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Page design changes

13-Jan-10

Over the last few months, there have been some changes in page design on the subject wikis, with more changes scheduled for the coming months. Most of these changes have, as of now, been limited to Groupprops, but the ones that seem to be working well are being incorporated in other wikis as well. One […]

Top hundred cities for Groupprops

07-Jul-09

It’s both interesting and inspiring to know that content in Groupprops is being used (and hopefully liked) by people in many different regions of the world. Of course, both the choice of subject matter (i.e., group theory) and the choice of language medium (English, with a bias towards American spelling) limit the usefulness of the […]

Language issues

12-Apr-09

This is just a few quick notes about some of the issues of language and conventions that come up when dealing with subject wikis. One of the most basic questions is what language to use. English is the only language I know where all the requisite terminology and ideas have been developed sufficiently, so that’s […]

Success parameters for the subject wikis

24-Mar-09

It’s been slightly more than a year since I booked the subwiki.org domain, and some of the people with whom I’ve discussed the idea of subject wikis have told me that it’s an extremely ambitious project that requires more hands and better ways of measuring success. At the end of the day, it might turn […]

Proof style in the math subject wikis

11-Mar-09

Proofs are one of the defining features of mathematical content: practically any mathematical work is considered incomplete without a proof. A “proof” of a mathematical fact is a clear explanation of why the fact is true, starting from some previous known facts and agreed-upon definitions. When I initially started up Groupprops, my idea was to […]

Short survey added

24-Feb-09

I’ve created a short survey on Groupprops. A link to the survey comes up randomly in the sitenotice on Groupprops, so I’m hoping that people who visit the site will click on the link and fill the survey. This is a very preliminary survey, and is my first experience with surveys, so I’ll use this […]

Usage analysis on Groupprops

19-Feb-09

The Group Properties Wiki has been at its new location since around May 2008, and Google Analytics has been operational on it since May 10. Using Google Analytics, I’ve been able to get a fairly good idea of what pages people prefer when they visit Groupprops, how they use the website, and how to make […]

The goal of subject wikis

02-Feb-09

Having described the history of subject wikis in a previous post, I can now get to describing what I consider the ultimate goal, mission, and vision, of subject wikis. This is emphatically not my first attempt at formulating a general goal for subject wikis. In March 2008, shortly before I booked the subwiki.org domain and […]

The history of subject wikis

02-Feb-09

Subject wikis began some time around December 2006. I thought of starting a wiki on the extensible automorphisms problem, a question I had raised in group theory. A month ago, my college had used a wiki page on Editthis.info to coordinate a multi-threaded discussion on concerns about the college moving: the page is still there. […]

How do we use online references?

29-Jan-09

In a blog post elsewhere, I gave my take on the use of online references for mathematics. Three of the most used general websites for English-language mathematics reference are Wikipedia, Planetmath, and Mathworld. In the blog post, I described how I came to discover these individual resources, and how I have come to use Wikipedia […]