Technical articles on Wikipedia

So, in response to this post about the level of technical articles on Wikipedia. This is always an issue of course, and I have followed some of the community discussion as well as talking to friends that are in at different levels of experience with wikipedia. It isn’t an easy problem, but I think it is one of psychology rather than writing style to a large extent. I will give some examples. The first is an example from the original post. This is from the article on fluid mechanics on Wikipedia as posted at the Epidemix blog,

Fluid mechanics is the subdiscipline of continuum mechanics that studies fluids, that is, liquids and gases. It can be further subdivided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest, and fluid dynamics, the study of fluids in motion. Modern applications use the computational approach to develop solutions to fluid mechanics problems; the discipline concerned with this is the CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics.

The response is, “You lost me at continuum”. First of all I have to ask, really? Do people stop processing things at the first instance of something they don’t know? This is a sideline issue though. I will now include the text as it actually is on Wikipedia with hyperlinks,

Fluid mechanics is the subdiscipline of continuum mechanics that studies fluids, that is, liquids and gases. It can be further subdivided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest, and fluid dynamics, the study of fluids in motion. Modern applications use the computational approach to develop solutions to fluid mechanics problems; the discipline concerned with this is the CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics.

In this context the obvious response was, if you cared about continuum mechanics, and didn’t know what it meant then perhaps read the article about it? Every article doesn’t include every piece of information about everything.

There are some other examples, but they are all more style issues rather than content in my opinion. Yes, Wikipedia style is somewhat cold, there aren’t a lot of rhetorical questions, and conversational tones. The example from Johns Hopkins is just not the type of writing you will find at Wikipedia.

So, the real issue, lets actually look at some troubling articles. From Somatic hypermutation:

Somatic hypermutation (or SHM) is a cellular mechanism that occurs during an adaptive immune response and serves to diversify the antigen specific receptor repertoire of the immune systems, throughout the lifetime of an organism.[1] Somatic hypermutation involves a programmed process of mutation affecting the variable regions of immunoglobulin genes. Unlike many other types of mutation, SHM affects only individual immune cells, and the mutations are not transmitted to the offspring.[1]

Or Chebyshev polynomials:

In mathematics the Chebyshev polynomials, named after Pafnuty Chebyshev, are a sequence of orthogonal polynomials which are related to de Moivre’s formula and which are easily defined recursively, like Fibonacci or Lucas numbers. One usually distinguishes between Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind which are denoted Tn and Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind which are denoted Un. The letter T is used because of the alternative transliterations of the name Chebyshev as Tchebyshef or Tschebyscheff.

I think we can safely say these topics are more inaccessible than the other examples. I think looking at these makes the issue more clear. So, what do we do with them? Should we try to make them more simple? How would we go about that? The problem is the assumption that any given topic can be made simple to people with no background in the subject. Would you like to know about fluid mechanics? It might take more than 200 words. Is the article on Chebyshev polynomials useful to someone? I’m sure it is, but probably not me. I understand the somatic hypermutation, but my background is in genetics. Even his example of mitochondrial DNA is suspect. The writers background is in medicine, and he prefers the NIH wording,

Mitochondria are structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use. Although most DNA is packaged in chromosomes within the nucleus, mitochondria also have a small amount of their own DNA. This genetic material is known as mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA.

to Wikipedia’s. That’s fine, but I think most people on the street would be lost at chromosomes. He’s obviously not with his background, but that’s the point. You simply can’t explain things like mitochondrial DNA, somatic hypermutation, or Chebyshev polynomials to someone with no background at all. Some articles simply can’t be made accessible. In those instances we would do better sending people to introductory articles on the broader subject, something that has already begun on many articles as stated in the post. (see Genetics and Introduction to genetics)