Wikipedia is a prominent free hypertext-based encyclopedia written by a lot of folks from all over, maybe even by you (in part).
It is released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (like PlanetMath).
Or is it?
See the ultra-contentious expose: Wikipedia, the unfree encyclopedia.
(Rationale: Wikipedia does not hold GFDL. PLanetmath neither does at 100%, so Planetmath is unfree as well?) --drini
That's a big part of it, and to the extent that PM doesn't hold to GFDL and yet asserts GFDL, then yes, it is creating a non-free situation for users. --jcorneli
The thought occured to me that we might want to position PlanetMath or some derivative organization (see On rebranding PM.org) to become the "micropedia" to Wikipedia's "macropedia" (i.e., we provide short, but in-depth, technical coverage, they provide big ideas and contextualizing information).
We might start by talking to the human entities behind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/PlanetMath_Exchange (which page speaks to part of the current relationship of the 2 organizations) --jcorneli
I agree. Tis is something I've had in mind. This is a "strategic plan" sort of idea that is necessary when there are other providers "in the same market". --akrowne
Also, remember the conversations we've had elsewhere on this sitewhere it was pointed out that the primary difference between WP and PM is not so much technical vs. non-technical as it is that PM allows different levels of sophistication simultaneously as opposed to reducing everything to a common level. --rspuzio
Interesting discussion found via google on wikitech-l:
On Wed, 2002-11-27 at 08:00, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: > On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 01:13:11AM -0500, The Cunctator wrote: > > On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 22:12, Jonathan Walther wrote: > > > On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 02:50:24AM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote: > > > >How to integrate it with Wikipedia script ? > > > > > > > >Wikipedia script when rendering should find all <math>.*</math> in markup, > > > >call this program (which is very fast if images are already rendered) > > > >and get info provided by it to render a page. I'm not even sure what should > > > >that program return. > > > > We would be best served by not duplicating the efforts of > > http://planetmath.org, a GFDL math encyclopedia. > > > > I recommend that Wikipedia either 1) not use Tex-graphics, and stick to > > what can be done with plain-jane wiki/HTML, or 2) integrate efforts with > > planetmath.org. > > Neither of these two solutions would work well, nor would "upload pngs". I fail to see how the second method wouldn't work well-it's a philosophical approach, not a particular method. All I'm saying is that we should figure out ways to work with planetmath.org, not duplicate their effort.
--jcorneli
Maybe this? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_!MediaWiki (simple semantic additions to wiki pages). --jcorneli
That seems to be about as much a jump as the semantic web is from the web. Namely, too big, at least, to just implement the improvements we want. I haven't looked in detail at the semantic wiki, but my concerns with the semantic web have been that it is highly divorced from the human element of production. RDF is a great innovation and has lots of applications, but its not exactly inducing a societal sea-change in how we author content. On the other hand, while the semantic web people were inventing RDF, wikis came out and did just that. Now what I want out of wiki is a simple extension to allow typed links, and some basic interface filtering and organization to do natural things based on them (such as navigation/searching based on site structure). I could be wrong about Semantic_MediaWiki, though, I'll have to look into it in depth later. The point is, being machine-processable is not the entirety of what we want. --akrowne Fri Apr 7 19:34:32 UTC 2006
I think we all like to think of Noosphere as having advantages over the wiki software that's being used on Wikipedia, but I don't know if we're tapped into the development of that software (even as lurxors). In a thread over at PlanetPhysics, someone mentioned that Wikipedia 'has TeX support'. Is this true? And what sort of support do they have? What is coming on the horizon for Wikipedia? (If it isn't 'being semantic', then is it maybe automatic linking? Ownership? Threaded forums attached to everything? Deep linking and character-level annotation ;)? ) --jcorneli
So, when they say TeX support, they mean you can embed a LaTeX expression in a wiki page. Not a bad idea (no doubt we could use such a thing on AsteroidMeta), but it is not quite the same as actually supporting full-on TeX authoring! I know we had talked about possibly adding a wiki 'authoring mode' on PM; perhaps we could use MediaWiki, and then automatically translate the wikisource to LaTeX source. As for the permissions, that's interesting, but it doesn't seem that these are used in a terribly complex way on Wikipedia (at least not as far as I know!). --jcorneli
The homepage for meta-issues about MediaWiki is at [3]. It has a wealth of information. There is an old (1y) proposal for creating a wiki of mathematical proofs [4]. A "first draft" for an i18n of MediaWiki is here.
But, yes. It would make sense to at least consider MediaWiki before rewriting Noosphere. Surely it would require changes to MediaWiki. At least better LaTeX support and an auto-linker to start with. However, I don't think we should blindly stick to LaTeX (nor Noosphere!) without at least considering alternatives. For example, LaTeX's theorem environment is quite primitive for PM's purpose. It would make sense to mark up proofs, theorems and definitions in a standard way. Maybe we could keep such data in a Wikidata database? That would benefit the HDM project? Due to the large number of plug-in extensions, MediaWiki seems to be rather flexible.
One advantage of moving to MediaWiki is that it would free up resources and energy to free math, and not software issues. Say, once MediaWiki's i18n project is completed, we could probably adapt it almost as is. This would also move PM closer to WP. This could have many advantages. For one, it would be easier to share content. – matte
I wasn't suggesting using MediaWiki instead of Noosphere. I don't think it would be a good idea. I don't think there are any (reasonable, free) alternatives to LaTeX. LaTeX markup is easy to write, and it has the benefit of being directly typeset-able using the LaTeX program. Of course, is primarily a typesetting language.
When you talk about marking up theorems, proofs etc. in a 'standard way', I think this could be done in LaTeX, no problem: it is just a matter developing some site-wide style standards. AFAIK, there is no need to get rid of LaTeX as a typesetting language just to install some additional "semantic" markup. Whatever semantic markup we use could be stored in just about any kind of database, I don't see why a wikidata database would be any particular benefit.
As for the flexibility of the platform due to its extensions: that's an interesting point to consider, certainly. However, we could no doubt add more extensions (e.g. Gnuplot, Maxima) to Noosphere, as well.
As for "freeing up resources and energy for free math instead of software", I must reject that assertion. Free math and free software are integrally linked; you can't really have one without the other. There is an immense amount of software work that will be worth doing regardless of what platform we use. I've been working on a platform that is neither Noosphere nor MediaWiki -- the choice of platform is certainly important to me, enough to motivate me to work on one that's rather different from these others.
For many things the choice of platform is somewhat arbitrary. But it isn't always arbitrary.
Being "closer" to WP doesn't seem like a good objective in and of itself. Having some interface that is more familiar to WP's may be a very good thing. But whatever's behind this interface will almost surely have to be different.
Sharing content seems to be a bigger technological problem than could be resolved simply by choice of platform. (To say nothing of our license questions!) See bidi system for a sketch of the issues there.
Now, I do think it would be great to coordinate our development with the WM people as much as is reasonable – but in addition to these folks, there are dozens of other groups working on commons-based software efforts! Ideally we'd be coordinating with all of these people. Coordinating these sorts of efforts was one of the mail goals for AsteroidMeta -- and I'm sure there is a lot we can do to improve our situation there. --jcorneli
Wikipedia has the burden of "being an encyclopedia". Some other resource with different goals (e.g. "being a knowledge-base") might not have the same dubious editorial tyranny issues. By selecting items from the KB for inclusion/exclusion from the encyclopedia, it would be possible to have both types of resources at once. The problem with Wikipedia is that they are trying to do everything (a) with wiki; (b) within the confines of the "encyclopedia" framework^1.
Over at PM we are currently talking about significantly expanding the set of "OK" objects, by allowing them to bear different labels (like "new result") and deciding inclusion/exclusion in the encyclopedia proper based on at-least-clearly-defined classification criteria. (More interesting: letting users decide which "namespaces" to draw data from, so they can create a tailor-made reference work to suit their need, even OTF.)
1: Actually, (b) is patently false if you take all of the Wikimedia Commons into consideration, but since the various projects there don't seem to interface with each other much, it is effectively true; and (a) basically kills the possibilities for interesting inter-component interfaces anyway.