I distinctly remember every course teaching proper use of citations back in that decade saying Wikipedia is a trash source and you should at best use it to get acquainted with a subject you have no knowledge in. Also, “pretty early days” doing a lot of heavy lifting there since it was founded in 2001. It was 10th busiest in the world by 2007 (source: Wikipedia article “History of Wikipedia” (lol)).
2009 was so late in wikipedia history that not on had every field (and subfield) made their own specialized wikipedia pages, many of them had started dying off at that point lol. Also that was a fun experiment that I wish hadn’t died. I found the specialized wikis (which had proper authorship and some peer review) to be more useful than published literature reviews as a grad student. Scholarpedia pages are still up and probably useful, but I doubt many have been touched since 2012. Might be fun to run random matlab and python code from there just to see how compatible it still is lol.
throwback to my 10 year old self reading the article on complex numbers over and over trying to understand even 3% of it, all because I heard about them in passing and it sounded interesting
I think even for people that have studied a fair bit of math a lot of it is difficult to parse. Which I guess is fair. An encyclopedia is meant to be a reference and summary of knowledge, not necessarily a teaching tool. I think it still makes an alright guidepost for something, which I can then use to find learning materials.
I distinctly remember every course teaching proper use of citations back in that decade saying Wikipedia is a trash source and you should at best use it to get acquainted with a subject you have no knowledge in. Also, “pretty early days” doing a lot of heavy lifting there since it was founded in 2001. It was 10th busiest in the world by 2007 (source: Wikipedia article “History of Wikipedia” (lol)).
2009 was so late in wikipedia history that not on had every field (and subfield) made their own specialized wikipedia pages, many of them had started dying off at that point lol. Also that was a fun experiment that I wish hadn’t died. I found the specialized wikis (which had proper authorship and some peer review) to be more useful than published literature reviews as a grad student. Scholarpedia pages are still up and probably useful, but I doubt many have been touched since 2012. Might be fun to run random matlab and python code from there just to see how compatible it still is lol.
the amount of math topics covered in some detail on wikipedia is genuinely sort of staggering.
I just wish their math articles were more comprehensible to normie dummies like me
don’t feel bad, i have a degree in that shit and a lot of is incomprehensible to me.
throwback to my 10 year old self reading the article on complex numbers over and over trying to understand even 3% of it, all because I heard about them in passing and it sounded interesting
I think even for people that have studied a fair bit of math a lot of it is difficult to parse. Which I guess is fair. An encyclopedia is meant to be a reference and summary of knowledge, not necessarily a teaching tool. I think it still makes an alright guidepost for something, which I can then use to find learning materials.