Here is my attempt at a historical explanation for the way things are at the moment.
First, mathematicians in general are often reluctant to say things that are mostly right but formally incorrect. It's part of the culture of the field, which was reinforced by a certain writing style that became popular in advanced mathematics in the later 20th century. Second, for a few years there was a lot of pressure on Wikipedia to tighten up the referencing on math articles. Writing techniques that were commonly accepted in the early days, like inventing examples or making up informal analogies, were suddenly deemed "original research". Edits like this [1] are not rare today, where someone thought that a section that seemed easy and informal must actually be OR. Fortunately the examples in that section are actually covered in many textbooks, so I could just add a citation. But if the example was written just for Wikipedia, it would be very hard to maintain if someone seriously challenged its inclusion. The current state of many math articles reflects a combination of these trends. When we were asked (not always nicely) to make math articles stick to the sources, which are usually written in a dry, technical way, math editors mostly agreed. After all, we can read the sources, so we can read articles that resemble them. Recently, there has been talk of making articles more accessible. But many of the tools that we would use in other writing aren't available. * We can't just leave out the technical bits, like most popularizations do. * We can't invent examples and explain them in detail, because of the original research policy and because Wikipedia isn't a textbook. * We can't freely use analogies and informal explanations, for the same reasons (see [1] again). Many math editors care about accessibility, of course. But the confines that we are asked to write in are very tight, which makes it a particular challenge. - Carl 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kleene%27s_recursion_theorem&diff=413952471&oldid=413931670 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l