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For me it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics I'm an engineer by schooling but I've worked as a quant for the

For me it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics I'm an engineer by schooling but I've worked as a quant for the past 10 years. This means that I know a whole lot of "applied" math but will get tripped up by the formal terminology used. This usually means I google a term and end up on wikipedia, where learning that term leads me to realized I need to look up the formal definition of another term, rinse and repeat. As an example from my browser history, I was just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics for fun which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean which lead to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrarily_large https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrarily_large

agumonkey 10y ago
Remember, they all lead to philosophy.
- thrill 10y ago
  Which eventually leads here: https://goo.gl/PhVfQd https://goo.gl/PhVfQd
jerf 10y ago
An idea that I will never implement is to create a mathematics wiki site structured as a "lattice", meaning that all links within a given explanation can only point "down", for suitable definitions of down. It's frustrating to try to learn anything from Wikipedia because it'll freely jump up to post-graduate math on any topic without warning. Despite it being suboptimal from a pure math perspective, I figured "down" would likely end up being "a topic covered earlier in the standard mathematics curriculum"; any other attempt to be clever I came up with always backfired for the "able to learn math from this resource" goal. The second paragraph of the Wikipedia page on integers, about as simple a "math" page as I can imagine, as I write this, brings in "subset" and "countably infinite", and the third paragraph just goes off the rails if you're trying to use this to learn about the integers: "The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes called rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, the (rational) integers are the algebraic integers that are also rational numbers." I know enough of the relevant maths to actually perfectly understand that. I also remember enough about when I didn't understand the relevant maths to remember what it felt like to read stuff like that. My point here is not that it's a "bad page", just that it is very hard to learn anything that way.
- joefkelley 10y ago
  This is exactly it. You want a directed tree for learning, whereas wikipedia is an undirected graph. Mathematics suffers the most since its tree is unusually deep, not wide.
percept 10y ago
My complaint about mathematics (and similar) articles is that they seem to be written for technical correctness, but not for instructional purposes. So people who already understand the concepts can nod and agree "I find nothing (further) wrong with that," while learners definitely fall down a rabbit hole of successive links. At times it seems more like lawyering than teaching. I've considered the argument that Wikipedia isn't meant for that purpose, that it's simply a repository for formulas and such, but I don't believe that agrees with any idea of human advancement and learning, and the site's own mission statement reads "to collect and develop educational content."
- monknomo 10y ago
  I for one, would find a lot of value in a mathematics encyclopedia slanted towards learning instead of mere technical correctness. Wikipedia's physics articles suffer from the same problem.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Recently started to go to the library, any book, old, thin, large, is better than wikipedia for this.

agumonkey 10y ago

Remember, they all lead to philosophy.

thrill 10y ago
Which eventually leads here: https://goo.gl/PhVfQd https://goo.gl/PhVfQd

jerf 10y ago

An idea that I will never implement is to create a mathematics wiki site structured as a "lattice", meaning that all links within a given explanation can only point "down", for suitable definitions of down. It's frustrating to try to learn anything from Wikipedia because it'll freely jump up to post-graduate math on any topic without warning. Despite it being suboptimal from a pure math perspective, I figured "down" would likely end up being "a topic covered earlier in the standard mathematics curriculum"; any other attempt to be clever I came up with always backfired for the "able to learn math from this resource" goal. The second paragraph of the Wikipedia page on integers, about as simple a "math" page as I can imagine, as I write this, brings in "subset" and "countably infinite", and the third paragraph just goes off the rails if you're trying to use this to learn about the integers: "The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes called rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, the (rational) integers are the algebraic integers that are also rational numbers." I know enough of the relevant maths to actually perfectly understand that. I also remember enough about when I didn't understand the relevant maths to remember what it felt like to read stuff like that. My point here is not that it's a "bad page", just that it is very hard to learn anything that way.

joefkelley 10y ago
This is exactly it. You want a directed tree for learning, whereas wikipedia is an undirected graph. Mathematics suffers the most since its tree is unusually deep, not wide.

percept 10y ago

My complaint about mathematics (and similar) articles is that they seem to be written for technical correctness, but not for instructional purposes. So people who already understand the concepts can nod and agree "I find nothing (further) wrong with that," while learners definitely fall down a rabbit hole of successive links. At times it seems more like lawyering than teaching. I've considered the argument that Wikipedia isn't meant for that purpose, that it's simply a repository for formulas and such, but I don't believe that agrees with any idea of human advancement and learning, and the site's own mission statement reads "to collect and develop educational content."

monknomo 10y ago
I for one, would find a lot of value in a mathematics encyclopedia slanted towards learning instead of mere technical correctness. Wikipedia's physics articles suffer from the same problem.
agumonkey 10y ago
Recently started to go to the library, any book, old, thin, large, is better than wikipedia for this.