Hey dude, no need for a defensive stance. Was merely looking for some discussion on wikipedia as a learning tool. Of course it was never meant to serve that purpose...

I have a feeling that every time an article is edited, tits recast into a slightly higher level language. End result being that you have to be an "expert" in a subject to even start to make sense of an article.

Another thing I feel makes wikipedia a bad learning tool can be described by a story like this: I look up a definition, and find a word I am unsure of. No problem, click and read up. Except this definition is in it's entirety made up of high level abstractions. So now I have 10 more defininitions to read. Recurse. It's like dependencies between articles often goes "upward" to a higher level of abstraction. They are seldom "grounded" to basic simple concepts, it seems. As an encyclopedia I suppose this is how it's supposed to be.

I sorely miss some semantic data on prerequesites for articles. With this information in hand, perhaps it could be possible to invert the dependencies, so that things can be explained in terms you already know, not in an everending succession of unknown terms.

Perhaps it could be possible to maintain something like 2 or 3 different versions of articles at differing levels of advancedness?