Wikipedia:You're not smart enough to read Wikipedia

For many readers, they never read more than the lead section of the article, not because they are dumb, but because they found that the text is just extremely hard to understand, to the point that only those that already understand the concept would understand the text. For many readers, Wikipedia articles scream: it's not our responsibility to make the text easy to understand for you, its you who is too uneducated to understand the text. Because, for a certain section of our editors, you need to be smart enough to read and edit Wikipedia.

That's why ironically, an encyclopedia where anybody can edit has been called out as being elitist to its readers. That's also the reason why many people have a negative stereotype of Wikipedia editors that's eerily similar to an ivory tower academic: living in a microcosm, writing articles about super niche topics that only they and those that as smart as them can understand.

But doesn't that conflict with what Wikipedia is supposed to be, if our goal is to "every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge"?

You shouldn't need to be especially smart to read a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia should not just be a dry, bland and boring collection of articles. Wikipedia should actively invoke human's innate curiosity, creativeness, and the desire to explore the world. These seemingly 'unencyclopedic' and 'not here to edit the encyclopedia' features may be the one that makes Wikipedia shine. I don't know what these articles are going to look like. But I hope that you would keep this philosophy in mind when you are writing your next article here.