Why are Wikipedia science articles written to be totally useless?

Why are Wikipedia science articles written to be totally useless?

It's extremely easy to write them in a much more clear manner.
Take, for example, this segment of the "Quaternion" article:
>As a set, the quaternions H may be identified with R4, a four-dimensional vector space over the real numbers.

This is how Wikipedia decides to define the quaternion, with the most overcomplicated definition conceivable. To the layman who doesn't know what a quaternion is, it would sound like a quaternion is something so weird they can't even begin to understand the definition of it.
Well guess what layman, they could have just said "A quaternion is a number represented by a four dimensional vector".

And who's likely to be looking up what a quaternion is? People who don't know what quaternions are! Seriously, who goes to Wikipedia to find precise and rigorous definitions of things when that's something it's poor at doing?
Unless you so happen to have a very, very broad range of prerequisite knowledge, a Wikipedia science or maths article will only make sense to someone who already knows what's being explained.

So if any of you are Wikipedia contributors, stop doing this. Sure, it's impressive that you understand what you're writing, but it's totally useless. Maths and science must be taught in both their own terms and English; the former to ensure zero ambiguity, the latter to allow a basic understanding without having to go down a fractal of prerequisite knowledge.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotation
blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?151627-All-About-Quaternion-Rotations
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Cause that's what a quaternion is. Except you didn't post the full definition tard.

Why don't you use the tard version of wikipedia then?

Simple.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia isn't about education. It's about autists being as pretentious as possible.

I don't think you understand what the purpose of Wikipedia is - its not a tool designed for learning, like a textbook or lecture notes or khan academy or something, which would be good places to learn math.

Wikipedia is NOT the place to go to learn about math and science - it's a place to hold the sum of ALL human knowledge.

As stated by wikipedia's founder - "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Offering a simplified description that more people could understand would not improve Wikipedia but make it less effective at its goal.

keep in mind that you can do two things: write your own description if you feel you can improve the article, or go to simple wikipedia, and if there's not a simple wikipedia page, you sound like you have the knowledge on quaternions to make one

The full definition only makes the problem worse.
Nowhere is it simply stated that "A quaternion is a four dimensional number", you have to actually understand all the symbols and terms to understand their roundabout way of saying it. And against standard Wikipedia practice, they don't make the first use of a jargon term on the page into a hyperlink to the article which explains it.

The simplified articles are, ironically, written for only things that didn't need simplifying. Because most of the people who understand the poorly written articles don't have the people skills to simplify them.
Being able to put yourself in other people's frames of mind when creating something is definitely an underrated skill.

Giving every single person on the planet free acess to the sum of all human knowledge is tricky to define. They can access the knowledge on a physical level, but years of relevant schooling is often required to understand a lot of the pages; so they can't access the knowledge on a mental level.
There's a very simple solution to that though, and that's to always start off with a simple explanation of everything. In fact, that's the best way to do it.

When explaining what an atom is, you don't start with explaining how the strong nuclear force holds everything together and quantum mechanics allow an electron to exist as a cloud around the nucleus rather than plunging straight in, only vaguely hinting at what a nucleus is and what it's orbited by.

Instead, you start out by saying that an atom is a cluster of positive protons and neutral neutrons with negative electrons around it. Then, just as the person is thinking "That makes no sense, the things that should repel are sticking together and the things that should attract are staying apart", you explain how it all works in more detail.
That's how it should work, because if for each thing you have to understand several more things until you reach the most basic stuff of maths and science, then for anything advanced you'd have to understand thousands of things. If you don't have to understand the things but instead they just allow you to understand the advanced explanation, then you just have to read the basic explanation to get a basic idea of what the thing is, and you can understand the advanced explanation by reading several basic explanations of other things.

Only then is the knowledge truly free for all to access.

I don't quite have the knowledge on quaternions to make a simplified page by the way. I've never actually worked with them, all I know is that they're definitely four dimensional but also apparently have a 16-dimensional aspect to them.

>As a set, the quaternions H may be identified with R4, a four-dimensional vector space over the real numbers.

This is trivial, if you don't understand this, why are you trying to understand quaternions?

>they could have just said "A quaternion is a number represented by a four dimensional vector".

This is also wrong and possibly misleading. The quaternions have a different structure from traditional numbers and vectors.
For instance, quaternion multiplication is noncommutative. With numbers, multiplication is commutative, and there is no multiplication rule for standard vectors.

However, I don't think you're wrong about wikipedia. I just think you're a fucking idiot. The article on quaternions is VERY idiot-friendly as far as math articles go. Not sure if you just picked a bad example or what.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a math textbook. You're going to find a definition there which will not be tailored to a bunch of numberphile babies. That's how encyclopedias work.

It also bothers me that you're implying that there's always a simple explanation for mathematical things, and that you can just 'jump in' wherever you like.
That's not how mathematics is, you fucking plebian. You need to work your way up from the start, building your mathematical arsenal bit by bit.
If you don't like it, then fuck off, you weren't made for math, and you don't belong on this board.

Wikipedia isn't for learning you mongoloid. You shouldn't be using Wikipedia as your introductory material on any subject. It's perfect for the expert who has forgotten some detail of a topic or needs a quick list of properties of some mathematical object. Pick up a fucking book.

if you don't know what a vector space or R4 is, then you really don't need to know what a quaternion is, and you should stop trying to skim wiki pages to seem smart

fucking brainlet

>i dont know what quaternions are
>but the article is definitely wrong!
gee who would have known?

>much more clearer
El ohh el!

>don't know something
>look it up on wikipedia
>it seems to be the more impenetrable, difficult topic that I clearly don't have the intelligence to understand
>read a book about it
>turns out the topic wasn't all that difficult

Of course you morons just want to whine about quaternions specifically.

I picked quaternions as an example because someone else complained about the article to me.
Also, vector multiplication is noncommutative, so what's the problem with saying that quaternions are four dimensional vectors?

By the way, while I agree that maths puts more emphasis on having to work your way up from the start, it's not necessarily required. For example, you don't have to know the fundamental theorem of calculus to differentiate and integrate. Honestly, I think it'd be better to teach differentiation and integration first and then teach the fundamental theorem of calculus.

Quaternions have applications outside of math that don't actually require you to know any of the math to do with quaternions.
I, for one, would like to understand them for graphics rendering and 3D modelling.
This knowledge doesn't exist so you can make it as hard as possible to understand then be pretentious about it, the world isn't so R1 as you might think.

I don't think you're understanding him, you fucking retard. Two sentences may contain the same amount of information while one is more understandable than the other. Wikipedia chooses the less understandable way of writing.

If you can write it in a more readable way, then do it. Wikipedia is editable.

The kind of people who write Wikipedia articles on quaternions may not be the most succinct or straightforward people

While that seems to be the case, it does seem rather backwards in comparison to the rest of Wikipedia.
For example, with anything historical or political, Wikipedia would provide a very clear overview but you'd have to use external sources for finer details. And it's a much better system, since it makes sense that the most immediately obvious source of information will also be the most immediately obvious to understand, then the huge amount of detail not given by the Wikipedia article will be covered by the books that the reader will now know how correctly select since they have a basic understanding of the topic.

Working backwards by having to select a good basic book out of countless others is pretty awful. If you've got a basic explanation of something on Wikipedia, there'll be nothing clearly wrong with the explanation, but if you've got a single author giving a basic introduction to an advanced topic, they'll forget what the reader does and doesn't know, so the reader has to try out far too many books until they find one where he author actually has basic teaching skills.

>the quaternions may be identified with R4
This is the least complex sentence imaginable that is still accurate. In fact, it's just incredibly simple in general. Mathematical articles need to use mathematical terms.

While accuracy is good, it's better to have a clearer explanation that sacrifices accuracy and then having further elaboration that gives the information that an expert would want.

Say that you're trying to learn topic A, but to understand it you need to understand topic B1 and B2, and to understand topic B1 you need to understand C11 and C12, and to understand topic B2 you need to understand C21 and C22, then to understand C11 you need to understand D111 and D112, etc.

That's how mathematical explanations often work (Though eventually they taper off again as they turn out to be complex abstractions of simple maths), and it's great for experts but useless to anyone else.
The great thing about mixing accurate mathematical explanations and slightly inaccurate English explanations is that the amount of time it takes to get the prerequisite knowledge for the English explanation is extremely short, literally minutes versus years in some cases; but no harm is done to the expert, their impenetrable maths is still there.

Using only words and concepts that the reader already knows is the best way to go; in fact, getting accurate as possible explanations out of inherent as possible knowledge is what I'd define as teaching skill.
One could, with enough teaching skill, teach a caveman how the sun glows through nuclear fusion given a moderate amount of time, some patience on their part and knowledge of their tongue.

If you knew anything about graphics rendering and 3D modeling you would know what R4 and vector spaces are.

But you clearly don't. You just think they're cool or something idiotic like that.

wikipedia hasn't been "for the laymen" for at least ten years

wikipedia is an enormous circlejerk platform for people trying to show off how advanced their knowledge is, and it has been for a long time

...

So one might as well explain to the problem to the pretentious types at the heart of it.
They often have everyone's best interests at heart, even if they don't actually understand the bigger picture of what they're doing.

>go down a fractal of prerequisite knowledge

You should try it sometime, it's really fun.

Oh sure, and then I'll walk around the outside of a Mandelbrot and be home before dinner.
It just isn't fun if it's pure-jargon explanations all the way down.

>You: I don't know anything about quaternions but I dislike this explanation
>Me: You don't need to learn about them if you don't have the prereqs
>You: I totally do! I LOVE design and 3d and and...
>Me: If you did you would have learned basic linear algebra
>You: BAIT! BAIT!

ultimately you're a fucking moron, but anyone who read your first post already noticed that

The most complicated maths I've had to use for 3D is trigonometry, and I use the box-modelling style which is the most mathematically intensive.

linear algebra is absolutely crucial
the reason you don't think so and think trigonometry is "mathematically intensive" is because you're in high school

Don't be so desperate to flame.
What I was saying was a roundabout way of saying that nothing in 3D modelling is mathematically intensive, let alone requiring linear algebra.

>As a set, the quaternions H may be identified with R4, a four-dimensional vector space over the real numbers.
there is literally no way to simplify this or use smaller words

The first definition is more clear, in your definition each vector value could be a complex number. And normies wouldn't even understand your definition anyway

>vector multiplication is noncommutative
this isn't necessarily true, vector spaces don't come with a rule for multiplying two vectors
the quaternions have additional structure which introduces a vector multiplication operator that just happens to be noncommutative
it is true that the quaternions form a vector space under addition, but usually when we speak of "the quaternions" we talk about the division algebra they form

>I, for one, would like to understand them for graphics rendering and 3D modelling.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotation

The point of an encyclopedia is to be used as a reference not to teach you fucking retards.

Why else do you think "you just read the wiki article" is an insult? Stop using tools inappropriately, even your 5 year old sister can match shapes correctly.

That article makes the normal article on quaternions seem simple and easy to understand.
Speaking of which, I found a problem in the quaternions article in that it gives a very clear algebraic explanation for why ij = k, but not why ji = -k.

But for the purpose of 3D modelling, an explanation like blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?151627-All-About-Quaternion-Rotations is all that is necessary.

I'm not even the guy you're replying to, but the post in your link makes far less sense to me than the wikipedia articles. It's just a bunch of hand-wavey bullshit.

>quaternions H may be identified with R4
>Wikipedia decides to define the quaternion
This is not a definition, retard
this is a description
Lrn2fckn-read

It's at the top of the section labeled definition.

I've got to say, one of the best feelings ever was clawing my way through university and then finally being able to go to most wiki pages on mathematics and understand them on some level.

>hey guise these wikipedia articles are useless
>lol retard they're not supposed to be useful, lel

>It's about autists being as pretentious as possible.
By "awarding" each other barnstars. It makes perfect sense. To wikipedians.

they are useful but not for the purpose you want them for

if you think they should be dumbed down, to what extent? a college freshman level? A high school level?

I find Wikipedia articles perfectly useful. Have you considered that you're not using it for it's intended purpose? A saw would be useless in hanging up a picture.

The article doesn't matter. It is the citations that matter. Find the info, go straight to the citation and its website or book. Find out if the citation is just copy-paste from another website or group of websites that circle jerk each other to push an agenda. Once you prove or disprove the citation as legit you can then learn.

Also, you are an idiot. You must have the proper terminology for something so you can look it up. Those poor souls who don't know what x term is and don't look it up, don't know anything and don't care to know anything.

You're better off going to encyclopedia dramatica.

>The square is the n=2 case of the families of n-hypercubes and n-orthoplexes.

>Wikipedia is editable.
Except when your edits go against the community's dogma. Then they censor the truth and remove your edits.

I dunno. I'm just trolling.