Simon suggests some sort of integration between plantemath.org and Nupedia/Wikipedia.
All three projects are GFDL'd, so collaboration is easy (planetmath requires no invariant sections). No work is ever lost. I don't see a need for tight integration, and as Simon pointed out, the projects differ in several respects. Whatever good content they produce at planetmath we will use; whatever good content we produced at wikipedia they can use. Everybody wins it seems.
Planetmath has however vastly superior math typesetting support since they integrate LaTeX. I am pretty sure that eventually a feature like that will be available on Wikipedia as well: you type $$ \sum_{i=1}^n i^2 $$ into a wiki article and TeX will convert the formula behind the scenes into a graphic to be included in the page. That would also be useful for chemical structure formulas and drawings. Such a system, called mathwiki, is running at http://www.mathcircle.org/cgi-bin/mathwiki.pl. The code is based on Cunningham's wiki.
Axel
Hey, we support TeX and LaTeX now, too! Ted O'Connor figured this out on his own, without any support or oversight from me. It just magically appeared a couple of days ago.
Axel Boldt wrote:
Planetmath has however vastly superior math typesetting support since they integrate LaTeX. I am pretty sure that eventually a feature like that will be available on Wikipedia as well: you type $$ \sum_{i=1}^n i^2 $$ into a wiki article and TeX will convert the formula behind the scenes into a graphic to be included in the page. That would also be useful for chemical structure formulas and drawings. Such a system, called mathwiki, is running at http://www.mathcircle.org/cgi-bin/mathwiki.pl. The code is based on Cunningham's wiki.
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_Announcements
For now, you have to wait for Ted to make your image for you, but someday we will surely find a way to automate this. One problem is that TeX is not just a typesetting thing, but a programming language, so blindly letting the webserver interpret it is very dangerous.
I'm sure Ted will look at the mathwiki cite and see how they do it. Maybe their code is GPL and we can use it.
Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
For now, you have to wait for Ted to make your image for you, but someday we will surely find a way to automate this. One problem is that TeX is not just a typesetting thing, but a programming language, so blindly letting the webserver interpret it is very dangerous.
I'd do it through a whitelist. From the top of my head:
[a-z0-9_^~{}] are always ok \ is ok if followed by a known command: sum, over, etc.
Building a list of 50 commands that worked for 90 % of all useful (to Wikipedia) math code should not be hard. One can always add commands later, should they be needed.
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org