[dosshell]

One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page.

I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.

[jacobolus]

> almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page

There is a project page advocating more accessible technical articles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Make_technical_artic...

In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.)

Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ...

How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.

[bee_rider]

I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.

[jjmarr]

Look up Abstract Wikipedia.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia

It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.

[armchairhacker]

> One problem I encounter with math wiki is that I almost need to know what it is before reading to understand the wiki page.

Case in point, nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage

For instance, https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/homotopy+type+theory

Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad

[IshKebab]

Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it.

I recommend Mathworld. Much much better.

[rightbyte]

A benefit of knowing a non-english language is that my native language wiki entry usually is a good tldr of the english one.

Many of the english math entries seem to be written for math students (as in math program students, not students studying math).