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