avoiding forks (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] public service ads in Wikipedia?)

Stephen Forrest stephen.forrest at gmail.com
Wed Feb 16 04:36:53 UTC 2005


On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:03:22 +0100, Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de> wrote:

> http://planetmath.org is far from being "blown away" by Wikipedia (IMVHO)

Agreed.  This is perhaps one situation where article ownership makes a
bit more sense.  (Which is not to say I advocate anything like this
for Wikipedia anywhere.)

Nevertheless,  I find PlanetMath frustrating at times.   A few issues
which are general to these sorts of ownership-oriented encyclopedias:
*Ownership can create long lagtimes between edits
*It's often more tedious to explain to someone what's wrong than to
correct it yourself, plus you have the 'appeal to  a human' factor to
get over.
*If I'm writing an article which covers topic Foo, but I notice it's
been half-covered in another article, what do I do?  I could ask the
owner to remove the stuff about Foo and point at my article, but that
could get personal.

The big area where I think PlanetMath has Wikipedia beat right now is
support for math symbols and text.  (I'm sure this has been expressed
elsewhere.).  The LaTeX support in MediaWiki is highly useful, but it
needs to be more seamless, particularly for inline math.

A sign of this is that writers are constantly resorting regular
textual italics and superscripts/subscripts for inline text because it
looks better than using inline LaTeX.  This is  less than optimal
because the fonts don't match (and this can be a big problem in math).

Finally, a scheme like PlanetMath's classification by AMS grouping,
probably done through the category system, would be nice to have.

Steve



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