DispersiveWiki:Community Portal

This is the portal for discussing the general Dispersive Wiki project and for making announcements. You can sign your name and timestamp by writing three or four tildes ~~~ at the end of your message, and use : at the start of a message to indent. Use == (title) == to start a new topic.

Older discussion has been archived here.

Equation template

I'm trying to organise the standard information on each equation in a template, Template:Equation. You can see some instances of this template in action on the cubic NLS page, as well as on some of its children. I'll slowly start propagating this template across the equations (also an excuse to do some more cleanup as I revisit each page). Terry 01:18, 8 August 2006 (EDT)

More generally, we now have a template page to organise the emerging set of templates we will use. Actually we could use some very short templates, such as a Schrodinger template to get that umlaut automatically in there, or perhaps templates for popular journals which contain HTML links to their web pages; the possibilities are endless :-). Terry 15:05, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

Copyright

Ugh, I hate legal issues, but at some point we have to choose a copyright license for this wiki to govern how the content can be copied in the future. It seems that most Wiki's use the GFDL, which basically allows anyone to copy the material so long as they attribute the source, and also extend the same freedom to subsequent users of the material - the term for this seems to be "copyleft". (See for instance Wikipedia's copyright license.) I am not experienced with these things but this seems reasonable enough to me. Any thoughts? (Eventually the licence sill need to be put on this page.) Terry 11:20, 11 August 2006 (EDT)

The DispersiveWiki is now protected under the GFDL copyright. Colliand 11:49, 13 September 2006 (EDT)

Connections to other Wikis

I am actually gate crashing your site. I have set up a wiki similar to your own devoted to water waves. www.wikiwaves.org At the moment it is something of a one man band - with help from a few arm twisted students and collegues. I am really impressed with what you have done here - I naievely hoped that all I had to do was organise the website and others would join. I am wondering about a few points of connection

1. It might be good to have links across wikis - i.e. if some water wave equations are dicussed on your site, then we should have a link to your site.
2. It might be useful to share resources - for example we have a program to convert latex to wiki. We have developed this program but it has also been developed by others and can always be improved
3. Marketing - it will be easier for me to say to collegues - checkout this great wiki on ... - why don't you help to make one for our subject.

One idea I have is a central wiki site from which could contain general information and a pointer to scientific/mathematical wikis. I also think that having a name for these kinds of wikis would be useful - branding is everything!

I hope this posting was fine - I didn't know of a better place to put it.

Thanks for your link to (and work on) the water waves wiki and other tools. There are definitely connections between the two wikis since many dispersive equations (e.g. Korteweg-de Vries, nonlinear Schrodinger, Davey-Stewartson) emerge in certain asymptotic regimes from the water wave problem. We should indeed include relevant interlinks between the wikis.

I like your suggestion about forming a central "mathematics wiki" which would point to sub-wikis like the dispersive and water wave wikis. (See also the knot atlas wiki [1]) A main issue that we have been facing with the dispersive wiki is standardization of content, especially references. We'd like to move all our references into a template with links to mathscinet and arxiv. To do so, we'd like to develop a robot which will automate the content editing into templates. Tools like this would be very useful across all math wiki pages. Jim 10:25, 31 August 2006 (EDT)

I hope this is the place for this converstation. I feel like I am finding my way with this - it would be great if all this stuff had been worked out already but that is our job. I believe that the wiki model is incredibly powerful and is the best way to try and organise knowledge in a field where it is simple impossible for one person to know everything. However - its a very new form.

The central "mathematics wiki" would be great - it could point to other wikis and it could also be a place to store all the information that is common to all wiki sites, i.e. how do you set up an account, how do you convert latex to wiki, what format do we have for figures etc. It could also be a place to discuss ideas about formats etc. If the idea takes off we may have many more issues to try and work out.

You are lucky to have problems with the standardisation of content - it means more than one person is working on the wiki! The idea of the robot is fantastic. Our format for references is based on the name - I have actually changed it once. I wanted a system that minimised the same entry ending up in the wiki twice, and one where you could guess the form of it with a reasonable chance of success.

There is a list of Math Wiki's at [2]. It's not very extensive yet, as you can see. At some point we should add this wiki to that list, I guess. Terry 23:46, 3 September 2006 (EDT)