Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible

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For further details, see Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles.
For general accessibility issues, see Wikipedia:Accessibility.
✔ This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should follow it, except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article. Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus.
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Articles in Wikipedia should be accessible to the widest possible audience. For most articles, this means accessible to a general audience.

Every reasonable attempt should be made to ensure that material is presented in the most widely accessible manner possible. If an article is written in a highly technical manner, but the material permits a more accessible explanation, then editors are strongly encouraged to rewrite it.

Depending on the topic and the amount of interest in it, it may be appropriate to write a separate "Introduction to..." article.

Contents

[edit] Ideas for enhanced accessibility

Consider the types of readers that may encounter a technical article:

  • People who will simply not understand the concept. Hopefully this is a limited group — elementary school students, for example. All that can be done here is to make clear what prerequisites they will have to master before they can understand it: "In the field of quantum mechanics..."
  • The general public, with no technical background. Some technical subjects are important to public policy questions (like genetic engineering) or a common subject of curiosity (like quantum mechanics). A special effort should be made to explain these topics. For other highly technical topics, it should be clearly established what field of study the concept belongs to, and if it has any practical applications.
  • People who have taken science, math, and engineering courses in college, and scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from different fields or different specialties. This type of reader might be trying to learn the subject matter in detail for teaching or for their own research needs, or they might just need a general or shorthand explanation (to satisfy their personal curiosity, to give detail supporting some other concept they are more interested in, or to orient themselves to the general area). They may be lacking some prerequisite knowledge, in which case they will only read "prerequisite" articles if they have a serious interest. Or, they may already be familiar with the field or supporting fields, and just need to be filled in on this particular concept.
  • People already familiar with the subject looking up details for reference. We want them to easily find the details they are looking for. A good table of contents (and thus appropriately constructed section headers) can help a lot.

Enhancements made for the benefit of lay or semi-expert readers can also benefit more knowledgable readers by providing additional context, providing helpful analogies to use in thinking and communicating about the concept, by providing visual aids, and in making the prose clearer. Even experts sometimes benefit from new ways of viewing a subject.

Here are some more ideas for dealing with moderately or highly technical subjects:

  • Put the most accessible parts of the article up front. It's perfectly fine for later sections to be highly technical, if necessary. Those who are not interested in details will simply stop reading at some point, which is why the material they are interested in needs to come first. Linked sections of the article should ideally start out at about the same technical level, so that if the first, accessible paragraph of an article links to a section in the middle of the article, the linked section should also start out accessible.
  • Add a concrete example. Many technical articles are inaccessible (and more confusing even to expert readers) only because they are abstract. Examples might exist in other language wikis, such as German/Italian wikipedias, which have statistical examples. Use Google, Yahoo! or Systran translation, etc. to help convert.
  • Explain formulae. Not everyone thinks in mathematical symbols, or always remembers what they stand for. Giving an English gloss for the "meaning" of a formula helps formulaic readers to confirm their interpretation, and allows others to follow along. Readers often request to define symbols used, at least at the end of a section or table.
  • Add a picture. Many people learn better, and many technical concepts are communicated better, through visual depictions, rather than words or symbols. Diagrams should be related to symbolic or verbal descriptions where appropriate.
  • Use jargon and acronyms judiciously. In addition to explaining jargon and expanding acronyms at first use, you might consider using them sparingly thereafter, or not at all. Especially if there are many new terms being introduced all at once, substituting a more familiar English word might help reduce confusion (as long as accuracy is not sacrificed).
  • Eliminate passive sentences. This article uses active sentences.
  • Eliminate long strings of adjectives, particularly technical adjectives.
  • Use more verbs to improve readability — you can replace many technical adjectives with verbs.
  • Use language similar to what you would use in a conversation. Many people use more technical language when writing articles and speaking at conferences, but try to use more understandable prose in conversation. [1]
  • Use analogies to describe a subject in everyday terms. The best analogies can make all the difference between incomprehension and full understanding. As an example, the Brownian motion article contains a singularly useful entry entitled Intuitive Metaphor:
Consider a large balloon of 10 meters in diameter. Imagine this large balloon in a football stadium or any widely crowded area. The balloon is so large that it lies on top of many members of the crowd. Because they are excited, these fans hit the balloon at different times and in different directions with the motions being completely random. In the end, the balloon is pushed in random directions, so it should not move on average. Consider now the force exerted at a certain time. We might have 20 supporters pushing right, and 21 other supporters pushing left, where each supporter is exerting equivalent amounts of force. In this case, the forces exerted from the left side and the right side are imbalanced in favor of the left side; the balloon will move slightly to the left. This imbalance exists at all times, and it causes random motion. If we look at this situation from above, so that we cannot see the supporters, we see the large balloon as a small object animated by erratic movement.
Now return to Brown’s pollen particle swimming randomly in water. A water molecule is about 1 nm, where the pollen particle is roughly 1 µm in diameter, 1000 times larger than a water molecule. So, the pollen particle can be considered as a very large balloon constantly being pushed by water molecules. The Brownian motion of particles in a liquid is due to the instantaneous imbalance in the force exerted by the small liquid molecules on the particle.
  • Do not "dumb-down" the article in order to make it more accessible. Accessibility is intended to be an improvement to the article for the benefit of the less-knowledgeable readers (who may be the largest audience), without reducing the value to more technical readers.

[edit] Articles that are too technical

Various templates are available for labelling articles that do not meet agreed standards of accessibility.

For articles that are not sufficiently accessible, the {{technical}} template should be inserted at the top of the corresponding discussion page. You should put an explanation on the talk page with comments on why you believe it is too technical, or suggestions for improvement. Templates added without explanation are likely to be either ignored or removed. Articles containing this template can be found in Category:Wikipedia articles that are too technical.

To add an article to Category:Pages needing expert attention as well, the {{technical (expert)}} template may be used instead.

This tag should ONLY be used on articles which you honestly feel could be improved by someone following the guidelines listed above.

[edit] Articles that are unavoidably technical

For highly specialised topics where it is simply not possible to even give an overview in terms with which a general audience will be familiar, it may be reasonable to assume certain background knowledge. For example, many topics in advanced mathematics fall into this category.

However, the technical discussion should be preceded by a discussion aimed at a more general audience, which attempts at least to put the topic in some broader context.

There should be at least a sentence above the ToC to give the lay reader some idea of the place the subject holds in mathematics, what (if anything) it is good for, and what you will have to learn in order to understand the article (and perhaps the names and addresses of several organizations and psychiatrists that will help you rehabilitate yourself afterwards.)

For example, an article on the chronosynclastic infundibulum might begin like this:

Chronosynclastic infundibula are interesting locations in space-time, studied primarily by people known as quantum infundibulists, who are specialists in the mathematics of infinite probability. They are useful because they are locations in which everyone is right all of the time, even when your mother-in-law is visiting. In order to understand them, you must read the entire collected works of Kurt Vonnegut.

(An otherwise-unencyclopedic comment is used above to make sure that the subject itself is clear, but get the point across that it is not possible for ordinary mortals to actually understand how it works).

Then, after the table of contents, you can get into the messy technical details.

[edit] "Introduction to..." articles

See also: Wikipedia:Many things to many people

For topics which are unavoidably technical but, at the same time, of significant interest to non-technical readers, the best solution may be a separate introductory article. An example is Introduction to special relativity. A complete list of current "Introduction to..." articles can be found in Category:Introductions, while a list of main articles thus supplemented is Category:Articles with separate introductions. However, in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia's guideline on content forking, the number of separate introductory articles should be kept to a minimum. Before you start one, ask yourself

  • Following the advice given in the preceding sections, can the article be made sufficiently accessible as a whole, without the need for a separate introduction?
  • Given the degree of general interest in the topic at hand, might a well-written lead be sufficient?

You should start an "Introduction to..." article only if the answer to these questions is "no".

[edit] See also

[edit] External links