Talk:Extendable-output function

Non-technical?

@JayBeeEll: The subject of the article is highly technical by nature. It is hard for me to imagine a reader that is not interested in cryptography and still wants to read this article. Dimawik (talk) 00:27, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Dimawik: Lots of people who are interested in cryptography (e.g., students with a generalist CS background half-way through a first cryptography course) won't already be familiar with every single piece of uncontextualized jargon in every corner of the field. A good rule of thumb is to imagine what the typical reader of your article is, and then provide enough context so that a reader one level of specialty lower can understand. --JBL (talk) 17:35, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A good rule of thumb is to imagine what the typical reader of your article is, and then provide enough context so that a reader one level of specialty lower can understand: I wholeheartedly agree, yet think that I did just that in this article. As an example, I would fully expect a reader of an article on a variation of a cryptographic hash function (CHF) to already know what the said function is. One level down is "does not know what a CHF is but is willing to learn". For the latter reader a link to the article about the CHF is provided. In terms of education, this latter person can be a high school student, as this topic is not a genuinely hard subject like Maxwell's equations in physics, the situation here is along the lines "X is Y, but with an additional property Z. Since X is derived from Y, the properties of Y are inherited. Furthermore, if Y is designed using S, making Y into X is simple." etc.

I do not think it is always desirable to avoid using the specialized terminology, as was highlighted by Robert Sheckley with his Answerer. That said, I would be very happy to improve any particular area of text that is hard to understand. Dimawik (talk) 06:56, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Non-technical?