Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Writing better articles/Establish context (section)

== Stating the basics ==
''Move to [[Wikipedia talk:Establish context]]''

This is mentioned elsewhere, but I think it's worth reminding the collectivity of it: ''remember to state the obvious'' -- or rather, remember that that is obvious to ''you'' is not so to the average reader. I had to add this to the start of the new article on the [[Ford Thunderbird]]: ''The Ford Thunderbird is a car manufactured in the USA by the Ford Motor Company. '' -- the authors did not stop to suppose that the reader does not necessarily know it's a car. This ties in with [[news style]] and the 5Ws. -- [[User:Tarquin|Tarquin]] 17:23, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:Ah, that one was mine.  One forgets, also, that a reader might not have arrived from a related page and therefore have context.  The word 'car' DID appear a sentence or two later, though, so it's not that it was never mentioned, just not probably as soon as it might have.  What I did utterly forget to mention was this was a vehicle by Ford USA; as a transplanted Brit myself, you'd think I would know better than being so americentric, but clearly not!   That's why second pairs of eyes help, to catch the first author's assumptions. -- [[User:Morven|Morven]] 06:26, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:Agreed. Pretend an alien anthropologist from Alpha Centauri somehow understands English, and is reading Wikipedia to learn about humans. You can't assume anything. -- [[User:Wapcaplet|Wapcaplet]] 19:37, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::I agree with Tarquin, I am not sure whether you do, it may be irony. - [[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 20:43, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:::Irony? I think the word you want is sarcasm. And no, it's not :-) -- [[User:Wapcaplet|Wapcaplet]] 00:19, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::::Okay, we agree then that stating the basics is good (some people disagree and object against sentences like "A female child is called a girl, a male a boy." and "Sleeping is typically done lying in a bed"). - [[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 06:56, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:::::There is a difference between including the necessary basic information as suggested by [[User:Tarquin|Tarquin]] and treating your reader like a '''moron'''. Everyone knows that one sleeps in a bed; not everyone knows what a Thunderbird is. -- [[User:Viajero|Viajero]] 09:36, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::::::The alien anthropologist from Alpha Centauri does not. - [[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 09:41, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:::::::Of course he does! He understands English. He couldn't have learned it without acquiring a certain amount of basic information, like what a bed is for. -- [[User:Viajero|Viajero]] 10:03, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::::::::He may know what it is (seen it, felt the soft surface), but not what it is used for. - [[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 10:16, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I think a better rule of thumb than imagining your audience is from Alpha Centauri may be to imagine that our civilization is destroyed utterly, and our descendants are fortunate enough to uncover an operational Wikipedia while digging through the ruins.  We have so much trouble learning about the basic details of ancient civilizations because their writers generally failed to state the obvious... let us not make the same mistake.  --[[User:Skyfaller|Nelson]] 13:28, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:This scenario is just as ludicruous as the previous. How do we know, for example, what the ancient Greeks ''really''wrote about since virtually all their manuscripts were filtered by medieval monks? And a lone server running Wikipedia under the ruins of our civilization??? Get real! How about writing for an audience of people with high-school educations? That would imply an assumption of basic knowledge of common things, such as what a bed is for and why people go the beach, and behoove us to write about matters of depth and complexity, ie the arts and sciences, and current affairs. -- [[User:Viajero|Viajero]] 17:50, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::You can't assume that people know "''why people go the beach''". I agree the bed thing is stupid though. [[User:Angela|Angela]]

:::We can still write about matters of depth and complexity, while still defining obvious things. Viajero, I think the operational Wikipedia server buried under the ruins (and the anthropologist from Alpha Centauri) are merely thought experiments. They should not be taken seriously :-) But consider what we are writing here: a record of human knowledge. If these are things that "everyone knows", then it makes sense (to me) that they be included in such a record. I've created [[Wikipedia:State the obvious]] in order to expand this idea a bit. Feel free to [[Wikipedia talk:State the obvious|comment]]. -- [[User:Wapcaplet|Wapcaplet]] 19:22, 24 Aug 2003 (UTC)

::::[[User:Wapcaplet|Wapcaplet]], basically I agree with your ideas. In the course of editing articles I've added quite a bit of informtion particularly to the opening paragraphs, defining the context, which, I agree, is vital. It is amazing how US-centric some of the pieces are! As such, I am all for stating the basics, defining the context, and so on, but always with a distinction between basic information and '''mundane''' details. I don't quite know how to define this distinction, only I know it when I see it. A certain user here has a propensity for filling articles with mountains of trivial information which make articles read like ''easy-readers''. What is important? Historial/biographical/technical/statistical information of course, but also some sense of ''why'' something is important. For me, this doesn't include explaining, for example, that a towel is used to dry oneself. That's what you learn at home or at school as a kid; that's not what you turn as an adult (young or old) to an enclyclopedia to learn about. The idea that ''all'' knowledge belongs in an encyclopedia is a mistaken one; a good editor makes reasoned choices, I think, between basic, vital, and trivial information. -- [[User:Viajero|Viajero]] 18:59, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC)

:I have used wikipedia to learn a lot about maths, programming concepts and internet memes. I add my support for the following statement completely
<blockquote>
:Agreed. Pretend an alien anthropologist from Alpha Centauri somehow understands English, and is reading Wikipedia to learn about humans. You can't assume anything. -- [[User:Wapcaplet|Wapcaplet]] 19:37, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
</blockquote>
Some of the mathematical articles went "straight in", and lost me in the flavour paragraph.

I have noticed that wikipedia has an unofficial style: the first paragraph and userbox are where you learn wat is going on, and below this we have the main article. This makes the article accessible to everyone without "dumbing down" on the article. --[[User:Gigitrix|Gigitrix]] ([[User talk:Gigitrix|talk]]) 18:29, 16 January 2008 (UTC)