Quantum mechanics, cricket, and PR

[RJensen]

"Average" user is a prettty vague term. Does it mean the average person in society? surely we have to narrow it to encyclopedia users.

So the Quantum physics article should be pitched at the average person who specifically asks to read about quantum physics, ignoring the average of people who do NOT want to read about that stuff.

I guess that the average person who clicks on quantum mechanics is an undergraduate taking now (or in a year ir two) a university physics course or related course (in chemistry or material science, say.) 

This came up Monday: my daughter just began an advanced college couse in material science (in an engineering school), and the professor asked how many knew any quantum physics. Only one person said yes.  The others will want to read the CZ article.

[Chris Day]

This came up Monday: my daughter just began an advanced college couse in material science (in an engineering school), and the professor asked how many knew any quantum physics. Only one person said yes.  The others will want to read the CZ article.

Likewise this discussion in now starting on the DNA articles talk page.  What level of knowledge is assumed, what level of independence is assumed? By independence I mean, does every word really need to be defined or can we assume the reader will read up on the terminology as they go along. 

Biology has its own language, I expect non biologists will always struggle through dictionary in hand. So how much help in defining terms should be given?  If every term has to be defined the narrative starts to become very jumpy and every article becomes a primer.  DNA is probably an exception since its general audience is more than assured, but what of an article on oxidative phosphorylation? Should every term really be defined or is it OK to just link to our article on that term for those that have no clue. The "average" reader for oxidative phosphorylation is likely to be a university biology student after all. Right? Or no?

[J. Noel Chiappa]

"Average" user is a prettty vague term. Does it mean the average person in society? surely we have to narrow it to encyclopedia users.

How different are those two groups? I know when we bought a PC back in '95 or so it automatically came with a copy of Encarta, so clearly the expectation then was that every computer user would be an encyclopaedia user. (I have no idea what the situation is now - that was pre-WWW, and people tend to go online for information now.) I forget the numbers, but I think it's now more than 50% of the population in the US, EC, Japan etc who have computers. So I think "encyclopaedia users" covers a pretty major chunk of society.

the Quantum physics article should be pitched at the average person who specifically asks to read about quantum physics

Right, but who is that? Is it 80% people who have to read it (for a course, or something), and only 20% who are just curious, or are the numbers the other way around? I have no idea, actually... And even if it's the first, the 80% might be composed in large part of high-school students or undergrads trying to do a paper in a field that's not their speciality.

We might also look at publishing numbers; how many copies of 'popular science' books on an average technical subject (e.g. QM) sell, versus how many textbooks? I wouldn't at all be suprised to find that the PS books outsell the textbooks, in terms of volume.

This came up Monday: my daughter just began an advanced college couse in material science (in an engineering school), and the professor asked how many knew any quantum physics. Only one person said yes.  The others will want to read the CZ article.

Yeah, but probably the /Advanced one - the one that lost the BBC guy  after the first para. I suspect there are a lot of people like him - read a news story about something, want to find out more background, go to Wikipedia (or here), and get blown out of the water...

Heck, I got lost in the far corners of that original QM article - and I know enough about it to write the intro version!

Noel

[J. Noel Chiappa]

DNA is probably an exception since its general audience is more than assured, but what of an article on oxidative phosphorylation? ... The "average" reader for oxidative phosphorylation is likely to be a university biology student after all.

I would say on that one, you're probably correct in assuming that the topic would only be looked at by someone with special knowledge. (I made the same point in an earlier post, using the example of [[Wieferich primes]], whatever they might be.) And in that article I think you can assume special knowledge on the part of the reader.

(And may I point out that these kind of articles would probably never have made it into a traditional encyclopaedia - either paper, or CD - due to space limitations.)

But for topics that anyone might look at, like quantum mechanics, or DNA, or TCP/IP, I think we probably can't assume that.

Noel

[RJensen]

I with an opening paragraph of 150 words on quantum mechanics that will satisfy the person who has not taken a physics course. The next 3000 words can be pitched at the people who have studied some physics.

[Robert_W_King]

I with an opening paragraph of 150 words on quantum mechanics that will satisfy the person who has not taken a physics course. The next 3000 words can be pitched at the people who have studied some physics.

Word count is irrelevent if the text used is highly sophisticated and complex. 

Does anyone know if there are level or skill classifications for words?  Are there rankings for words like "oxidation"?

Maybe this is an approach we should take?

[J. Noel Chiappa]

I with an opening paragraph of 150 words on quantum mechanics that will satisfy the person who has not taken a physics course.

I was very sorely tempted to create a really snarky reply, suggesting the same be done with, say, the entire history of the Western World, but I will mostly resist.

The current intro section in the QM article, which attempts to sum up fairly briefly what it is, and what its importance is, is about 420 words. If I dropped the simple analogy (which I would argue against, because it gives people something concrete to hang their hat on in an otherwise some ethereal chunk of prose) I could get it down to 330 words. Sure, careful copyediting might get rid of maybe 50-100 words, but past that, you're getting into bone.

Some things just are too major, too important, too complex, to be able to cram even a good intro overview into 150 words (hence the crack about the history of the Western World).

The next 3000 words can be pitched at the people who have studied some physics.

Actually, the next 3000 are to people who want to get a tiny bit of detail on a subject with truly tremendous scope and importance. The next 60K are for people who have studied some physics! :-)

Noel

[Paul Wormer]

Noel, readability is inversely proportional to information density. Compare it to newspapers, those that write for the masses have lots of words and hardly any info in those words. The more intellectual newspapers have maybe the same amount of words, but much more information that is worth remembering. So, if you were to cram the same info in less words you would make your article less readable for the (sic) hoi polloi.

You could also cut down on the amount of info. I would be  against that, because  my belief is that the purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide info to its readers, not to entertain them. (I write here "belief", because I cannot prove that my opinion is  correct; I may well be an old old-fashioned excentric. And, indeed, on this forum I've read many times the opposite opinion from the younger citizens.)

PS The BBC reporter also had some criticism on the cricket article. Rumor has it that this pastime has rules, none of our Commonwealth friends feels challenged to explain those (better)?

[tkjazzer]

i wouldn't worry about these articles in the news too much. 

There is a saying that "any press is good press" and I think it applies here.  We all know that CZ is doing fine.

try to recruit more and we'll do fine.

[J. Noel Chiappa]

try to recruit write more and we'll do fine.

There, fixed it for ya! :-)

Actually, it should be "try to write approve more and we'll do fine", sigh...

Noel

PS:

There is a saying that "any press is good press" and I think it applies here.

If anyone reads his story now, and comes and looks at the quantum mechanics article, they're gonna be really confused, because it's not at all (any more :-) like what he described! :-)