It seems to me that any information - in an encyclopedia or anywhere else - on a subtopic must assume knowledge of the parent topic.
Other gripes by the author seemed to be nitpicks about article quality, which are fair but extremely minor.
I had a very similar discussion with someone involved with the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this year and he highlighted math/science as having exactly this issue. Way too many articles seem to be written by people who are far more comfortable and interested in using the equation editor than in providing an intelligible explanation.
The problem isn't universal to be sure. But it is widespread, especially in less popular topics.
Some articles about mathematics like for example that of determinants are noisy for me because of the well-intentioned “educational” parts. In this example I even think they do more harm than good for people who are struggling with the concept.
The first part of the section “Definition” starts with explaining in horribly ununderstandable natural language english a way to compute the determinant of some matrix. That text is unnecessarily confusing and complex. That text also serves as a good example where formal language can be easier to grasp than natural language. Would you explain quicksort in natural language rather than with a formal description?
If mathematics is taught like in that article, no wonder kids find math boring and hard.
Having a plain English lead paragraph that put the article in context is very important, but the leads are often hopeless.
> Quicksort (sometimes called partition-exchange sort) is an efficient sorting algorithm, serving as a systematic method for placing the elements of an array in order. Developed by Tony Hoare in 1959,[1] with his work published in 1961,[2] it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. When implemented well, it can be about two or three times faster than its main competitors, merge sort and heapsort.[3]
Use natural language for what it's good at. Where did this mathematical idea originate? Who introduced it? What was the problem this mathematical idea helped address? How much does it help address that problem (assuming the why and how are beyond the layman, just describe how helpful it was.)
The Quicksort intro by gohrt is a perfect example.
You're not using the natural language to do away with the thorough mathematical explanation, you're giving the lay reader an idea of why the concept is important, why they should care, in the most general sense.
I really wish more articles had a summary for laymen with a more detailed explanation below.
Also, what one reader calls a layman's explanation another calls gobbledygook.
That's one of the reasons for inventing hypertext. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemannian_manifold has a nice introduction paragraph, but it presupposes quite a bit of knowledge. If you want to know more, feel free to click some links to learn more.
And yes, things probably aren't presented in a way that is optimal for _your_ learning, but there is no way to do that for every reader.
I feel there's definitely room to make the Wikipedia description more friendly when it runs for pages and is unreadable from my side.
despite a strong background in science and engineering I can't make much of the considerable majority of mathematics-heavy articles. Many articles as the author no doubt notes define concepts in mathematical symbols which are left undefined, whose meaning is utterly lost on someone without the relevant academic background. For the rest, I find myself lost in a nigh recursive maze of definition upon definition.
Imagine, for example trying to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_matrix with little mathematical background
Okay, the paragraph about projective spaces and degrees of freedom is a bit of mystery to me, but the actual concept seems to be simple enough. Should every article utilizing matrix multiplications to describe linear mappings spend time rephrasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_%28mathematics%29 i.e. a basic linear algebra course?
I wonder to what extent this is just a humanities/sciences divide. I'd bet that scientists reading wikipedia far outside their specialty are less surprised and frustrated by the level of accessibility than are non-scientists. With important exceptions, topics in the humanities generally just have fewer levels of dependency.
(Needless to say, I don't think these levels of dependency imply true intellectual depth...)
If the people who edited the history subsections had the same attitude as the people who edited many of the math and science pages, there would be only an article titled "Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus", which wouldn't use the name "Caligula" anywhere, but somewhere deep within the article would mention that he had the nickname of "little soldier's boot." Because, hey, you need to have the knowledge of the parent topic, and if you don't even know the guys name then why are you even looking up the article?
I'm sure the math and science people would go nuts if the articles for other topics were written in a similarly opaque fashion. But they seem to mistake the clarity others write with as evidence that those topics are inherently simpler.
I would argue that any subtopic that requires more than basic understanding of the parent topic is too specialized for a general knowledge encyclopedia.
If you mean general knowledge in the sense of "knowledge which is generally held," or even "knowledge which is generally accessible," then a general knowledge encyclopedia wouldn't be that useful, by definition, to most people.
Crucially, it would be useless to the people most likely to use an encyclopedia!
A general knowledge encyclopedia should aim to curate knowledge with no discrimination in terms of category. This is what Wikipedia is, and it's really good at it.
I think there is room for improvement in linking topics and subtopics, even potentially in-line within an article. See a word you don't understand? Click the "+" next to it to expand a sentence that fills its place syntactically and semantically!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferenc...
proof of concept of something like what you're describing: http://www.telescopictext.org/text/pFjkqQY9bmfvQ (not the best example, but telescopictext is very cool)