7 ms·

We already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's all properly handled by Bulba

We already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's all properly handled by Bulbapedia) so I wonder why we haven't seen it for more serious topics before? Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.

dosshell 3y ago
One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.
  - jjmarr 3y ago
    Look up Abstract Wikipedia. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  > One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
- jacobolus 3y ago
  > almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page There is a project page advocating more accessible technical articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic... In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.) Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ... How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  A benefit of knowing a non-english language is that my native language wiki entry usually is a good tldr of the english one. Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math students (as in math program students, not students studying math).
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it. I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.
ryukoposting 3y ago
It seems to me that the line has been drawn at perceived academic interest. "Notability" is highly context-dependent, but I find that it's easier to identify Wikipedia's line of notability when you consider the potential academic usefulness of a particular article. Minutae of science, history, mathematics, etc seem more likely to be "academically significant" than a county road in Michigan, or a Pokemon. When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  > taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source What ends up happening is people (including academics in published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip through the cracks. Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs, ideologues, or trolls. However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper articles). Every source and author should be carefully evaluated for credibility and read with at least some skepticism.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    As I got older, teachers (and then professors) tended to get more comfortable with Wikipedia. I never, EVER cited Wikipedia, but it was generally acceptable to use Wikipedia as a starting point - or even to use Wikipedia as a way to find other sources. My fiancée substitute teaches between jobs, and her impression is that policies relating to Wikipedia may be more lax today than I ever saw.
bawolff 3y ago
> Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think. There are some specialized ones like https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjmarr 3y ago
Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway" when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up with. That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either. I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Not really ironic, because they can be checked.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      As a practical matter however... Almost no one's going to visit the $SMALLTOWN historical society and do so. They're going to do a web search.
      - 3y ago
kjkjadksj 3y ago
For a lot of these fields researchers already feel like they are contributing to the community by writing manuscripts. Making a wiki of that written for lay people is a fruitless waste of time, wikipedia entries are good enough for lay people and people in the field would probably rather read a legitimate review article with 150 sources.
CM30 3y ago
Hmm a quick check of Google brought up at least a few wikis about maths: https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page And a few about engineering: https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki Plus a few about computer related topics: https://dataengineering.wiki/Index https://dataengineering.wiki/Index And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like Python, PHP, WordPress, etc. So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of media/fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the value of these sorts of free resources.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  Fandom is complete and utter SEO garbage - every single fandom with enough nerds to have sense has moved off of it into an actual independent wiki. IndieWikiBuddy is an extension that actually takes fandom websites, and redirects google searches to the actual community run page. https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/
  - CM30 3y ago
    Oh I agree. I like to link to non Fandom wikis when their available, use that same plugin in most browsers, and support things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance. Sadly quite a few wikis still use the service, and haven't gone independent yet.
- movpasd 3y ago
  For maths, there is also ncatlab.
ajkjk 3y ago
I think about trying to start a math and physics wiki all the time. Basically it needs to keep track of as many major results and link them all to each other and map between their terminologies. It is so exhausting that so many results are hiding in papers from other subfields that use slightly different notations and terminology so you can't find easily find them.
StevenXC 3y ago
https://Topology.pi-base.org https://Topology.pi-base.org (a database of certain mathematical objects) started as a wiki, but transitioned to using GitHub pull requests and custom software to support automated deduction. Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find these interesting: - https://code4math.org/ https://code4math.org/ - https://mathbases.org/ https://mathbases.org/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dosshell 3y ago

One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.

bee_rider 3y ago
I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.
- jjmarr 3y ago
  Look up Abstract Wikipedia. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
armchairhacker 3y ago
> One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page. Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
jacobolus 3y ago
> almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page There is a project page advocating more accessible technical articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic... In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.) Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ... How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.
rightbyte 3y ago
A benefit of knowing a non-english language is that my native language wiki entry usually is a good tldr of the english one. Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math students (as in math program students, not students studying math).
IshKebab 3y ago
Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it. I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.

ryukoposting 3y ago

It seems to me that the line has been drawn at perceived academic interest. "Notability" is highly context-dependent, but I find that it's easier to identify Wikipedia's line of notability when you consider the potential academic usefulness of a particular article. Minutae of science, history, mathematics, etc seem more likely to be "academically significant" than a county road in Michigan, or a Pokemon. When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.

jacobolus 3y ago
> taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source What ends up happening is people (including academics in published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip through the cracks. Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs, ideologues, or trolls. However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper articles). Every source and author should be carefully evaluated for credibility and read with at least some skepticism.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  As I got older, teachers (and then professors) tended to get more comfortable with Wikipedia. I never, EVER cited Wikipedia, but it was generally acceptable to use Wikipedia as a starting point - or even to use Wikipedia as a way to find other sources. My fiancée substitute teaches between jobs, and her impression is that policies relating to Wikipedia may be more lax today than I ever saw.

bawolff 3y ago

> Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think. There are some specialized ones like https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jjmarr 3y ago

Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway" when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up with. That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.

ghaff 3y ago
>has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either. I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).
- Angostura 3y ago
  Not really ironic, because they can be checked.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    As a practical matter however... Almost no one's going to visit the $SMALLTOWN historical society and do so. They're going to do a web search.
    - 3y ago

kjkjadksj 3y ago

For a lot of these fields researchers already feel like they are contributing to the community by writing manuscripts. Making a wiki of that written for lay people is a fruitless waste of time, wikipedia entries are good enough for lay people and people in the field would probably rather read a legitimate review article with 150 sources.

CM30 3y ago

Hmm a quick check of Google brought up at least a few wikis about maths: https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page And a few about engineering: https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki Plus a few about computer related topics: https://dataengineering.wiki/Index https://dataengineering.wiki/Index And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like Python, PHP, WordPress, etc. So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of media/fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the value of these sorts of free resources.

alexb_ 3y ago
Fandom is complete and utter SEO garbage - every single fandom with enough nerds to have sense has moved off of it into an actual independent wiki. IndieWikiBuddy is an extension that actually takes fandom websites, and redirects google searches to the actual community run page. https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/
- CM30 3y ago
  Oh I agree. I like to link to non Fandom wikis when their available, use that same plugin in most browsers, and support things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance. Sadly quite a few wikis still use the service, and haven't gone independent yet.
movpasd 3y ago
For maths, there is also ncatlab.

ajkjk 3y ago

I think about trying to start a math and physics wiki all the time. Basically it needs to keep track of as many major results and link them all to each other and map between their terminologies. It is so exhausting that so many results are hiding in papers from other subfields that use slightly different notations and terminology so you can't find easily find them.

StevenXC 3y ago

https://Topology.pi-base.org https://Topology.pi-base.org (a database of certain mathematical objects) started as a wiki, but transitioned to using GitHub pull requests and custom software to support automated deduction. Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find these interesting: - https://code4math.org/ https://code4math.org/ - https://mathbases.org/ https://mathbases.org/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]