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