is done; great!