Why Does Wikipedia Suck on Science?

My boss tells me this post, from my other blog, Epidemix (where I obsess over the margins of public health and medicine), might be of interest here. It's long, so here's a chunk:

Wikipedia is, by all measures, one of the great accomplishments of the Internet Age. I'm willing to say it stands alongside Google, eBay, GoogleMaps, IMDB and Wired.com as among the greatest resources on the Web (ok, that last one is self-serving).

But boy, does it suck when it comes to science topics.

Curious about just what epigenetics is? Figure you really should know what mitochondria do? Don't count on Wikipedia - odds are their analysis is too pedantic for you, as it is for me.

Look at that Epigenetics entry, for instance, which comes up first when you Google the term "epigenetics". Here's the first sentence:

In biology, while the subject of genetics focuses on how organisms can inherit traits by inheriting genes from their parent(s), which encode information for cell function as sequences of DNA, epigenetics is sometimes used to refer to additional methods of biological inheritance that do not directly relate to the inheritance of collections of genes, or soft inheritance.

Huh?

Now I'm sure that's accurate, but it's way too rich for my blood. A better primer can be found at the backgrounder from Johns Hopkins that ranks as the number three hit:

There is far more to genetics than the sequence of building blocks in the DNA molecules that make up our genes and chromosomes. The "more" is known as epigenetics. What is epigenetics? Epigenetics, literally "on" genes, refers to all modifications to genes other than changes in the DNA sequence itself. Epigenetic modifications include addition of molecules, like methyl groups, to the DNA backbone.

That, I get. It's the same on so many other topics.

Now given that there are 1.8 million articles on Wikipedia, there are bound to be dozens - if not thousands - of exceptions. For instance, on the basic science entries - biology, cancer, volcanology - Wikipedians have created useful, thoughtful, and readable dispatches. And sometimes there's been the laudable foresight to add "introduction to" pages, such as those for quantum mechanics and quantum physics. But increasingly, I find myself skipping over a Wikipedia result on Google not because I'm worried about the validity of the information there - I don't share that concern and think it's way overblown - but rather because I'm worried it's just going to be a bunch of formulae I can't parse and jargon I can't unpack.

Read the full post here.