{"id":258,"date":"2009-11-20T17:02:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-21T00:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glencora.org\/?p=258"},"modified":"2009-11-20T17:02:43","modified_gmt":"2009-11-21T00:02:43","slug":"mathworld-v-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/2009\/11\/20\/mathworld-v-wikipedia\/","title":{"rendered":"Mathworld v. Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was a mathematics undergraduate in the <a href=\"http:\/\/mathworld.wolfram.com\/\">MathWorld<\/a> generation. \u00a0It spread like wildfire in our department. \u00a0I stopped carrying textbooks around with me &#8211; instead I could just walk into our undergraduate lab and look something up. \u00a0MathWorld was every math textbook I needed. \u00a0(A friend of mine was blocked from MathWorld after trying to download all the pages.)\u00a0We mourned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ericweisstein.com\/authors-rights\/erics_commentary.html\">the year MathWorld disappeared<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike my immediate reliance on MathWorld, I have been a slow Wikipedia adopter. \u00a0The information on MathWorld seemed more reliable that Wikipedia could ever be, as it is contributed to (exclusively?) by mathematicians. \u00a0That said, I can&#8217;t imagine Wikipedia going down for a year. (At least, not before the zombie apocalypse starts.) \u00a0I find myself more and more using Wikipedia for technical matter. \u00a0I don&#8217;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. \u00a0I think the information on Wikipedia (even for MathWorld-type entries) is richer. Wikipedia entries tend to be more pedagogical than MathWorld&#8217;s, handy now that I am teaching.<\/p>\n<p>I still don&#8217;t trust Wikipedia, though. \u00a0It is a good, quick first reference; a source of examples. \u00a0I&#8217;m hoping to incorporate Wikipedia participation into my graduate classes once I&#8217;ve figured out this teaching thing. \u00a0Perhaps I&#8217;ll become more trusting of Wikipedia one day, but I wonder if I&#8217;ll ever rely on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was a mathematics undergraduate in the MathWorld generation. \u00a0It spread like wildfire in our department. \u00a0I stopped carrying textbooks around with me &#8211; instead I could just walk into our undergraduate lab and look something up. \u00a0MathWorld was every math textbook I needed. \u00a0(A friend of mine was blocked from MathWorld after trying to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106172,778],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mathworld","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}