Planet Math (http://planetmath.org/ ) is a wiki that claims on its home page “to help make mathematical knowledge more accessible”. I surfed through this site, and found that it had a very different set up from Wikipedia, which I suppose is to be expected. It’s not a list of words and concepts but from what I can tell various math projects. The wiki, like most is able to be added to and edited by its members.
However I have only one problem with this wiki. First I have to say that perhaps my greatest weakness in school has always been math. I’ve always been fond of the sciences, but math has always felt too abstract for me. When I read that for my class I was going to have to review a math wiki, I was a bit worried that my…weakness was going to make reviewing this page more difficult than it really needed to be. Then I clicked on the page link, and read the mission statement I described above on their home page. Immediately my mind jumped to Wikipedia and how its founder bragged about his goal being to make all knowledge accessible to all. I began to feel more comfortable, until I began to explore the wiki. At the very least the site organization makes it hard to navigate and truly grasp at a great deal of this math, without having a math background. Sure it may perhaps be that the math is indeed accessible to me, in a sense that I can see and read it. However without having a sufficient math background I was left feeling like I couldn’t make sense of it all. For me, I felt like it would be like having Wikipedia written all in Latin. Sure, I may recognize a “Pax” here and a “Diem” there. In the end sadly an overwhelming amount of the information would be lost to me. I felt that way with this wiki, as I would click onto an article and it felt more like I jumped into the middle of a book written in a foreign language. If I cannot easily get the background information to work forward, then math has only superficially become more accessible to me.
The lesson that can be taken away from looking through this wiki is to always remember the purpose of your wiki. If the purpose of a wiki is to make information accessible to anyone reading, it needs to be laid out in such a way that anyone can at the very least build up an understanding of a topic. In the case of math, perhaps links to earlier concepts that are vital background knowledge could have done this. If the purpose of the wiki is to only be understood by those contributing to it, then little worry to outsiders need to be given.
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