Should Wikipedia Allow Mathematical Proofs? 469
Beetle B. writes "An argument has arisen over whether Wikipedia should allow pages that provide proofs for mathematical theorems (such as this one).
On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to? Should Wikipedia just become a textbook that teaches mathematics? Should it just state the bare results of theorems and not provide proofs (except as external links)? Or should they take an intermediate approach and formulate a criterion for which proofs to include and which to exclude?"
Why the /? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Why the /? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's not a reason to omit things from the Wikipedia. True it might lull users into thinking they do not need "better" references, but that is up to the users' sense of criticality.
Just my
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some topics which used to be on Wikipedia, but were removed. Why were they removed? "not notable enough". See, that makes no sense to me. I would like to see EVERYTHING (everything that is legal of course) in Wikipedia. Why exclude some bits of human knowledge while including others? Does Wikipedia need more hard drive space or something? I can't imagine that being the reason. Perhaps arcane or highly focused knowledge scares some people. Or, perhaps since they are not intelligent enough to understand it, they decide that it has no value. If there are a bunch of less used articles (since they are unused) it won't be raising bandwidth costs either.
Recently I went to the "quantum gate" article. There are equations and technical language everywhere. I certainly did not understand it.. I'd first need to read more about the underlying concepts. I hope this disproves my "lack of intelligence" point, but I am not convinced. A while back I went to Wikipedia to learn more about Encyclopodia, and it was useful to me. But then I noticed an RfD. I got lucky when I searched, because now I wouldn't be able to learn what I learned then... the article is gone! Why? Because it was highly focused. Not notable enough for some people. Well, you know what? It was useful information to me.. and now that information has been lost. I consider that a step in the wrong direction.
Besides math, there is knowledge out there that, while I may be completely uninterested in it (celebrity trivia, for example), some people find fascinating. How about articles on "everyday" people. Does including it make Wikipedia any less useful for me? Absolutely not! I cannot predict the future.. who knows but I may need to know some weird fact, read some proof or book, find some arcane piece of knowledge, read about my friend from high school who I lost contact with. Why limit it?
Now please don't misunderstand what I'm trying to say. I am not saying that factually incorrect information be included in Wikipedia as if it were fact... or sarcasm, etc. We're talking about knowledge here, not fantasy.
There are already user pages for personal information as well, in case people are concerned with Wikipedia turning into MySpace or something.
So I ask again.. why not include everything?
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Wikipedia is not, nor ever was intended to be, anything but an online encyclopedia. Including the entire works of human culture that have expired from copyright or are in the public domain otherwise is not what they are about. When asking "Why not include everything?", you are missing the point of an encyclopedia. An obvious example is youtube - if wikipedia included everything, they'd host all of youtube's content too (minus the copyrighted bits), which would be resource intensive and essentially pointl
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
I realise this appears to be a difficult concept to grasp, but you'll get there if you stretch yourself: Wikipedia is not about creating an archive of all of human knowledge. It is about creating a free online encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is a well-defined type of reference work, not an archive of random facts. There are many things an encyclopedia excludes by design. Mathematical proofs are one of these things.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Results 1 - 10 of about 9,830 from en.wikipedia.org for "anime" "list" [google.com]
This includes the:
List of video games based on anime or manga
List of video games based on anime or manga
List of H anime (but not including fan parodies, have to keep up standards)
And 9827 more lists of this kind. Shall we keep the mathematical proofs for now, ok? By the time hard disk space becomes scare we can think about where to start deleting.
Wikibooks (Score:4, Informative)
Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)
In other sciences, background knowledge is based on observations, and thus you can only get theories. Good and reasonable as they may be, the background is a posteriori, and therefore does not prove anything.
Please correct me if i'm wrong.
Re:Sure (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Computer Science != Science (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct in thinking that "computer engineering" and "software engineering" are not scientific disciplines, because they aren't. They are also not computer science. A software engineer is to a computer scientist what a mechanical engineer is to a physicist.
The lines seem to be blurred when it comes to computer science because, more so than with any other scientific discipline, great computer scientists have a tendency to also be great engineers. As Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man Month:
A physicist, on the other hand, would usually require an enormous amount of education in material properties, state of the art in manufacturing technologies, and/or a massive amount of infrastructure to provide power etc. to engineer an actual implementation that tests his theories. For physics, and most other sciences, application of theory requires a non-trivial and entirely different set of skills and knowledge than it takes to develop theory, which is why there is a much more distinctive break between the science and engineering in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. than there is with computer science, where a program might not only serve as the definition and description of a theory, but also as a concrete implementation.
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
New playground for the delitionist (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, it is usually a lot easier for someone to check a proof than for someone to look verify who the last prime minister of Malawi was.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Funny)
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1) They are not easily twisted to support a political ideology
2) They don't appear in standard general purpose encyclopediae
3) General readers cannot understand them
The world desperately needs a global rdf-schema wiki for mathematical and scientific information, which allows the description of experimental data, explanatory inference, hypothesis, and proof. Wikipedia is not that.
If the same semigroup textual diff algebra used in da
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A mathematicians view (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A mathematicians view (Score:5, Informative)
No problem for you then: Wikipedia's math content is exactly that.
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ClearType is patented (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A mathematicians view (Score:4, Insightful)
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Dictionary - Encyclopedia - Textbook (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note, its worth noting that the article submitter engaged in the discussion [wikipedia.org] about the article for deletion. They voted to delete the article.
Re:Dictionary - Encyclopedia - Textbook (Score:5, Insightful)
They've started something - a compendium of knowledge - and they're preventing it from growing because they want it to fit a publishing model that no longer applies. Why limit yourself?
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They thrive on the attention, the ability to destroy
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Some subjects are simply hard. Wikipedia, along with everybody else writing about technical topics, should follow Einstein's advice: simplify it as much as possible, but no further. On no account should precise but highly technical wording ever be replaced with vague descriptions in layman's terms. The latter should simply be used to supplement the existin
Re:Dictionary - Encyclopedia - Textbook (Score:5, Interesting)
Delete. I feel only notable proofs should be kept in Wikipedia - not proofs of notable theorems. The proof of infinitude of primes is notable - it's often the first proof by contradiction many encounter. Cantor's proof is also notable (and again, may often be the first of its kind seen by students). Both of these may also have had a great deal of historical significance. The proofs provided in this article are in no way special. Yes, totient functions are important, which is why there is an article on them. The proofs of its various properties are just details. I agree that it should be transwikified - Wikibooks if there is a book on number theory being worked on there. Beetle B. (talk) 23:56, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
In retrospect, I chose a bad headline. I wanted this to be a discussion not on whether they should have proofs, but on what criteria should be used to decide which proofs to include - for which there was little, but not much discussion. It seems many here want Wikipedia to allow all proofs.
Another analogy no one pointed out is that when scientific results are posted on Wikipedia, is it "acceptable" to post along with them the raw data from the respective research journals (ignoring copyright for a moment)? Is this a valid analogy, and if not, why not? In a sense, that data is "proof" of the "correctness" of those scientific results.
To muddle the waters further, I actually went to the totient proof page looking for something, and reading one of the proofs did help me with my work...
Yes (Score:2, Informative)
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
To elaborate a little bit, some proofs are more elegant than others. Some require more knowledge than others. You can prove Pythagoras' theorem on two pages using only elementary geometry or in two lines using vectors. Which version you present depends on your audience, but that doesn't change the fact that you should present one. Proofs are useful, they help you understand not only that a theorem is correct but, much more importantly, why it is correct; so why is there even a discussion about whether or not to include proofs? Especially on a system like Wikipedia, where multiple versions of a proof can coexist peacefully (in theory) on a page - it's not like you'd have to choose one over all others (like you might have to, for instance, when teaching a class or giving a talk).
So - what's the problem? Unless it's political, in which case, well, you know, *yawn*.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Quite frankly, I am torn. On one hand, wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, and this is not the kind of thing that would generally make it in an encyclopedia. Even though wikipedia doesn't have the space concerns that regular encyclopedias have, there are issues of aesthetics and flow, as well as not cluttering up what the user wants to find with too much noise (which many proofs will be to many people).
On the other hand, there isn't an a priori reason why wikipedia should be bound by any of the limitations of a regular encyclopedia, and most of the problems mentioned above can be solved by creating appendices for any proofs that cannot be tastefully inserted into the text, either at the bottom, in a collapsible section, or on another page.
However, it can be argued that even this leads to clutter, or that certain proofs do not meet relevancy or quality standards. Wikipedia is not, and should not be a general storehouse for everything that happens to be true. It might be appropriate to have a proof of the Pythagorean theorem but not appropriate to have a proof that a fibration leads to a long exact sequence of homotopy groups. In fact, for some things, it is probably for the best if no more than a sketch of a proof and a reference to an edited book/paper are given.
Personally, I would like to see a companion site, wikimath or some such, that integrates well with wikipedia but contains the things that wikipedia should not. I envision a site which subsumes the content planetmath.org but is closer to the style of wikipedia, both editorially and aesthetically. With enough interlinking between the two sites, it could easily serve as an appendix to wikipedia, placating both the people who wish to add proofs and the people who wish to keep wikipedia pure and relevant.
In any case, I don't believe that the issue is as clear cut as many people want to claim, and I don't think that a completely satisfactory solution will be simple and easy.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
As the grandfather post indicated, the best solution is a separate wiki, such as WikiMath.
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Among these political factions is a major movement called de
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Almost nobody will read proofs. Britannica has no proofs. I think proofs at Wikipedia are doomed. But we need something that supports proofs. It should not be in the form of bitmap graphics, like wikipedia. It should be semantic web content, which can be automatically verified, and used by theorem proving programs as well as by human readers.
Something very muh like that exists at metamath [metamath.org]. Of course metamath is more interested in foundations (building everything up from just ZFC and basic predicate logic), but it does get as far as Hilbert spaces and such, and has the facility, at least in theory, to extend to any particular field you wish to claim; it is all a matter of adding the necessary extra definitions for whatever sorts of mathematical objects you wish to consider.
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The problem is that a proof is very dependent on the theorems presented before it. Plus, it is highly dependent on the manner and exact working of the proof descriptions. Plus, there is no one description of a theorem - some are described slightly different than others. Plus, there will be a million pages of unnamed lemmas that big theorems are based on.
I think proof outlines when it's useful is ok but allowing proofs
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put links to textbooks online and offline (Score:2, Insightful)
Absolute truths on Wikipedia? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Absolute truths on Wikipedia? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is there any reason that absolutely ANY trivial fact can't be included in wikipedia?
Just have a ratings system to put less-noteworthy material someplace where people won't have to browse through it. Companies like google can specialize in finding data in these kinds of articles.
Disk space is getting to the point where an encyclopedia could be built capable of containing the continuous typing of every human on earth for the rest of time. So why not let them type?
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That is not an absolute truth. It might very well be false tomorrow. In fact, I'd say chances are about fifty-fifty.
Heck Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
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We need a semantic wiki for scientific and mathematical information, which can be used by computers as well as people, that offers many views, suitable to the interests of the reader, for the same underlying data. Proofs, both user-supplied and automatically derived, would be part of that data, visible to those with an interest in them, and in modern browsers, not as bitmap gr
The crazy wikipedia admins.... (Score:5, Insightful)
But this 'consensus' is 'weird'. Sometimes even when there is a clear majority in favor of saving some article or changing some policy admins will say that 'Wikipedia is not a democracy.' If you then ask well what does determine it you also end up with a tautology. I once asked someone why they wanted to delete article x and they said they were a 'deletionist'. Again I asked why and ended up with circular reasoning.
As far as this issue is concerned I think without proofs you are missing a whole lot in math. This also makes Wikipedia a difficult forum to discuss math and science in terms of what goes into an article. As someone in this area I often try to explain to people that their idea about y or z here is doesn't work because of some scientific concept.
The problems occur when they consider their generalist approach most important even if they are ignorant of the topic area. For example I might be talking about Unsolved problems in biology or Unsolved problems in medicine [wikipedia.org]. Well to really address the issue you need expertise in that area. Generalists without it go in and presume to understand what is an unsolved problem in a field in which they lack knowledge. I heard all sorts of bizarre ideas from people in the unsolved problems in chemistry [wikipedia.org] deletion debate [wikipedia.org] about the 'nature' of chemistry, how chemistry itself was not very precise and easy to define. It's so crazy because Science magazine had a whole issue [sciencemag.org] on the topic of big unsolved problems in chemistry. Oh well I guess those people who are actually scientists just don't get chemistry in the same way as a wikipedia admin.
It gets really crazy in that although the above articles got deleted enough people kicked up a fuss to save unsolved problems in neuroscience, unsolved problems in chemistry and unsolved problems in economics to save them. To really converse on these issues you have to really understand neuroscinece but wikipedia admins seem to think not. They play sneaky games. If they can't delete them the first time around keep on referring it for deletion. They did this with Unsolved problems in biology here [wikipedia.org] and here [wikipedia.org]. Then if you try to recreate the article you get slapped down by an admin because the article has already been deleted so you lose not matter what.
I finally gave up on getting any logical argument from the admins when I pointed out that if unsolved problems in neuroscience [wikipedia.org] could exist then why not have unsolved problems in biology [wikipedia.org]. I even talked to some practicing biologists about what these problems might be and low and behold they gave me some. Then the admins said well its not biology, its really biochemistry. Then I asked well why not have Unsolved problems in biochemistry. And it went
Middle Ground (Score:5, Interesting)
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be. Do they want it to be an encyclopedia or does it want to be the source of all knowledge. Personally I think it should aim to be the best encyclopedia going as I suspect being the one source of all knowledge is probably impossible and there is a danger the real worth of the site will be swamped by too much detail.
Wikipedia should be the starting point of learning not the start, middle and end.
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Personally I think it should aim to be the best encyclopedia going as I suspect being the one source of all knowledge is probably impossible and there is a danger the real worth of the site will be swamped by too much detail.
I somewhat agree.
Why not try a math.wikipedia.com for the math geeks to play around in? The actual proofs (with as much detail as you could want) would be presented there and linked to from the main wiki page.
If it doesn't work out, scrap the idea.
Wikipedia should be actively sandboxing new ideas and formats.
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Hundred page proofs are not really suitable for Wikipedia
Why? If it's an important proof and you can present it more easily in Wikipedia format (for example, by adding anchor tags all over it so that you can link to "Proof#coolpart"), what would be the argument against doing so? 100 pages will only take up a tiny slice of a modern RAID, and if few people ever view it then it will hardly take any bandwidth. Still, it'll be available for anyone who needs it. I guess I just don't see the reason why you'd want to prune knowledge from the site.
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Mathematical proofs are as much important and informative as their theorems. The proof allows for better understanding of the theorem, you can see why there are certain assumptions in the theorem and what is broken when these assumptions are not met. For some applications the proof is a blueprint for algorithm to solve problem stated in the theorem.
But I guess that biographies of fictional characters and detailed descriptions of Japanese cartoon episodes have much more important place on wikipedia.
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I wouldn't say more important. A more accurate term would be more secure/permanent place.
There are typically far more rabid fans of japanese cartoons willing to wage a wikiwar, than there are rabid fans of math proofs.
Now add the fact that stuff can and does get deleted, and you'll see that a lot of stuff worth keeping could get deleted just because there
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Obviously you haven't read the accounts of what happened when the mathematicians found out the EE's were using "j" instead of "i" for imaginary numbers.
Wikipedia and deleting (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mathematicians seem happy to officiate their ideas so only Mathematicians can read them and leave
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It's an important problem that Wikipedia math articles very often dive straight into a very low-level (IOW detailed) explanation where there should reasonably be a high-level (IOW overview) introduction before the low-level details. Too many Wikipedians confuse high-level overview and dumbing down. They are not the same thing.
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Mathematical proofs aren't facts. (Score:2, Insightful)
Proofs are the Source! (Score:2)
Also, slight changes in wording can drastically change the content of a theorem. By supplying a proof, it becomes very clear if the theorem has been stated correctly or not.
Users decide (Score:2)
Why are you asking us? (Score:3, Informative)
Why Wouldn't It? (Score:2, Insightful)
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As I've heard them before, the arguments are that proofs might:
Why not follow the path of Wikiquote? (Score:5, Interesting)
Existing articles are not 'polluted' with proofs and can link to the relevant wikiproof article. The wikiproof site can implement specific features that are usefull for mathematical proofs.
Reemi
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Validation? (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is verification [wikipedia.org], that
Choose one proof. (Score:2, Interesting)
Right. More of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia has allowed mathematical proofs, for several years. I've found several of them useful, as it sometimes has nice proofs that would otherwise have been troublesome to track down without a more detailed literature search. I know other people who have found them useful as well. The fact that this useful information is now being opposed by some (including, apparently, the submitter) on the basis of "OMG, if we allow proofs, then there might be too many proofs, and then how will we stop it?!" is highly irritating to me. Proofs have been allowed for years without overwhelming the rest of the useful information. Wikipedia has not become a repository for opaque, useless 200-page proofs. Why are we suddenly worried about this? If you're really concerned, just put the proof on a separate page from the main theorem.
I still have never seen a coherent explanation of why Wikipedia is so concerned lately about deleting any material that is unworthy. It has greatly reduced the site's utility to me, and is the reason I use it less and less, and will refuse to contribute to its fund raisers until their deletion policy is substantially revised. The only explanation I've ever seen is a sort of question-begging, "But if we allow non-notable information without deleting it, then there will be non-notable information there!" Yes, so? Here's a nickel, kid, buy yourself a bigger hard drive. If you want to make "non-notable" information appear lower in search results, fine. That's useful. But a lot of information that I find useful is apparently now considered "non-notable" by the Wikipedia admins, and I'd rather there still be some way for me to find that information.
Also, what's with the policy of hassling articles with trivia sections? That seems so arbitrary to me. It's frequently a useful place to collect interesting information about the subject that doesn't fit neatly in earlier sections (and "if it's notable, you should merge it into the main article!" is just silly -- we should awkwardly insert this single notable and interesting factoid into an unrelated earlier section? That just makes it harder to find for those who care, whereas the people reading the earlier section will wonder why the subject jumps around. Trivia sections allow for cleaner editing and easier information searches.) Again, what is the harm in it being there? If you don't care about trivia, you don't have to read the section. And, again, if it bothers you that much, just put it on a separate page.
I'm a little bitter about this whole thing. Wikipedia used to be such a great resource, but lately all I hear is admins talking about ways to block useless information (for certain definitions of "useless"), not about how to actually strengthen the material that's there. Pretty soon, teachers won't have to tell kids not to cite Wikipedia....
Re:Right. More of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between saying "Information should be cited and with neutral POV" (with which I agree), and "Information should be cited and with neutral POV, so trivia sections are bad" (which seems like a non sequitur). If trivia sections were allowed, but with the same requirements as the rest of the article, I'd have no complaint. Instead I keep seeing useful trivia sections (or no longer seeing them...) with ugly banners saying they shouldn't be there. It just reinforces the growing perception of Wikipedia admins as gatekeepers trying to keep information out rather than in.
trivia are by definition not notable, otherwise they wouldn't be trivia.
Yeah, I've also heard this argument. It conflates the formal definition of "trivia" (i.e. something unimportant) with the actual conventional use of the term (i.e. a small piece of information). I have trouble accepting good faith in those who make this conflation, since it's so self-evident -- if there are two possible meanings of a word, and one of them makes a sentence false by definition, try using the other one. However, assuming you are making this argument in good faith, let me clarify: when people talk about the notability of information in "trivia" sections, they are usually using the latter definition. Since this definition encompasses, just for example, every question/answer ever made on Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit, I'd certainly hope there would be a place for that sort of "trivia" on Wikipedia.
I've seen several articles getting their trivia sections removed or "integrated", and I must say it was an improvement.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you another -- I've seen useful trivia sections removed, or poor integration attempts, or ugly banners telling me that the useful information I'm reading shouldn't be there. It is appropriate to apply the same editorial guidelines to trivia sections as to the rest of the article. But there's no reason to make a blanket "discouragement" in cases where it really is the appropriate choice.
Bourbaki 2 (Score:2)
Wikiproof (Score:2)
For many people the inclusion of a proof could be far beyond their understanding, yet at the same time for some other people this is very useful. I believe that main content of Wikipedia should be easily accessible, in terms of explanation, to the average person and that specialist resources should help provide the harder more specialist content.
Obviously (Score:3, Insightful)
Proofs belong into Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
"Most people don't understand them" could be applied to most topics on Wikipedia, with or without proof. Just take any page about an advanced topic in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology or probably even history.
I agree that they should not be part of the *same page*, e.g. the previously mentioned proofs of the Pythagorean theorem should IMHO *not* be part of the page "Pythagorean theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem)" (which currently includes 8 different proofs).
I don't think that something like wikibooks or wikiproof is a good idea. When I want to know more about the Pythagorean theorem, should I go to wikipedia? Or citizendium? Or MathWorld? There are already too many choices, and there is absolutely no advantage to having one more. I find it very useful to have *one* resource for "all knowledge". It's not like Wikipedia gets any heavier if it has more pages.
The reasonable thing to do would be to add a "Proof" section to things needing a proof, with one link per proof (e.g. "Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem", "Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem") etc. If using the current Wikipedia system is not good enough for that (but I think it is), it should be easy to introduce a new standard "Proof layout" e.g. something like this: If something is not in Wikipedia, it is *still* possible to link to Mathworld or wherever else you like. "No mathematic proofs because some don't understand them" is like saying "No dates in history pages because some can't memorize them".
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The problem is not kind of content, it is anger. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia should become whatever people want it to be. Who knows in advance what that is?
With the approval of the author of a well-known open-source program, I posted information about how to use the program. Next day that contribution was gone, removed by someone who said that Wikipedia should not become a place for software manuals. But my explanation was the clearest, most complete available at the time; the author of the software did not want to spend time re-writing his own manual.
The problem is not to decide which kinds of content to include in Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not have that problem of paper encyclopedias, paper and printing cost. More pages in Wikipedia are almost free. The only problem Wikipedia has with more content is organizing the content so that it is easy for the reader to make use of what he or she wants, and easy to ignore the rest.
The problem with Wikipedia is not with content, it is a social problem. There are many, many people with some kind of anger problem. Such people don't have many friends. But although they reject and discourage other people, they are still human and need to socialize. So, they spend time with open social groups like Wikipedia. They are there with the hidden and not-so-hidden purpose of having targets for their anger.
Angry people have plenty of free time because other people usually don't want to talk with them. Angry people have the time to dominate social groups, and destroy them. Wikipedia's problem is how to recognize angry, destructive contributors and how deal with their anger.
Allow them (Score:3, Insightful)
Allow them. Period. Otherwise you set up circumstances for vandals to thrive [slashdot.org] like they do around all other ambiguous rules. Put another way, if there are any rules specifying when you can delete proof, I guaran-frickin-tee that some kid will use them to remove articles about the four-color theorem and Godel's incompleteness theorem. They'll claim that they're doing it for nebulous purity reasons; that's just because you won't be able to see their smug little grins as they exercise their power.
The last think Wikipedia needs to do is give the Deletionists more ammunition. They're pissing off enough people as it is.
I award you The Sword of a Thousand Truths (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a mathematician (Score:3, Interesting)
"Wikipedia is proof that math majors can't find jobs."
Wikipedia articles on math/physics topics really need to develop a whole new format. One thing I would like to see is more casual articles on math topics. Sure, I can almost every popular mathematical proof on wikipedia....but wikipedia is a general knowledge database.
The proofs should DEFINITELY be on the same page, but a lot more care should be taken to make the articles more approachable. I used to use wikipedia in conjunction with my textbook...and several times I wound up preferring the textbook. This wasn't on instructional topics, but on rather general topics. The wikipedia article was simply to confusing, and too technical.
Basically, remember that wikipedia articles DO have an instructional quality. Most mathematicians aren't reading the wikipedia article on the "twin prime conjecture". Encyclopedia articles aren't written for people who know everything about the topic, they are written for people who need information.
**(BTW...this comment is written in the same manner as most of the articles. It has all the essential information, but in a very impractical format)**
Re:proof should be most simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:proof should be most simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wikipedia is oraganized knowledge in electronic form. It's electronic, so there's no "wasted paper", and it's organized, so it proves taht a large amount of knowledge can be organized - and so also a large amount of knowledge within one article.
I am afraid that, if Wikipedia admins persist on deleting stuff they don't like (because that's the only objective measure they have, they didn't go asking anyone if w
Re:proof should be most simple (Score:5, Interesting)
So if you have something like a mathematical proof, and noone modifies it, is that a sign that nobody understands it, or that it's correct? I would guess the latter, but even if not, I would not go on deleting it just because I sustepct something. Who am I to delete stuff that smarter people than me have written?
Or do you mean to say that the basis/policy on which Wikipedia works is admins who are ignorant about topic X will delete articles about topic X?
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But the basic principle, that the Wikipedia should host as many proof
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