I was a mathematics undergraduate in the MathWorld generation. It spread like wildfire in our department. I stopped carrying textbooks around with me – instead I could just walk into our undergraduate lab and look something up. MathWorld was every math textbook I needed. (A friend of mine was blocked from MathWorld after trying to download all the pages.) We mourned the year MathWorld disappeared.
Unlike my immediate reliance on MathWorld, I have been a slow Wikipedia adopter. The information on MathWorld seemed more reliable that Wikipedia could ever be, as it is contributed to (exclusively?) by mathematicians. That said, I can’t imagine Wikipedia going down for a year. (At least, not before the zombie apocalypse starts.) I find myself more and more using Wikipedia for technical matter. I don’t think it is solely because I am less likely to look up definitions of groups and more likely to look up definitions of complexity classes. I think the information on Wikipedia (even for MathWorld-type entries) is richer. Wikipedia entries tend to be more pedagogical than MathWorld’s, handy now that I am teaching.
I still don’t trust Wikipedia, though. It is a good, quick first reference; a source of examples. I’m hoping to incorporate Wikipedia participation into my graduate classes once I’ve figured out this teaching thing. Perhaps I’ll become more trusting of Wikipedia one day, but I wonder if I’ll ever rely on it.
The information on MathWorld seemed more reliable that Wikipedia could ever be, as it is contributed to (exclusively?) by mathematicians.
Actually, MathWorld has no edge on reliability, at least for advanced topics. It was created mostly by Eric Weisstein, a former astronomer and amateur mathematician who had been collecting this information since he was in high school. Early versions on the web were absolutely full of serious errors (usually not in elementary stuff, but in anything a high school or college student might find difficult or exotic), and the errors have only gradually disappeared.
P.S. I hope you realize that the reason MathWorld disappeared for a year was because of some extremely foolish business activities by Weisstein. After signing over the full rights to the work to CRC Press when they published it, he later tried to sell Wolfram the electronic rights. Of course, CRC Press sued, and they were clearly going to win based on their contract with Weisstein, so eventually he and Wolfram settled with them. Weisstein has tried to explain/justify his actions based on a very unclear understanding of copyright law, but the moral is that before you sign a contract for your life’s work, you had better figure out what the contract means. (Sorry for the rant – it just bugs me that Weisstein describes this as “author’s rights” in the commentary you linked to, while I think a fair description would be that he tried to violate the publisher’s rights.)
Really? My experience is exactly the opposite. I loved the idea of Mathworld when it appeared, and I too mourned its disappearance (thanks to the lovely combination of publisher greed and author stupidity), but I never actually USED it. Wikipedia, on the other hand, I use all the time.
Despite ten years of editing, Mathworld still looks amateurish—no surprise, considering Mathworld was put together by a mathematical amateur. It’s rife with errors, in both mathematics in scholarship. But Wikipedia is regularly edited by professional mathematicians, and it shows. (Hi, David!)
(The closest thing to Mathworld when I was an undergraduate was the CRC Handbook, back in the days when handbooks actually fit in the hand. I miss those log tables.)
I didn’t think about the experience factor. I used MathWorld as an undergrad, but didn’t start looking at Wikipedia until late in grad school. I no doubt have higher standards now.
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