Physics on Wikipedia

[mmcirvin]

The physics information on Wikipedia seems excessively divided into two categories:

1. Articles written by interested laypeople, which are quite accessible and usually correct in broad outline, but can also be vague and chatty and have occasional factual and conceptual errors (usually the same ones promulgated all too often in popular and introductory books).
2. Articles written by professionals or advanced students, which are scrupulously correct, crammed with equations and jargon, and almost completely incomprehensible except to people who already know the subject and therefore don't need an encyclopedia article.

Sometimes a single article is divided into sections of type 1 and sections of type 2, which doesn't help much.

Back in the day on Usenet I did a lot of science writing that attempted to fill the gap. I imagined my audience as consisting of clever undergrads or technically-minded nonscientists who'd read a bunch of pop treatments of the subject, noticed that there were some things that were inadequately explained or didn't make sense in them, and had some math training, but weren't ready for a graduate-level treatise. I think there's a shortage of this kind of semi-popular writing, maybe because there is little commercial market for it. But it occurs to me that this is traditionally the stock-in-trade of grand old encyclopedias like the Britannica. Wikipedia seems an obvious home.

I recently did a lot of doctoring on Antiparticle along these lines, but that last section still needs a lot of work.