DispersiveWiki:Community Portal

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Linking to math reviews

Andrew Comech has written a tool called bibget. It does some neat things, e.g. UNIXPROMPT> bibget -r MR2121437 instantly retrieves the relevant math reviews reference in bibtex format. Colliand 00:07, 31 July 2006 (EDT)

Do we want to put references as [[Au2006a]] or [[Bibliography:Au2006a]]? Using the one page per reference section has the major advantage of allowing us to use the "what links here" link to hunt down all old links when a preprint is published, so I'm convinced this is the right way to go. Pblue 11:32, 31 July 2006 (EDT)

I think by fiat we are now using the former, as it is easier to type and looks nicer too. Presumably the Bibliography category will let us organise these pages easily even in the former case. Terry 23:59, 1 August 2006 (EDT)

I corresponded with AMS about linking to mathscinet from our bibliography pages. They directed me to the web page http://www.ams.org/msnhtml/getitem.html . So, for published papers in our bibliography we are free to link to mathscinet. For example, see http://tosio.math.toronto.edu/wiki/index.php/Bo1999b Colliand 12:31, 2 August 2006 (EDT)

Some reference pages, such as LiPo1993, have partial mathscinet links [1]. The string id at the end should be replaced by the associated math review number MR1249105. Is there an automated way to get these inserted into all the pages? Colliand 00:10, 3 August 2006 (EDT)

I am guessing that because we don't have specific tags for author, title, etc. one would need to build a reasonably smart system to automate things. Plus one expects references to continually be added by new authors, which we probably can't expect to adhere to any really complicated rules. Still a semi-automated system may be possible. Presumably once a mathscinet link is available one can query the AMS database in some automatic manner to aid our own somehow. Terry 00:39, 4 August 2006 (EDT)

Further correspondence with AMS from Drew Burton:

Getitem has the other nice feature that users without MathSciNet

licenses do get the cannonical bibliographic information and links to

the original article at the publisher's site when possible.

Another free tool that might be of interest is MRef for looking up

references in the MathSciNet database at http://www.ams.org/mref. It

takes normal reference strings and does an awfully good job of looking

them up in our database. It provides a variety of result formats.

E.g. I used it on your entry for BusPer1993 and got:

Buslaev, V. S.; Perel\cprime man, G. S. Scattering for the nonlinear

Schrödinger equation: states that are close to a soliton. (Russian)

Algebra i Analiz 4 (1992), no. 6, 63--102; translation in St.

Petersburg Math. J. 4 (1993), no. 6, 1111--1142 MR1199635 (94b:35256)

There is more information about our linking tools at

http://www.ams.org/tools in the "Linking" section.

It would be nice if we could write a link which takes the reference data on our bibliography pages already, uses that information to :search mathscinet, then displays the relevant mathscinet article listing. I don't know how to write such a link but will start to :experiment a bit. Colliand 11:19, 4 August 2006 (EDT)

In the long term, I think we should build a template for bibliography articles, with various arguments for bibliographic data such as author, title, etc. The advantage is that we can change the format of all articles simultaneously by editing the template. In the short term, the important thing is to get the basic data in the right place; data migration can then be done basically at any time. Terry 15:04, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

There are no, non-trivial links to the old Bibliography page. Pblue 10:52, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

There's a very basic template:bibliography. Pblue 13:41, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

Looks good! I tweaked it a little and set up one of my own references, Ta2004, using the template as an example (though I don't have access to MathSciNet right now). At some point we should migrate over but there is no urgency; it seems that one should search for a conversion process which is as automated as possible. Terry 15:04, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

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)

Why not just use Wikipedia?

Why have a separate project? Why not just edit the standard Wikipedia?[2]Crust 14:56, 25 August 2006 (EDT)

I would imagine that this would probably upset many editors in the Wikipedia community. Looking at the policies on what Wikipedia is not, I would think that putting a large number of technical pages on Wikipedia (such as the 600+ pages of bibliography) which are really of interest only to specialists would be inappropriate. Perhaps in the far future there could be some sort of merging, though. Terry 11:32, 27 August 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.