All About All:WikiProject Mathematics - All About All

All About All:WikiProject Mathematics

First, an important note for everyone to remember: some Wikipedians have come together to make some suggestions about how we might organize articles about mathematics.

These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obliged to follow them. This WikiProject is not intended as prescriptive. If you do not yet know what to write, or the guidelines may be helpful. Mainly, we just want you to write articles!

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) for a draft manual, with detailed discussion of a number of issues.

Scope

This WikiProject aimed originally to organize articles in the area of mathematics; in its broadest terms, this may include overlap into the areas of physics, computer science, operations research, and other areas.

The initial goals of this WikiProject were to:

• provide a standard "bare bones" format for mathematical articles
• provide useful links for article writers
• provide a location to discuss issues relating to this section of Wikipedia
• provide standards for mathematical notation using wikified HTML/TeX.

Update 2005

This project was started in 2002; not surprisingly things have moved on. For example the scope of this project would not now include many physics pages, outside some aspects of theoretical physics. The 'house style' of mathematics articles is now reasonably well established.

The main issues for WP Mathematics are now probably the following.

• Keeping track of, by listing and categorising, all relevant articles.

Who knows how many, now? It might be 1% of the English Wikipedia, or around 4000. It depends on how one counts areas such as statistics, cryptography and so on. The overall organisation is pretty much in place, by now.

• Bringing stubs up to a reasonable standard.

There are always plenty of pages that are definition-only. It is always good to add motivation and examples.

• Developing 'core articles' into good expositions.

As anyone who teaches the subject knows, the gap between stating some true facts, and really putting over a topic, is quite large. Here we can consider also the need to add history and proper attributions.

• Expanding coverage to bring the subject up to date.

This is a huge task, so the main requirements are patience, and not to be discouraged. Much of the advanced material is still really from the 1950s.

• Hoaxing

There has been some of this; most Wikipedians, naturally enough, don't feel qualified to pronounce on articles purporting to be mathematical. If not us, who?

There needs to be a better mechanism for alerting math folks to possible hoaxes. --Chan-Ho 13:26, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Charles Matthews 09:59, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Participants

See /Participants for a list. Introduce yourself.

Things to do

Looking for something to do? There are several places on Wikipedia where mathematics related requests, suggestions and tasks have been collected together:

Some issues to think about

Probably the hardest part of writing a mathematical article (actually, any article) is the difficulty of addressing the level of mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader. For example, when writing about a field, do we assume that the reader already knows group theory? A general approach is to start simple, then move toward more abstract and general statements as the article proceeds. The structure described below is one way of achieving this.

When you need to describe a concept in terms of some other concept (for example, explaining rational numbers in terms of integers), be sure to:

• Add a (prominent) link to the relevant article (in this case, integer). As for other Wikipedia articles, avoid duplicate links.
• If it makes sense, add a very quick (and naive) explanation/description (in this case, "positive or negative whole numbers" might work).

If the relevant article has not been written yet, then create a good stub, and list it on the list of mathematical topics (see below) - the odds are good that someone will expand on it.

Since some terminology varies from author to author in the literature, you can check the Wikipedia article on an ambiguous term (if one exists) to see what usage is established here (or to see if you want to try to change that).

It's worth a bit of time to just peruse what's already in the 'pedia; this will give you a feel for what type of information is already available, and how much detail you need to provide.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject General Audience for a project whose goal is to help make articles more accessible.

Motivation

See discussion at /Motivation.

Partial list of articles that need higher-level explanations

• Adjoint functor
• Laplace transform
• Orthogonal polynomials
• Sheaf

How is the above list doing in terms of getting higher-level explanations? ---- Charles Stewart 08:32, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Proofs

See /Proofs for discussion of how and whether to include proofs of results.

Conventions

The following pages attempt to describe certain conventions for articles with mathematical content. Please read, comment on, improve, criticize, and if appropriate, follow these standards.

• /Conventions - Working list of terminology conventions.
• Wikipedia:Naming conventions (theorems)
• Wikipedia:How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics (proposed)
• Wikipedia:Algorithms on Wikipedia (proposed)

Classification

There is no one single, prescribed method. Both the lists and the categories have grown organically, rather than being imported. See also areas of mathematics.

List of publications in mathematics

There is an effort to organize a list of important publications in many areas of science. Such a list captures the major achievements in each field and might be a valuable asset for one trying to learn a new field. The List of publications in computer science is the oldest and most mature list and might show the goal of the lists. The rest of the list need much more contributions. Please try to improve the mathematics related lists:

• List of publications in mathematics
• List of publications in statistics
• List of publications in computer science

Some useful links and resources

The list of mathematical topics is used by contributors to keep track of changes to the entire content of mathematics in Wikipedia, in a fashion similar to the more general "Recent Changes" link. If you add new articles which are at least remotely related to mathematics (including biographies of mathematicians, and so on), please add them to that list, so that everyone can review / add to / mercilessly savage your contributions.

A lists of topics for subdisciplines can be found at the list of lists of mathematical topics.

Featured and former featured articles

As of September 22 2005, there are ten mathematics articles which are featured articles:

As of September 22 2005, there are ten mathematics articles which are former featured articles:

The dates provide links (where they exist) to the featured article candidate discussion or the features article removal candidate discussion — prior to June, 2003, there was no formal FA nomination process, and there was no formal FA removal process, prior to March, 2004.

Emboldened article titles indicate articles that have been featured on the main page. The symbol: , indicates an article that has an audio recording of the article text (see the article for a link to its recording).

Project subpages