I find the mathematics is more accurate on http://www.conservapedia.com Their facts get checked by the Almighty Himself! ;) Dan Piponi wrote:

The mathematics is probably the most reliable part of Wikipedia. -- Dan

On 10/17/07, PR Stanley wrote:

...

Hi Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia? Paul

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On Oct 17, 2007, at 22:25 , Dan Weston wrote:

I find the mathematics is more accurate on

http://www.conservapedia.com

Their facts get checked by the Almighty Himself! ;)

I Kings 7:23? :p -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH

Dan Weston writes:

I find the mathematics is more accurate on

http://www.conservapedia.com

Their facts get checked by the Almighty Himself! ;)

Since decent people here pointed out how my sarcasm may be blessing and useless, I must ask (living so far from the Bible Belt that I miss all standard American connotations...) Are you serious? (Not about the checking by the Lord, but concerning the quality of that conservapathologia?) My favourite citation, (apart from such obvious and meaningful things, as underlining the fact that Stalin appreciated Darwin, and now you know what to think about...) is the definition of "point" in "geometry" as an infinitely small dot. If you are not satisfied, you go "point itself, and you read that "A point can be represented on paper by a dot; however the dot is not a point, but only represents it. Because the actual dot contains millions of molecules of ink and other substances, whereas the point exists as an abstraction only." And you can die happy. === Jerzy Karczmarczuk

Hi thank you for all your replies. One of the reasons I'm interested in Wikipedia and Wikibook is because you're more likely to find Latex source code used for typesetting the maths. Latex is the one and only 100% tool right now. A lot of publishers use Latex but try to get anything from them in electronic form. I think it'd be easier to find water on Mars. Cheers, Paul

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 02:45:45AM +0200, jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

PR Stanley writes:

...

One of the reasons I'm interested in Wikipedia and Wikibook is because you're more likely to find Latex source code used for typesetting the maths. Latex is the one and only 100% tool right now. A lot of publishers use Latex but try to get anything from them in electronic form.

I don't understand you. WHAT YOU WANT? 1. Many articles in Wikipedia typeset math formulae as *images*, you don't really see the LaTeX sources. Some formulae are typed through plain HTML.

Don't forget that PR Stanley is blind. Latex page sources are infinitely superior to unadorned images of unknown providence. Stefan

Stefan O'Rear writes:

... Latex page sources are infinitely superior to unadorned images of unknown providence.

Of course, most certainly! But I failed to understand the relation to Wikipedia. OK, I see. If you look at the sources, several pages have the accompagnied by the source... <img class="tex" alt=" y = c_i x^i \," src="blah.png" /> However, extracting this from the Web page seems extremely painful... I never thought somebody would need that... Jerzy K.

At 01:48 19/10/2007, you wrote:

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 02:45:45AM +0200, jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

...

PR Stanley writes:

...

One of the reasons I'm interested in Wikipedia and Wikibook is because you're more likely to find Latex source code used for typesetting the maths. Latex is the one and only 100% tool right now. A lot of publishers use Latex but try to get anything from them in electronic form.

I don't understand you. WHAT YOU WANT? 1. Many articles in Wikipedia typeset math formulae as *images*, you don't really see the LaTeX sources. Some formulae are typed through plain HTML.

Don't forget that PR Stanley is blind. Latex page sources are infinitely superior to unadorned images of unknown providence.

Stefan

I've sent him an email explaining roughly how the screen reader technology works. Unfortunately, Mathml has a long long way before it can be classed as an alternative to Latex. Cheers, Paul

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 02:45 +0200, jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

PR Stanley writes:

...

One of the reasons I'm interested in Wikipedia and Wikibook is because you're more likely to find Latex source code used for typesetting the maths. Latex is the one and only 100% tool right now. A lot of publishers use Latex but try to get anything from them in electronic form.

I don't understand you. WHAT YOU WANT?

1. Many articles in Wikipedia typeset math formulae as *images*, you don't really see the LaTeX sources. Some formulae are typed through plain HTML.

2. MOST journal publishers who recommend LaTeX give you the appropriate .cls files. Kluwer, Journal of Functional Programming, etc. Sometimes the attached manuals contain formulae. Whom did you ask, and what did you want?

3. LaTeX is NOT the one and only one. Texts which should be printed, OK, I format in LaTeX. Presentations on screen, my lectures, seminars, etc. I format in MathML, and I show using Mozilla, etc., standard navigator. Of course, making MathML by hand is like eating oysters with shells.

I recommend then the script of Peter Jipsen http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimath.html which permits you to write your formulae intuitively, and fast. And reasonably well, although the comparison with LaTeX would be difficult.

This is my problem with XML --- the syntax is so verbose, people are driven to *author* in anything but XML. TeX can be authored directly, by a real person, using a standard text editor. Infinitely superior to XML. jcc

The trustworthy articles on Wikipedia have references that can be checked, and read. The ones without references are not to be trusted...... Dave Barton ----- Original Message ----- From: "Philippa Cowderoy" To: "PR Stanley" Cc: Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:28 AM Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Do you trust Wikipedia?

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, PR Stanley wrote:

...

Hi Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia? Paul

To a first approximation - trust but verify.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia -- if not ordained directly from the Almighty, then at least by his earth-bound agents! No, but seriously, I agree with Le Hacker Soleil, news of wikipedia's inaccuracies is greatly exaggerated. Martin jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

David Barton writes:

...

The trustworthy articles on Wikipedia have references that can be checked, and read. The ones without references are not to be trusted......

Let's apply (illegally) some recursive reasoning. Why should we trust Dave Barton? He didn't give any references either! Seriously. *PLEASE*, show me untrustworthy Wikipedia pages. But NOT stub pages, visibly waiting to be completed. I do not claim that there aren't any. Encyclopaedia Britannica is not checked by the Almighty either... But I dont like accusations without explicit proofs. There are constant revisions of W_P, and established protocols to solve disputes. And, remember that already the invitation to editing says plainly that articles without references are routinely removed. Jerzy Karczmarczuk

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On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Jules Bean wrote:

jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

...

*PLEASE*, show me untrustworthy Wikipedia pages.

Any article on a disputed territory or open political dispute.

Most articles on a controversial philosophy.

Many articles on living people.

Articles on controversal topics like HIV/AIDS, climate change, economics, generally things which are called "conspiracy theory" by enough people. You find many authors which forget good scientific style if the topic is presented in a way which contradicts to their view. "Neutral point of view" just means "Biased view which is shared by enough people".

Fortunately, articles on mathematics have several virtues which make them less likely to subject to the problems which plague the above. There is a notion of objective proof,

Most proofs in mathematics use intuitive arguments, most proofs are not formalized enough in order to be checked by machines. Ok, this can be considered a deficiency of machine provers. But in the history there were famous "proofs" which turned out to be wrong. Remember the first "proof" of the four color theorem of Alfred Kempe (cited from, you guess it, wikipedia :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem ) Or remember the first trial of Andrew Wile to prove the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture for Fermat's last theorem. It is generally hard to show that a proof is incorrect if the statement is correct.

there is a wide peer-reviewed literature which can be used as references,

Do referees actually check every proof?

there are a disproportionate number of wikipedians with mathematical ability to catch errors.

Wikipedia contains the same abuse of notation as all the mathematical literature. I just like to recall "the function f(x)". Or see the German part of Wikipedia where people have decided to restrict the category "Mathematical Function" to functions with real and complex parameters and values. (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Mathematische_Funktion) In conclusion I would not trust Wikipedia. But this holds for the rest of the world, too. Scientists must always have a basic stock of scepticism, especially for "well known" and "widely accepted" facts/believes.

shai dorsai On Oct 18, 2007, at 5:00 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

On Oct 18, 2007, at 19:53 , John Meacham wrote:

...

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 02:31:10AM +0100, PR Stanley wrote:

...

Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia?

Certainly! I honestly think wikipedia is one of man's greatest achievements, and it is just in its infancy.

For what it's worth, I'm withholding judgement on Wikipedia until it matures a bit (they're still learning how to deal with editorial issues IMO) --- but when I first heard about it I couldn't help but think of the Final Encyclopedia.

-- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH

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Paul Brown wrote:

On 10/17/07, PR Stanley wrote:

...

Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia?

I trust most of them to not be wrong, but I don't trust them to be right.

Mathematical concepts are bit like binary search -- getting the flavor right isn't that difficult, but being concise, complete, and correct is very difficult even for experts. In non-mathematics books that I've read (econometrics, operations research, etc.), some of the bits of exposition on fundamentals (multi-var calc, stats/probability, etc.) are not wrong but not quite right.

For lay purposes, wikipedia is probably fine, and any resource *that people use* that makes an effort to educate and inform on mathematical concepts deserves some thanks and support.

My $0.02.

I'd probably agree with most of that. I read a fair bit of stuff on Wikipedia. Some articles are really quite interesting, some are far too vague to comprehend, some are just explained badly, and a fair few are near-empty stubs. It's pot luck. Do I trust the material to be "correct"? Well, let me put it this way: If I read something from Wikipedia that's "wrong", what's the worst that could happen? It's not like I'm going to *use* this information for anything important, so... ;-)