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What should be on the PlanetMath grand tour?
What should be on the PlanetMath grand tour?
posted by jac on 2009-05-10 12:56:28

Share your favorite places on PlanetMath.

I'm going to give a talk about PlanetMath at Bennington College next week. I thought it would be worth asking everyone here to point out some of their favorite articles, or other aspects of the site that they are proud of, or anything here that they enjoy, so I can put this in the talk. I'd like to turn this talk into a re-usable Tour that will make it easy to share PlanetMath with new people. So, what should we show off?

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Things to show about PM by bci1 on 2009-06-03 02:31:29
Hi, Joe:
Perhaps one of your best bets is the PM book produced with Arxana in 2005, now available on the web.
Best wishes,
IC
\bci1
[ reply | up ]
some important things to notice about PlanetMath by jac on 2009-05-21 20:53:51
These are some of the things that I would say if I
was giving someone a tour of PlanetMath. I'm sure
there are other important points -- but these seem
to be the key issues (both areas that need improvement,
and some of our strengths).

We have fewer or less prominent "general" articles than
some of our competitors:

http://www.google.com/search?q=planetmath+spectral+graph

We have OK, but somewhat less descriptive articles about
basic objects of mathematics (although perhaps our articles
are a bit more mathematically precise):

http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/LaplacianMatrixOfAGraph.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff_matrix

Our new jsMath rendering mode doesn't always work;
our HTML with images mode isn't necessarily tuned for
maximum readability.

http://planetmath.org/?method=js&from=objects&name=Orientation3&op=getobj
http://planetmath.org/?method=l2h&from=objects&name=Orientation3&op=getobj

(compare with the darker and more readable text on the
Kirchhoff matrix page at Wikipedia).

Our code repository is out of date (but I think this
in the process of changing, now that the data is being
recovered from our old server's drives -- although
this does make me wonder whether code development has
been following "best practices" for an open source
project in the mean time):

http://aux.planetmath.org/noosphere/snapshots/

Although we do have a good way to look at "related"
documents (through "See also" links, Attachments,
and Parent links)

http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/InfiniteProductOfSums1a_i.html
Child: http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=objects&id=11425
Parent: http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=objects&id=4368
Grandparent: http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=objects&id=4230
Cousin: http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&from=objects&name=InfiniteProductOfDifferences1A_i

there is no easy way to use all of this information to gather
the related articles on a topic into a "course packet" that
one could use to *learn* the topic. (Such course packets
would also provide us with a way of deciding how complete
the treatment of a topic is -- e.g., are we missing overview
articles? Are we missing useful basic examples? -- If we
could gather articles into course packets, it would be easy
to see what's missing!)

On the plus side, detailed information of this sort
is almost wholly missing on our competitor's sites!
It's long been noted that detailed coverage of proofs
is PlanetMath's strong point. I'm inclined to agree --
but perhaps we're not that good at showing off or using
this strong point.

Feature requests frequently sit around for a long time, sometimes
the code is written but the feature is not installed or not
documented.

http://wiki.planetmath.org/AsteroidMeta/email_posting_to_forums

Our list of donors is small (and so we don't have a huge
budget to go into improving anything on the list of issues
I've brought up above):

http://aux.planetmath.org/doc/donors.html

(This may change at any point in the future -- and our new
"your logo here" banner may help leverage our web presence
to invite large donations and important partners.)

Many ideas about how to improve things have been talked about
by members of the community here, but they are not particularly
well integrated with the "workflow" on or around PlanetMath,
just for example, this project I've been working on for quite
some time:

http://common-lisp.net/project/arxana/

It has frequently been suggested to me by my dad
that we should try to get PlanetMath plugged into
the One Laptop Per Child program,

http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/index.shtml

But frankly, I don't think we're ready yet, despite
the fact that "improving, porting, and developing
math and science activities for students and teachers"
is in demand in that program.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program

A key ingredient for readiness to use PlanetMath
as an educational platform would be for us to
have *problems* that can either be graded automatically
or by a teacher or self-graded (by comparing one's
own solutions with archived solutions). We don't
have anything like that currently. This would
of course be useful to math learners at all levels
and socio-economic classes!
[ reply | up ]
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