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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

We already see this with niche things like gaming fandom details (every pokemon used to have a wiki page for a bit, but now that's all properly handled by Bulbapedia) so I wonder why we haven't seen it for more serious topics before? Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.

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One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page.

I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.

I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.

Look up Abstract Wikipedia.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia

It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.

> One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page.

Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage

For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory

Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad

> almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page

There is a project page advocating more accessible technical articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic...

In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.)

Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ...

How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.

A benefit of knowing a non-english language is that my native language wiki entry usually is a good tldr of the english one.

Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math students (as in math program students, not students studying math).

Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it.

I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.

Hmm a quick check of Google brought up at least a few wikis about maths:

https://math.fandom.com/wiki/Math_Wiki https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Main_Page

And a few about engineering:

https://engineering.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Wiki

Plus a few about computer related topics:

https://dataengineering.wiki/Index

And various languages and frameworks have wikis too, like Python, PHP, WordPress, etc.

So there's definitely some interest in wikis outside of fandom topics. The Wiki listing pages on Wikipedia has at least 30% of the page listing wikis that don't involve a piece of media/fiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

I suspect the disparity is probably because hobbies and fandoms could mostly only communicate via the internet, and naturally went from fansites and hobby sites to wikis. Meanwhile more academic subjects have an audience who seem to be unsure of the value of these sorts of free resources.

Fandom is complete and utter SEO garbage - every single fandom with enough nerds to have sense has moved off of it into an actual independent wiki. IndieWikiBuddy is an extension that actually takes fandom websites, and redirects google searches to the actual community run page. https://getindie.wiki/

Oh I agree. I like to link to non Fandom wikis when their available, use that same plugin in most browsers, and support things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.

Sadly quite a few wikis still use the service, and haven't gone independent yet.

For maths, there is also ncatlab.

Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway" when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up with.

That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.

>has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on

Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either.

I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).

Not really ironic, because they can be checked.

As a practical matter however... Almost no one's going to visit the $SMALLTOWN historical society and do so. They're going to do a web search.

That's part of why digital libraries are important!

Wikipedia has its own "Wikipedia Library", which is a system to allow active editors access to high-quality sources. But if it has to be resorting to Sci-Hub or libgen to check sources for Wikipedia, that's also a form of public service.

Active _non-anonymous_ editors. Anonymous editors can't access TWL.

It relies on databases donating access to Wikipedia editors. There are other restrictions too. Most of the stuff in TWL can be accessed with a university library card that many alumni are eligible for.

Someone has probably checked them at some point. And that's good enough for me

Not if that someone was a neofascist with an agenda to rewrite relatively minor history.

Sadly that happens, and it happens a lot more than most people realize. It's way too easy to fake a reputation on Wikipedia.

There's an opposite irony, too: Wikipedia doesn't want to be a location for original research, but moving the pages out of Wikipedia means they could now be a suitable citation source for articles on Wikipedia.

From my understanding this is also sometimes a method used to get fake info on Wikipedia. Get the fake info on a secondary source, then cite that on Wikipedia.

There's an XKCD cartoon in that vein. Best to get it in print somewhere but getting information onto what is a plausibly credible source is better than nothing with respect to getting it into Wikipedia via a citation.

For extra irony, get the fake info into Wikipedia long enough that someone uses it, and then use what they wrote as a source to put it into Wikipedia.

(There's a WP: page about this problem that I think gives it a name, but I can't find it right now.)

Aha, someone else mentioned it in these comments: "citogenesis", and it was indeed Randall Munroe's coining, and the meta page is

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_in...

And it's not just a Wikipedia thing. When I was researching a book a number of years back I found some fairly consistently repeated origin stories which, if you went back to some older books, basically weren't the whole story.

I've seen this kind of stuff used in some activist style groups as well before. Someone may be trying to push some kind of agenda. While in an argument with someone they link to a Wikipedia article. That Wikipedia articles source ends up linking to the activist groups own site. That site then links to some kind of sketchy or very broad conclusion piece of "research" that is unreproducable.

So I feel like Wikipedia's rule don't necessarily make their content any more reliable. It just adds a step if you're looking to push some kind of biased/iffy opinion onto a page.

Definitely, but that's what it means to be an encyclopædia. Wikipedia is very definitely relying on foundations that are shakier than anyone expected when the project was started -- but still (at least in my opinion) firm enough to build something net positive.

I think about trying to start a math and physics wiki all the time. Basically it needs to keep track of as many major results and link them all to each other and map between their terminologies. It is so exhausting that so many results are hiding in papers from other subfields that use slightly different notations and terminology so you can't find easily find them.

It seems to me that the line has been drawn at perceived academic interest. "Notability" is highly context-dependent, but I find that it's easier to identify Wikipedia's line of notability when you consider the potential academic usefulness of a particular article. Minutae of science, history, mathematics, etc seem more likely to be "academically significant" than a county road in Michigan, or a Pokemon.

When I was a kid, I was taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source. I know I'm not the only one. Part of me wonders if their present moderation is influenced by that.

> taught to reject Wikipedia as an academic source

What ends up happening is people (including academics in published work) still use Wikipedia as a source, but just don't mention it. This is much worse than just citing Wikipedia, because it can lead to "citogenesis", whereby a claim that originated (without evidence) in Wikipedia is then given credibility by being republished elsewhere. Sorting out what happened later is a huge pain, and many examples slip through the cracks.

Overall, Wikipedia should be taken for what it is: a moderately inconsistent tertiary source written by pseudonymous volunteers some of whom are dispassionate world-class experts and others of whom are incompetent amateurs, ideologues, or trolls.

However, what I've found tracking down lots of Wikipedia claims over the years is that Wikipedia is on average no less reliable than many other kinds of sources that are taken more seriously, including paper encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journal articles (and don't get me started on newspaper articles). Every source and author should be carefully evaluated for credibility and read with at least some skepticism.

As I got older, teachers (and then professors) tended to get more comfortable with Wikipedia. I never, EVER cited Wikipedia, but it was generally acceptable to use Wikipedia as a starting point - or even to use Wikipedia as a way to find other sources. My fiancée substitute teaches between jobs, and her impression is that policies relating to Wikipedia may be more lax today than I ever saw.

For a lot of these fields researchers already feel like they are contributing to the community by writing manuscripts. Making a wiki of that written for lay people is a fruitless waste of time, wikipedia entries are good enough for lay people and people in the field would probably rather read a legitimate review article with 150 sources.

> Math, Engineering, CS could all benefit from a good wiki, I'd think.

There are some specialized ones like https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo

https://Topology.pi-base.org (a database of certain mathematical objects) started as a wiki, but transitioned to using GitHub pull requests and custom software to support automated deduction.

Folks interested in open collaborative math content may find these interesting:

- https://code4math.org/ - https://mathbases.org/

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