Difference between revisions from 2010/10/24 01:00 and 2010/10/18 16:02.! Problem
Communicating requires picking the audience. Too basic and you bore the advanced. Too hard and you lose everyone else. Bridging the gap is a mystery.
! Solution(s)?
I guess you need to explain it first at the basic level, then move on with that as a foundation. If you have a chain of those explanations, you can give advanced users a path to bypass the "easy" sections. This requires ensuring there is nothing essential in the skippable parts. (I have seen some books do this, saying, "If you are already familiar with X, feel free to skip chapters 2--5.")
! Examples
As much as I like Wikipedia, I find that when a page is about a technical topic, they tend to get very terse and require a huge amount of background knowledge. Here are examples of explanations that take you from basic to intermediate in an efficient way:
[Irregular Webcomic|http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/special/educational.html]:
* [Fourier Transforms|http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1640.html] - vs [Wikipedia's version|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform]
* [Cantor's diagonal argument|http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2292.html] - Compare against [Wikipedia's version|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument]
* [Cantor's diagonal argument|http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2292.html] - vs [Wikipedia's version|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument]
* [Maxwell's Equations|http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1420.html] - vs [Wikipedia's version|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations]
Feynman:
* [Light Detection|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4] - Amazing, as always.
! Fixipedia
Wikipedia has a project called the "Simple English Wikipedia". It is for people who do not speak English well. If a "Simple" page exists, you can get to it either by changing the Language on the left bar:
[http://panoptic.com/rking/file/up/simple-wikipedia.png]
Otherwise you can manually change the "en" in "en.wikipedia.org" to "simple". (Notice that the "Simple English" entry may be nestled between the Cyrillic sounds for "R" and "S". Ha!)
My idea is to take the difficult pages and make sure they have a clean explanation on the "simple" side. If there isn't already one, I'll do the work to figure out the topic and then boil it down on the simple page.
Here is my list of pages that need help:
* [p-n junction|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-n_junction] - [simple|http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-n_junction]
* ...hundreds more.
Here are some that are already good:
* [Differential equation|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_equation] - [simple|http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_equation]
* ...?s more
If you join me on this project please let me know.