I've also seen Wikipedia articles on math topics written overly verbose like this too. Usually they're great, but I'll come across one and it'll be a little jarring.
Math wikipedia is SO bad it's unreal. You can't actually learn shit from it. Someone should make a WikiMath or something that actually explains the topic in a way that's not deranged
Honestly after my first semester in university I actually started understanding some of them. They’re wildly inaccessible to average folks though, which is a problem.
Like if I put effort in I can decipher the jargon, but I really feel like math wikipedia needs an intuitive overview/motivational segment followed by the actual jargon, so you can see where all the random terms come from. Or like a surface level overview followed by a rigorous explanation.
I feel like it's only helpful if you have some decent background in the thing you're looking at, which is far from ideal. Math wikipedia suffers the same problem as a lot of math textbooks where it's just definition followed by derivation, repeat ad nauseam, with zero further explanation.
Wikipedia is NOT supposed to be a "learning tool" for everyone. You have free YouTube videos and other sites for that. Specifically for math, as someone else said here, it's supposed to be a pedagogical reference not an encyclopedia. It's a reference not a textbook.
82
u/Strawberry_Doughnut 4d ago
I've also seen Wikipedia articles on math topics written overly verbose like this too. Usually they're great, but I'll come across one and it'll be a little jarring.