User:Thorncrag/General audience
Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, and thus it should be written for a general audience—that is, intended for a non-specific audience and which should appeal to the widest demographic possible. Some guidelines exist which codify this objective, but it seems to go largely without emphasis that articles in Wikipedia should meet this standard.
This standard should go beyond just the inclusion of "jargon" or technical language on articles: at least a basic (but complete) understanding of a subject must be discernible by a general audience. This means that any article that does not meet this standard should be improved or possibly deleted.
From the beginning
The editing cycle begins with the creation of an article. The creation stage is arguably the most scrutinized stage of an article's editing cycle—as it should be. Therefore this guideline is most important at an article's creation stage. Any article not meeting this standard should be deleted for one simple reason: if the article's creator does not or cannot complete the article, then it becomes exponentially less likely that the article will ever be considered suitable for inclusion since the general audience is not likely to be able to discern the article's subject. Moreover, articles in such a terse state offer no intrinsic value to the encyclopedia and only serve as potential target for Wikipedia skeptics to impugne Wikipedia's credibility.
Relation to A1
"GA" differs distinctly from the speedy deletion criteria of A1 which does not apply. A1 serves as a rationale to delete articles that "lack sufficient context" whereas GA articles have sufficient context, but would only be discernible by those few who are familiar with the article's subject.
See also