> Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. People who read Wikipedia have different backgrounds, education and opinions. Make your article accessible and understandable for as many readers as possible. Assume readers are reading the article to learn. It is possible that the reader knows nothing about the subject, so the article needs to explain the subject fully.
random example: take a look at the Wikipedia article for "currying". [0] while quite accessible to someone with a math/cs background, this would be pretty much unintelligible to someone who wasn't familiar with the notion of a mathematical function. perhaps it could be rewritten to be even more accessible, but what would be the point of explaining currying to someone who doesn't know about functions and arguments in the first place? brittannica doesn't even cover this topic.
I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help all uses:
- Specialists would more easily be able to refresh their memories of topics they use infrequently before diving into the details.
- People in neighboring specialties can more easily branch out.
- Informed laypeople (e.g. experts in other industries) could more easily find new ideas for cross-pollination into their own field.
As one random example I have recently found application for an algorithm mainly reserved for use in geophysics and cartography to audio signal processing, but learning and applying it took way more research than it really should have.
I like Wikipedia as it is, let's not make it into IdiocracyPedia for the sake of accessibility... if you're not lazy and you're willing to put some focus and time into your research you'll be able to understand quite unfamiliar subjects from Wikipedia, there's nothing blocking you, as opposed to eg. lots of academic articles that may contain un-google-able jargon and unexplained/unmentioned domain specific assumptions.
If you're not convinced, even professional scientists themselves regularly publish and read "review papers" which are pretty much papers doing no research other than summariing and simplifying the current state of the research in their field.
