[Wikipedia-l] Re: planetmath and wikipedia

Thu Nov 8 17:24:37 UTC 2001

Simon suggests some sort of integration between plantemath.org and
Nupedia/Wikipedia. 

All three projects are GFDL'd, so collaboration is easy (planetmath
requires no invariant sections). No work is ever lost. I don't see a
need for tight integration, and as Simon pointed out, the projects
differ in several respects. Whatever good content they produce at
planetmath we will use; whatever good content we produced at wikipedia
they can use. Everybody wins it seems.

Planetmath has however vastly superior math typesetting support since they
integrate LaTeX. I am pretty sure that eventually a feature like that
will be available on Wikipedia as well: you type 
  $$ \sum_{i=1}^n i^2 $$
into a wiki article and TeX will convert the formula behind the scenes
into a graphic to be included in the page. That would also be useful
for chemical structure formulas and drawings. Such a system, called
mathwiki, is running at http://www.mathcircle.org/cgi-bin/mathwiki.pl.
The code is based on Cunningham's wiki.

Axel