Helder started a discussion at
[[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#RFC:
_Should_MW_developers_drop_the_rendering_preferences_for_math.3F]].
I followed his link to this present discussion, and there I
followed the instructions on how to post to this list, and I
got an email telling me I am now authorized to post here,
and after that I spent my whole day trying unsuccessfully
to post here.
Helder doesn't seem to have informed this list of the
discussion he started there so that people here could
read that discussion or participate in it, nor did he say
anything that made it particularly feasible for people there
to post here. So just what his purpose was seems hard
to figure out.
The two discussions should not be separate. The issues
in this thread have been talked about frequently since
February 2003 on that wikiproject talk page. Various
views exist, but there is general agreement about the
less-than-perfect nature of existing system.
To me "displayed", as opposed to "inline" TeX looks very
good in Wikipedia articles. "Inline" TeX usually looks
about three or four times as big as the surrounding text,
which looks bufoonish. Simple things like a^b and a_b
are formatted wrong: obviously in both cases the a should
be at the same level as the surrounding text and the b
respectively higher or lower.
Making everyone use mathJax may be the solution, but
mathJax still has bugs. Wikipedia needs more sophisticated
behavior from mathJax than do other forums that use it,
such as stackexchange and mathoverflow.
After all the hours I've devoted to merely figuring out how
to post here, I am in no condition to do better than these
present comments. --- Mike Hardy