• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Is Wikigroaning still a thing? I love when articles like List of Minor Naruto Characters are longer and more detailed than something like History of the Caribbean

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      This comment made me want to see for myself. It seems that List of Minor Naruto Characters was merged with List of Naruto Characters at some point, but that article has 28702 words compared to 10686 words for History of the Caribbean, which is less than half as much content.

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The ones about biology are fine, the ones about anything mathematical for fuck sakes I can't understand shit

    • LeninWeave [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, those often aren't really written in an accessible manner. Probably mostly mathematicians writing them.

      • dat_math [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Can confirm. They're mostly writing them as reference material for mathematicians who already understand the concepts.

        • Mardoniush [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          This is deeply annoying, since the intended audience should be "Guy who hasn't solved an integral for 10 years but wants a decent understanding of Metric Tensors."

        • Owl [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Advanced math on Wikipedia is so annoying. Like I just want to know wtf a Hypergolic Vector Space is so I know whether it'll be worth my time to go learn about them, but instead the intro paragraph is a list of ever more abstract kinds of math that it's a subclass of until we hit group theory, and the article body is just a giant list of obscure properties.

          Also, and this is not advanced math at all, the other day I needed the length of a chord in a circle, couldn't be assed to re-derive it myself, and thought this was basic enough that I should be able to just get it from wikipedia. But I was wrong because look how weird and useless the chord properties that make the cut are.

      • gammison [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah I had a class offer extra credit once for writing a summary of quantum key distribution suitable for Wikipedia. Tbh a lot of theoretical math and cs articles aren't particularly good either.

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Probably math students, the presentation style is more similar to someone with an undergrad than a professional. You can check some scholarpedia articles and you'll see there is very often more motivation presented in them, despite those articles being technical literature reviews. Though I've definitely seen a few mathematicians I recognize in the discussion pages (and I think one of my high school physics teachers).

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The content is good, but yeah they could be improved both in terms of readability, but also consistency and presentation. It's really funny to see an article clearly pull from two different books and change notation halfway through.