The Wikipedia article for the electroweak force consists of a two-paragraph introduction that basically just says what I said above plus some fairly intimidating technical context. The rest of the article is almost entirely gnarly math equations. I have no idea who the article exists for because I'm not sure that person actually exists: someone with enough knowledge to comprehend dense physics formulations that doesn't also already understand the electroweak interaction or that doesn't already have, like, access to a textbook about it.
Probably a person who just wants to find one equation and can't be bothered to open a textbook. Ever since the academic world discovered that books don't have a Ctrl+F function, things have gotten worse.
Is this elitism? Is it just scientists writing like scientists? Have no doubt that a great many scientists are terrible at communication, but we can also imagine a world in which Wikipedia would attract the scientists that actually are good at communication. There have to be some that aren't otherwise occupied with writing books about string theory.
Wiki's articles cover the whole two dimensional parameter space of readability versus depth : it's not that there aren't any very good science articles, it's that there are too many of the extremes. The majority tend to be either so short as to be meaningless, or so technical as to be meaningless. The latter probably accounts for pretty close to 100% of mathematics articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficient), most of which I can't understand. The former makes up a high fraction of even slightly obscure astronomy articles (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish_galaxy). If you want a very broad overview of a big topic, say, cosmology, wiki tends to be very good. But try and dig deeper and it's like tunnelling through a field landmines.
No doubt yes, there are some good science communicators that aren't using wikipedia for whatever reason. But good review articles are hard to write from scratch. Small snippets which are scarcely longer than dictionary articles are easy, and so is adding a single equation. Planning the structure of a publically-readable review, however, takes a lot more time : it requires someone who's already very familiar with the topic, preferably an "insider" to have a general sense of which papers are well-accepted and which should be left out. Even then it involves a lot of careful reading of many different technical papers. Chances are, most of those who can do this are going to write independently of the anonymous wikipedia.
And before anyone asks, I'm going to be spending most of this weekend preparing a lecture course, so there. :P
https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ne7xzq/wikipedias-science-articles-are-elitist
Disappointed about theoretical physics? Try to learn something about homology or algebraic geometry instead! :) It is much more fancy and meaningless
ReplyDelete"I don't understand it! Therefore it must be elitist."
ReplyDeleteAs you said, it provides some depth and some quick introduction. If they want really good articles that are structured so all audiences can make the most use of it, then you should get someone to write that article.
What's elitist is to expect good Science Communicators to work for free so Motherboard has a free resource because, you know, they deserve it.
Jordan Henderson Yes, the elitist interpretation is open to debate. Certainly it can appear elitist - an encyclopedia which is only accessible to specialists is pretty elitist - but whether it was done because the authors are snobs... personally I rather doubt it. I think that could easily occur because of Wikipedia's operating model. I don't think many people are going to go out of their way to write articles in order to deliberately exclude the public.
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