Yep, this is groovy. Maybe somebody wants to get their script and see what
it does with Wikipedia. I shudder (with delight) to think what the result
will look like.
Larry
> Check it, yo:
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EmacsWikiGraph
>
> This is very cool.
>
>
> Ted
>
> --
> Edward O'Connor
> ted(a)bomis.com
This news about Britannica is important. Britannica is becoming a pay site.
We need therefore to get the word out that Wikipedia is a free alternative.
How can you help? In the near future, instead of writing Wikipedia
articles, use your Wikipedia time to post on mailing lists and newsgroups
words to the effect that Britannica might be becoming a pay site, but
Wikipedia is free and always will be--and in the space of a few years, it
will be *bigger* than Britannica. They should be quakin' in their boots.
Anyway, please do help. Post to a few mailing lists and newsgroups--get the
word out. It's important we do this *now*, and that we mention (and link
to) the Britannica story. It will gain us many converts.
Larry
This is relevant for all of us, as it ought to give us extra incentive to
work on Wikipedia (and Nupedia).
You might or might not know that Britannica is at least implying that not
all of its articles, or all the content of all of its articles, are no
longer available for free. The following message is now appended to
Britannica articles:
"Need more? Full Britannica articles are available to subscribers and Free
Trial participants. To view the complete article, register for 14 days FREE.
To learn more about our premium service, click here. Britannica.com
subscribers, please log-in above."
I believe Jimbo said early on, and I believe I agreed, that Britannica
simply couldn't maintain its business model with banner ads--they would
either have to become open content (and therefore have a moral justification
to ask for volunteers) or become a pay service. It seems they've chosen the
latter route, which is great news for Wikipedia.
Larry
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> 2. What should be the nature of the mathematics part of
> Wikipedia? I'm asking this because I see it as more or less
> a replacement (or even better) as things like Eric Weisstein's
> Mathworld or Foldoc. But there the emphasis is on concise
> write-ups with formal definitions...
"Concise" is not as valuable here: we have no space limitations,
so we should take as much space as is necessary to clearly
explain something, give examples, and some background as you
suggest. I also think our audience will be more laymen than
that of something like a textbook: after all, the audience of a
textbook is self-selected math students, while we'll be getting
random search hits, so I think it is important for us to explain
and link to context in every article.
> However, I think that in order to be usable as a mathematical
> dictionary (should it be?) the short formal definition should be
> near the beginning (or >maybe even always *at* the beginning) and
> clearly recognizable as such. So I guess my question is actually
> if there should be some kind of rule on this.
I think most articles will end up this way: define, then describe.
How that's done for each subject will be best determined by experts
in that subject, with feedback from the rest of us.
> 3. A related question is how much redundancy do we want?
> Is "reflexive" going to be explained on every page that uses
> its in its definitions, or do we want one small article that
> defines it and let all the others link to that (as in Mathworld).
> If we do write such an article what should be the title? Should
> it simply be "reflexive" or "reflexive binary relation"? I
> would say the latter because the term "reflexive" has a higher
> chance of having other meanings in other contexts.
Redundancy is not bad per se, but linking to separate articles
makes it easier to give more detail when needed. Titles should be
as clear as necessary--your judgment is as good as anyone's on
that matter. There is lots of discussion about these topics on
Wikipedia already, and some general consensus about several things,
but it would be a bad idea to set up rules to far ahead of time--
we want to see what works first, then edit things based on our
experiences. Once we get the content, that's easy to do.
> 4. What is the current opinion on using HTML 4 special characters?
> I'm using 'mozilla' and it handles them fine. Even text-ased 'lynx'
> tries to represent them with normal characters which results often
> in a quite readable result. And it would of course be really nice
> to have things like subset, and, or, forall, element et cetera.
LOTS of discussion exists here. For a first pass, see "Wiki special
characters". The symbols on that page should work in most browsers
of recent vintage. Mozilla is better than most: IE and NN won't
show you "forall", "subset", and some others. A product like TtH
would be useful, but would shut out Mac owners and possibly others.
Again, use some judgment: if you think you can explain a subject
without needing the special characters, then do so; but if you really
do need them, go ahead--browsers will catch up. If you can get by
with the few extended characters in ISO, then use those directly
instead of HTML entities (such as "not", "times", and "middot").
There's lots of discussion about these topics already in
Wikipedia, and your contibutions there would be helpful.
Hello all,
I should probably not ask this here but put it on the appropriate pages in
Wikipedia, but I prefer personally discussions by mailing-list. (Yes, I
know, very unWikiWiki of me.) So my apologies if my behaviour is
inappropriate.
So here goes:
1. What is the status on the search engine? It is really slow and as far as
I can see at this moment not working at all. It has probably been
already said a zillion times before but I think a good search engine is really
really important critical success factor IMHO. Or are we going to let Google
do all the work?
2. What should be the nature of the mathematics part of Wikipedia? I'm
asking this because I see it as more or less a replacement (or even better)
as things like Eric Weisstein's Mathworld or Foldoc
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/index.html
But there the emphasis is on concise write-ups with formal definitions. But
the scope of Wikipedia is much broader so I would expect there the same
thing but also
* informal introduction of the term,
* more examples and
* something about the history of the term.
However, I think that in order to be usable as a mathematical dictionary
(should it be?) the short formal definition should be near the beginning (or
maybe even always *at* the beginning) and
clearly recognizable as such. So I guess my question is actually if there
should be some kind of rule on this.
3. A related question is how much redundancy do we want? Is "reflexive"
going to be explained on every page that uses its in its definitions, or do
we want one small article that defines it and let all the others link to
that (as in Mathworld). If we do write such an article what should be the
title? Should it simply be "reflexive" or "reflexive binary relation"? I
would say the latter because the term "reflexive" has a higher chance of
having other meanings in other contexts.
4. What is the current opinion on using HTML 4 special characters? I'm using
'mozilla' and it handles them fine. Even text-based 'lynx' tries to
represent them with normal characters which results often in a quite
readable result. And it would of course be really nice to have things like
subset, and, or, forall, element et cetera.
Kind regards,
-- Jan Hidders
I think that's a good idea, but it should either be a preference one
can turn on and off (default on, I think), or an option not taken when
clicking on the name for a search. Otherwise we might have pages we
can't change until we discover them through chance. (e.g. suppose
"CountriesOfTheWorld" redirected to "Countries Of The World," which
redirected to "Countries of the world.")
You Wrote:
>Has this been suggested yet? I don't think it would be too hard to
>implement.
>
>Tim
>
>
>
>[Wikipedia-l]
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Coincidentally, the same week you're off fiddling around in Europe,
I'll be vacationing--in Las Vegas. If you'll still be in town the
29th or 30th, though, I'll treat you to a meal.
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