And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.
I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound regurgitations of various textbooks.
> you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point
This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated encyclopaedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leaf&type=revision&diff=742673936&oldid=741796479
Your phrasing would be better were Wikipedia not a hyperlinked encyclopedia. Because Wikipedia is a hyperlinked encyclopedia, it's perfectly acceptable and even preferable to use stilted phrasing when it benefits the concise exposition of related concepts.
Archaic legal writing relied heavily on terms of art. Terms of art, IMHO, provided many benefits, including 1) concision, 2) consistency, and 3) signaling. Concision because terms of art are a way to reference more complex concepts that you don't need to spell out. Consistency because widespread use of terms of art meant that there was only one way to say something; if you used other phrasing it was presumed you meant something different than what was meant by a related term of art. And signaling because using a term of art made it clear and obvious you were referring to some concrete legal concept, even if the reader wasn't familiar with it.
Notably the shift to "plain language" legal writing did not in the least change expectations in the legal community regarding the consistency and signaling aspects of legal language. Today, instead of using terms of art, lawyers literally copy+paste whole blocks of long-winded clauses.
IMO, all three of those aspects--concision, consistency, and signaling--should likewise be emphasized in an encyclopedic text, _especially_ in the context of hyperlinked text.
Different contexts require using language differently. You wouldn't criticize a musician for using a different style of prose, right? It's not just the medium that dictates how we phrase things, but the context and function of the communication.
In my experience, the scientific press usually does not know what they are talking about, and relying on them for enlightenment or information is dangerous.
You are absolutely right, because writing quality original work takes effort, and writing quality original maths work takes 100x more effort.
> This is kind of a cop-out
Call it whatever you want, but the fact remains that some subjects are more complex than others. Complex matters take more effort to write about, and there's fewer people qualified to write about them. When these two factors come together, you see regurgitated stuff. If you think that everything is equally simple if you explain it the right way, you're sorely mistaken about the nature of reality.
All this reminds me that I shouldn't be spending my own effort on HN :D
However, I must disagree with your claim that the scientific press will do better. As part of their coverage of the physiology prize they made up a new term "cell recycling" that will waste the readers time when they try to look up what it is about. As long as they are technically correct, the math wikipedia pages are at most useless.
When you open a Wikipedia article about a complex subject, it's expected that you're going to do a lot of background reading.
The problem is that you start surfing Wikipedia with a BFS/DFS approach, when it would be a lot more efficient if the articles were organized more systematically to lead to a gradual understanding of the subject.