The Harvard Business School commonly calls this porblem “The Curse of Knowledge” In a group of approximately 100 experst only 1-2 will be able to translate the expert concept into common terminology. THey suggest you focus on telling an anecdote to illustrate the concept. I am not sure we can really do that with mitochondria though. For a good example on expert wikipedia entry search personalized medicine.

-Steve
http://www.thegenesherpa.blogspot.com

There have been several discussions on what kind of “reading level” Wikipedia is aiming for. Many Wikipedians have expressed concern that Wikipedia might end up being too pedantic. Wikipedians do recognize this concern, and the Wikipedia Manual of Style tries to address the issue, asking the editors to ensure that articles in Wikipedia remain accessible to a general audience.

If you feel that an article is too pedantic, feel free to tag it with the maintenance templates ({{technical}}, {{context}}, {{confusing}} etc.) and start a discussion on the article’s talk page. There are several such articles that have been nominated for cleanup.

There is also a Simple English Wikipedia that uses simple language, without dumbing down. But, it’s still in a nascent stage and not as comprehensive as the main English Wikipedia.

I just can’t be bothered with Wikipedia anymore. The politics that surround what gets included and what doesn’t make Wikipedia a more biased source that it claims to be. As for going in and helping to edit, if only I had the time! It would be a full time job and more.

So your real question is, “Why does Wikipedia suck on science communication?”, and the answer is because there are less communicators than there are experts.

There’s an unavoidable distinction between those who know a subject and those who know how to communicate a subject. This is why traditional encyclopedias employ editors. Lacking the traditional organizational structure of a publisher, there has to be a balance struck among wiki contributors about which things should be cut from an article to improve clarity, and which well-written passages are too shallow or potentially misleading. Because expert communicators are, by definition, fewer than the set of all experts, there will be, in general, a skew towards pedantry and there’s no getting around it without a way to weight the contribution of communicators a little more than technical experts.

You just have to understand wikipedia is it’s own category, and not something you can compare head-to-head with a traditionally published encyclopedia.

There are all sorts of problems with science entries in wikipedia… they range from too technical to too simplistic to too short.

Next semester I plan to assign my upper level physics and astronomy students the task of seeking out and improving many of these entries as a semester-long project. So many educators complain about students using Wikipedia for research I figured… here is one way to make sure they don’t get all their info from Wikipedia… give them the job of fixing all the stubs.

You lost me at pedantic…

dr. dave – veyr very very cool idea =)

dr. dave, don’t bother with Wikipedia; unless you have thousands of students they won’t be able to make a dent. Even if they do, there’s no one there to keep the articles from being screwed up again. Citizendium is a new wiki site that works similarly to Wikipedia, but has a group of editors with actual expertise in the subject areas (with some effort put toward actually verifying credentials). Anyone can edit an article, but there will be “approved ” versions — sort of like stable releases of software versus beta releases.

Citizendium has just started, so there’s not a lot there yet.

Eric: Why the hell not have students work on something potentially futile, pointless, and serves no purpose? It’s a damn sight better than what they’re doing 99% percent of the time — stuff that’s *definitely* futile, pointless, and serves no purpose.

Dr Dave: In all seriousness, good idea! I would have been honored to get such an assignment. It’s nice to be able to do work as a student t hat has some persistence and utility, however fleeting.

Yeah, you might have a point with that but Wiki’s saved my life on a fair few Organic chemistry assignments so it isn’t all bad

I cannot agree that: “This is, in many ways, the opposite of the tragedy of the commons – it’s the tragedy of the uncommon, meaning topics that the common folk just don’t get – and thus can’t help in editing the entry on.” even though I understand how this could be frustrating. Because as a trained educator and library worker, I see no need to fret when the information I, or any students, need is not presented in simplistic terms at first. The act of continued research or the search for understanding is the part of the learning process that increases understanding of a subject the most.

I applaud the professor who is having his students edit stubs for credit. It is rare to find solid non-traditional teaching methods outside of the public school system in the US.

This problem is quite apparent, however, I would like to point out a mistake. You compare the Mitochondrial DNA with Mitochondria, two very different things. So naturally the explanations would be different (as Mitochondria is slightly easier to understand).

This is the article about Mitochondrion:

In cell biology, a mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) (from Greek μιτος or mitos, thread + κουδριον or khondrion, granule) is a membrane-enclosed organelle, found in most eukaryotic cells.[1] Mitochondria are sometimes described as “cellular power plants,” because they convert NADH and NADPH into energy in the form of ATP via the process of oxidative phosphorylation. Mitochondrion number varies immensely according to organism and tissue type. Many cells possess only a single mitochondrion, while others can contain several million mitochondria [2][3]. Mitochondria contain DNA that is independent of the DNA located in the cell nucleus. According to the endosymbiotic theory, mitochondria are descended from free-living prokaryotes. The mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of cells.

I learned most of the information that is in the Mitochondrion article in High School Biology. I’m in college now and take lower division science courses; I’m by no means a science expert, yet have not had a problem reading science entries in Wikipedia. In fact, I like that I can often find deeper information, explained in an understandable format.

I hope they don’t work to hard to fix something I don’t think is broken.

Peace,
CuriousMe

Even though experts should indeed try to make public articles more accessible, there are always technical details they feel cannot leave out, or the rigorous formulation which took so long to come up with and mustn’t now be wasted. Despite attending high-school, I’m pretty much self-taught in maths, from manifolds to complex calculus, and most of it I learnt through Wikipedia or my dad’s books – which are much more technical. If you make an effort and go through the article word-by-word and search the related concepts’ articles, I’m sure you’ll end up understanding it. Of course most people don’t have time for this, and most need only a simple description that enables them to keep on reading. That has more to do with the purpose of Wikipedia though (encyclopedias usually do have thorough and extensive articles), and it’s also the reason why there are “Informal definition/description” sections in some articles.

What you call pedantic, I call efficient. If I’m looking up mitochondrial DNA on Wikipedia – which I did last week, in fact – I don’t want to have to page through an explanation of what mitochondria are. I wouldn’t be looking at an entry on mitochondrial DNA if I didn’t already know that.

For the mtDNA one, the NIH description is actually slightly inaccurate. DNA is usually NOT packaged into chromosomes, except when the cell is about to divide.

I’m highly biased because I really like biology, but what about the mtDNA article introduction is hard to understand? It doesn’t say much that’s different from the NIH article, and what’s more, it’s correct.

After several months of working on Wikipedia, I found that the biggest problem was simply productivity. Making the smallest contribution is a lot of work, because it will have to be done, redone, done over, and done again. And if the topic is at all controversal, it will have to be discussed, defended, vandalism reverted, negotiated, discussed some more, and defended some more. It is exhausting, and eventually, everybody gets tired out, except for the fanatics. It is almost impossible to rewrite or change anything that has already been written; and it isn’t so easy to write something new.

Fortunately for Wikipedia, there are a lot of people willing to work on it, so even with low productivity, a kind of progress does get made.

the science articles on wikpedia are not hard to understand at all, the problem is people are too lazy to bother to read further and try to understand what they say. The idea of wikipedia is not to make a site for schoolers to go and “copy-paste” the articles for their homework.. it’s more for a deeper understanding of most topics… like a rel encyclopedia

tgoetz,

I hate to say it, but I think the sentiment you’re actually expressing here is laziness.

If you don’t understand the material presented in the article, click on the links to the entries on the terms you don’t understand and keep reading.

Wikipedia shouldn’t be dumbed down for the masses. It’s their responsibility to raise themselves to its level. The whole point of the thing is “learning,” after all.

Or, to put it another way: don’t bitch when your encyclopedia gives you too much information. That’s is freakin job.

-=rsw

The science entries on Wikipedia are great. Since when did Wikipedia become a manuel for dummies? I’m in high school, have had a few courses in biology and physics, and the examples shown in the article (of articles) are very clear and concise to me. I always thought Wikipedia was a collection or information for reference, not a teach-yourself book.

I agree with the last couple of posts – if you insist on a simpler presentation of the information you cite above (which I think is complex, but still readable, and I’m not in bio at all), then chances are you were only reading it out of curiosity, and you’re going to forget it in a couple of hours anyway.

Offtopic, but why is the font in this text field so very small? I can’t read the text I’m typing in, it’s disgusting.

I just looked at the mitochondria page. The first paragraph looks no more complicated than a high school or first year college bio class text.The mtDNA descriptions from NIH and wikipedia have virtually the same information, but the NIH description is incomplete in not stating that nuclear DNA and mtDNA have different origins.

I do not know your science background, but your citing the mitochondria DNA article when you originally complain about the mitochondria article and your preference for the incomplete and somewhat misleading NIH article suggest you may not really know the difference between mitochondria and DNA and the role each plays in the cell.

With respect to “you lost me at continuum,” perhaps you should try reading a little further. It is not “continuum” it is “continuum mechanics” If you do not know what that is there is a link to explain it. There is also a chart on the page breaking down continuum mechanics. No article will ever help you if you choose to ignore its content.

You may have a point, but I think you picked poor examples

I understand the point that Wikipedia science articles are always moving to higher and higher levels, and that this can be frustrating. But frankly, for some of us that high level is really useful… I am not a geneticist or a fluid dynamics guy, but I could understand both those articles really well. I like that they’re precise and use the terms that experts would use.

I am a science graduate student myself, and I find that I get a better understanding of almost anything by reading a text aimed higher than the average “science for laypeople” article, which tend to be wishy-washy and useless when you’re actually looking for precise information.

I agree that Wikipedia articles should include introductions aimed at ordinary people, but having the high-level content is a huge asset!!

Phil Goetz has a great point: if you don’t understand something on wikipedia, you can hop over to another article that will explain it in just a second or two. For example, if you go to the mitochrondrial DNA article without knowing what mitochondria are, just click on the blue, underlined word “mitochondria”, and there you have an explanation.

In a large cooperative effort like wikipedia, where the authors are self-selected, there are bound to be variations in the quality of writing. As we are all aware, there are scientists, and there are writers. Writers are good at storytelling, scientists are good at, well, their science. As long as wikipedia is what it is, a collection of contributors, we will se variations in writing quality and style. A book editor would have a writher and an editor smooth out these things, but that isn’t what Wikipedia is, or there would be writers and editors looking everything over before publishing, maintaing a chosen style and level. Due to the nature of the beast, I think we need to accept the flaws with the benefits. Overall, “its a good thing.”

I have no degree, yet I find Wikipedia’s science articles I’ve needed to consult so far (including the ones you quote), written well enough, whenever I need some information or reference.

I’d value some extra accuracy in the encyclopedia (as far as Wikipedia claims that title) over chewing it down to people who have had trouble with exact sciences in high school. That’s what external references in the articles should be good for.

These quotations from wikipedia are very misleading, simply for omitting the links. By “flattening” out the material, you exaggerate the complexity of an entry by removing the assistance of the medium. For instance, the first sentence in the “continuum mechanics” entry tells us that it “is a branch of physics (specifically mechanics) that deals with continuous matter, including both solids and fluids (i.e., liquids and gases).” This is just one click away – there’s no reason to be lost.

We should also keep in mind that wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a primer nor a dictionary. These should be other projects for the time being, until the semantic tools are developed to bring them parallel to their cousins.

I think the articles should use a certain amount of technical vocabularly. It makes things more consise and more accurate. Who cares if you don’t know what a particular term means, you can follow the carefully assigned links to find out.

In many cases, an article provides both the technical terms and a layman’s definition, you are merely getting berwildered by the difficult parts. The quoted fluid dynamics article is an example of this. If you had made it past “continuum mechanics” you’d find the rest of that paragraph to be what I consider to be a good summary. And even more commonly, the opening paragraph is a very strict terse definition, and then a later paragraph will give a more accessible description (usually appearing directly under the ToC, as in Epigenetics).

Though many of your cited articles are poorly written, I do not fault the approach. There are many scientific things that are quite involved, and no amount of good communication is going to be able to produce a simple, consise free standing article, at least not without some sacrifice. Hence I think you may be overestimating the problem of lacking experts with communication skills.

I would be more inclined to attribute poor articles to people who do not fully understand the material, say students rather than professors. These sorts of people can write well and produce accurate definitions, but lacking a full overview of the subject are not able to summarise it well in their own words.

As another reader commented above, Wikipedia has numerous problems that deter participation. Primary among these, and exceeding the expertise issue, is politics, and a curiously glaring proof of the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory (see http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 : Normal Person plus Anonymity plus Audience = Total F**kwad). I don’t bother contributing even small edits to Wikipedia anymore. It’s just not worth the hassle, the personal attacks, the circling of the wagons by the select Wikipedia elite. Great experiment, great results at first, now deteriorating.

I don’t think wikipedia should aim to be a resource for experts. After all, it is an encyclopedia and the purpose of encyclopedias is to get readers familiar with topics, not train experts

There’s nothing that annoys me more than information being dumbed-down.
Simple short descriptions are for dictionaries and traditional encyclopedias.
Wikipedia fills a hole by being a clearinghouse for things that are hard to find information on elsewhere.
Bring on the full-jargon science. If I don’t know it now, I can learn… also a certain level of detail and expertise offers a barrier of entry to average know-nothing dude on the street who might otherwise be tempted to share their “knowledge” about a topic.

Most of the commenters don’t seem to understand. It’s not about writing in a scientific style vs. “dumbing it down”. It’s about knowing how to write in the first place. A preposterous, confusing, esoteric style is not a sign of intelligence, but of inability paired with arrogance.

Or take the Wikipedia entry for “Tensor”. It’s not so hard, even for non-mathematicians, to visualize and get an idea of what a tensor is, but this convoluted style makes it impossible.

It’s also about knowing the difference between, say, a thesis, a textbook, and an encyclopaedia. For example, an encyclopaedia entry should start with a simple sentence starting with “A $lemma is a …” that gives a general idea about the subject with the least number of references possible. The “Epigenetics” article already fails at this point. It sounds like copy-and-paste from an oldfashioned textbook.

I have register unhappiness with the content of this article and agree with many of the posters. What makes Wikipedia valuable is exactly the fact that it has precise and complete information. It may not be trivial to read, but anyone with a genuine interest in a subject will find it a better starting place than other simplistic sources. Entries on a huge range of subjects are detailed and complete. Wiki will not and should not be a general text book. As a centralized, public, accessible repository of scientific knowledge, it is of immense value to the public the scientist alike. Science advances by continually building on the established body of knowledge. By making that body widely available, we will accelerate scientific progress. There are many other resources for simplified introductory material; we should not sacrifice this valuable resource to make one more.

I looked at the mitochondrian entry. It is clearly written at an “encyclopedia” level that any high school student should be able to understand, and there are links to help with possibly unfamiliar terminology. What it isn’t is dumbed down and larded with misleading metaphors like so much of the material published in “Wired.”

I hear that there is now going to be a special conservative wiki for people who find Wikipedia too “liberal.” Perhaps we need a special Wired-style wiki for people who are too lazy for Wikipedia

I’m mostly self-taught in science, and find the level of the articles excellent. It assumes a reasonable background to get them, yet that background is fairly easily avaialble, and the depth makes for good understanding further on.

I find this article pathetic. “Sorry, you lost me at Continuum?” Why the hell do you need to know anything about fluid mechanics if you don’t even know what the continuum assumption is?

The information on Wiki is actually useful, unlike most of the crap out there.

Reading this article gave me a sense of genuine rage. The author could not be further off base. My thoughts are completely opposite those presented here. I love Wikipedia precisely because it contains genuinely informative articles that use technical language. If I wanted dumbed-down crap I’d watch prime-time TV. Why don’t you do the Net a favor, step back from the keyboard and go sit in front of the TV with all the other fucking mornons.

Your article is the reason why so many Americans can neither spell and why so much high level research is leaving the US: The nagging of spoilt American brats who expect to by catered to for their every whim. Sometimes, you simply have to use that grey matter, blödmann.

I think that this is really not an issue; or, to the point that it is, what each wikipedia article thus needs is an ‘intro level’ and ‘mid level’ and finally ‘exper level’ discussion. *shrug* Solves everyones problem. It’s like good journalism – tell them the basics i nthe first paragraph, and then tell them the details, for those who care.

Might I suggest that the solution in this instance is for these “laypeople” to become *involved* in the process, as proofreaders and editors with a special focus on readability for laymen? A layman is indeed an expert, in the sense that he better understands the needs of his fellow layman peers than do specialists in other areas.

Hello Slashdot readers.

I’ve added a new post responding to many of these comments here: http://epidemix.org/blog/?p=74

-Thomas Goetz

Have you considered getting a basic education? All of those were perfectly understandable to me. Just because TV is dumbed down for increasingly stupid people, thereby making increasingly stupid people, and needing to be dumbed down more for the new generation of yet dumber people, that doesn’t mean the Internet ought to be. Or at least, not wikipedia.

I dont know what the problem is here. I often use wikipedia as a study guide for my sciences courses and have no problem understanding the concepts and appropriate terms that are used. It does not take a scientist to comprehend the material, by a single click of the mouse one can follow a link to explain any number of words and references that is what is so good about wikipedia its ease of use.

These advanced articles require a certain level of understanding but nothing that a current high school senior doesn’t have. To dumb down wikipedia would be a disservice to all those who actually have a use for the atricles. Take some time and read the links and there should be no problem getting valuable use of all the pages.

Dont’t expect to learn anything without a little effort on ur part.

Hmm, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m not surprised that people are already saying “No, it’s not Wikipedia that has a problem by being too complex, it’s you who are too dumb!”

Which of course, is the reason why so many of these articles simply aren’t being fixed. Sorry folks, but while you can argue with the examples, if you can’t find any problem in a person coming to a page and being totally befuddled, I don’t know what to say except clearly we have entirely different goals.

If you have no idea what epigenetics, mitochondria or fluid dynamics, you will not be too likely to search for a description.
And if you do it will be readily understood
You probably have the same problem with a
dictionary where the words are listed alphabetically and not in a common way
whatever that means

No offense, but I’m 15 and those excerpts make perfect sense to me. Besides, like others have said, if you don’t know a term you can click on one of the plethora of links embedded in every Wikipedia article and find out.

And what’s the deal with the font in the comment boxes? I had to blow it up to about 300% just to be able to read what I typed.

I actually find it much BETTER that they have those in-depth articles. Usually, science majors or scientists wil want to look up some information that is more in-depth than they would find conventionally, and believe me, it is irritating when all you find are the layman explainations. Those sites abound; there is no reason that Wikipedia should be dumbed-down. I do’nt know if its a product of my emphasis, but I understood both examples perfectly well. The only time I”ve gotten lost in Wikipedia is when I should; for example, trying to read about General Relativity before I knew tensor mechanics. It would be criminal to have an encyclopedia entry on GR without the proper math and technicality. If it ‘dumbed down’ to the layman, I’d *stop* using Wikipedia.

Please do not recommend dumbing down wikipedia, that is incredibly ignorant. If you dont understand the explanation search for another source to get a different explanation rather than remove the confusing content. You may not understand the wikipedia article for the SN2 reaction in organic chemistry but that doesn’t mean its bad, it means you should probably use more sources when you’re learning something for the first time.

Well, i think that Wikipedia and the articles mentioned do their job well. Odds are that if you’re on Wikipedia searching for Mitochondrial DNA, you already know some of the words assciated with it, like what a mitochondria is in the first place.

The problem is only getting worse. Layman’s explanations have been put into a couple of topics near the top. If you look at the history of those pages, the layman’s explanation becomes more abstruse over time as people insert more technical vocabulary into them.

See Optical Vortex for an example.