The author says, "I have no idea who the article exists for because I'm not sure that person actually exists: someone with enough knowledge to comprehend dense physics formulations that doesn't also already understand the electroweak interaction or that doesn't already have, like, access to a textbook about it."<p>As a point of contrast, I'm sitting next to just such a person - my partner. He grew up in the inner-city and doesn't have a college degree, but has self-taught himself a number of high-level technical and other subjects using Wikipedia as a primary resource. To give him credit, he is very self-motivated and willing to read carefully in order to fully understand a subject.<p>That being said, I doubt he is the only such person. It seems a bit presumptuous of the author to assume that there is no one without high-level academic training who is willing to take the time to understand a technical Wikipedia article.<p>In addition, when the author says (in his comment below), "However, your beautiful and correct definition of A depends on C, which depends on B, which depends on A. So your reader has to understand C in order to grasp A and A in order to grasp C. This pitfall has nothing to do with necessary complexity -- not avoiding it is simply bad didactics", he is almost critiquing the idea of concepts that depend on other concepts. It is very difficult to define something well in isolation from its component topics. For example, when my partner started to read about the RSA algorithm, he had to go back to read about modular arithmetic so as to understand the math behind the algorithm. He then worked out the math on paper to more fully understand it. There is no way to explain how the RSA algorithm works in-depth without referring to prior subjects, and the same is true for many other subjects, including the very subject of the article - elitism. In order to understand the concept of elitism, you need to understand what an elite is and what social class is. It wouldn't make sense to explain elitism without those prerequisites. So the author's article actually ends up disproving his own point.