[WikiEN-l] WP and rivals - mathematics

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Someone was commenting or asking about the level of mathematics coverage.

There is now some real competition from the Springer Online Encyclopedia of Mathematics (EoM), at 

http://eom.springer.de/

This is based on the old Soviet Encyclopedia, with one round of updates (not integrated), plus new articles being added all the time. The individual articles here would typically be more authoritative than enWP. Apart from a few areas where party hacks may have been involved, the articles were written by experts.

Next, MacTutor (The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive), at

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.html

has 6000+ biographies. These have more purely biographical information than WP. I'm not convinced the explanations of what people did are clearer. We tend to get to the point, even at the (gasp) risk of OR in calling old stuff by its contemporary names.

We'd link to either EoM or MacTutor pages routinely.

Others are PlanetMath and MathWorld.

PlanetMath at

http://planetmath.org/

is a GFDL site, and we're on good terms. Their pages have ownership, and are most interested in proofs than WP tends to be. Quite a proportion of their pages have been imported, and there is a project to do that.

MathWorld is an offshoot of Stephen Wolfram, I believe, and Mathematica. It started off listing special functions. Now being exhaustive about the theory of special functions is almost one of those oxymorons (see [[Bateman Manuscript Project]]). I don't think we have much to fear from the comparison, even on that ground. Ir's at 

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/

There are various other online resources. I'd be interested in any other opinions. Actually deWP has stuff that sometimes is worth translating. Perhaps ruWP if one looked. I think enWP has the best WP coverage, though. We do have an appreciable expert population.

Strengths of enWP mathematics:

- Good integration, i.e. works well as a piece of hypertext, with useful category structure, history and biography joined in
- We are good at lashing up articles when news breaks, as did with the E8 story this year (mainstream media reports were useless)
- The story is getting up to date (only 25 years behind the frontier, maybe) which gives some edge still on the EoM in some places

Weaknesses:

- Not enough expository writing
- Level of coverage tough for all but advanced undergrads.

Charles




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