Comments on: Tricki available for viewing

By: gowers

gowers — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:28:00 +0000

In my other reply (below) I was wrong, but we have now introduced an “Article requests” heading in the Forums section of the Tricki. Suggesting articles would be a great way to contribute to the Tricki for those who do not have the time or relevant expertise to write them.

By: gowers

gowers — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:26:20 +0000

We have now introduced a way of labelling articles as stubs, and it shows up in links to those articles. I hope this will make browsing the Tricki a smoother experience. If you come across a stub that isn’t yet labelled, then feel free to label it as one: the criterion is that it should neither contain nor link to any serious mathematical content.

By: gowers

gowers — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:52:46 +0000

Harrison, I think if you click on “Forums” you’ll find that you can indeed request an article — you just start an appropriate forum topic. Certainly we saw what you are suggesting as something we wanted the Tricki to be able to provide. And suggestions for articles are valuable, as they help the Tricki to grow. (E.g. one person might not think of an idea for an article but be able to write it when someone else suggests it.)

By: harrison

harrison — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:39:43 +0000

I’d like to see a forum or subforum where Tricki users could request specific articles. As I see it, this would have at least three distinct benefits:

1. Most obviously, if (for example) I don’t understand when Fourier analysis is useful in additive/Ramsey-type results, and the Tricki doesn’t have an article on Fourier analysis in additive combinatorics, I can request that an article be written, and certainly I’d be able to find the information I wanted more quickly than I would if I did nothing.

2. People who know of a trick that should be added to the Tricki but, for whatever reason, don’t feel comfortable writing the article themselves could work with another contributor to collect examples or write the “meat” of the article. (This would, of course, likely happen eventually due to the open nature of wikis, but having a centralized forum where people could request help would speed up the process hugely — actually, I can’t think of a single large and active wiki without some form of “help request.”)

3. Finally, it would likely contribute to building the large-scale structure of the Tricki; with easily-accessible records and discussions of contributed articles, it might clarify how everything “should” fit together.

Just a thought,

Harrison

By: Timothy Chow

Timothy Chow — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:12:21 +0000

I should have explored more of the Tricki before making my last comment, which I will now clarify by saying that I was specifically referring to the titles in the “What kind of problem am I trying to solve?” section.

Also I see that the FAQ already addresses the issue of bad ways to prove things.

By: Timothy Chow

Timothy Chow — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:04:03 +0000

You have probably already considered this, but even so I would like to hear the justification. What do you think about changing the titles to “I want to…”? So for instance, instead of “What kind of problem am I trying to solve?” the top level would be “I want to solve a mathematical problem.” Instead of “Techniques for proving existence” one would have “I want to prove existence.” This might convey the interactive, expert-system flavor that I think you were trying to convey. It would also help ensure a certain uniformity; right now the top level title is a question, the next level titles are “Techniques for…” and I see that other titles are “a good way…” (seems redundant—surely there won’t be many articles about *bad* ways to prove things? or will there? that’s an interesting thought).

One problem might be that the “I want to” format might end up being too restrictive.

By: Qiaochu Yuan

Qiaochu Yuan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:41:42 +0000

Perhaps you might want to include an article explaining what it really means to solve mathematical problems. I’ve seen some comments elsewhere to the effect that people thought the Tricki was going to be a list of arithmetic tricks or useful technical results. I think it might be worthwhile to explain that, for example, solving mathematical problems is not a matter of finding the correct formula.

By: Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e62v1

Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e62v1 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:44:30 +0000

[...] Tricki. [...]

By: Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 04/06/2009

Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 04/06/2009 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:53:15 +0000

[...] Tricki available for viewing « Gowers’s Weblog [...]

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:11:42 +0000

This may not be part of the goal of the Tricki, but I’m curious if somehow provisions could be made for the autodidact? I see a lot of examples, but not a lot of exercises, and even less in the way of *specific* places where it may be useful. Obviously you can never guide usefulness, but when trying to become well-aquainted with a trick it’s essential to be able to actually *use* it. Another direction in the same vein is to allow linking of examples where *multiple tricks* might be used, either alternatively or together.

It might be simply that my own goal would be to have a sort of “cheat sheet” to problem solving – like the heuristics in “How to solve it” by Polya, but at a much higher level. You’d want to try to develop the facility to see when applying certain tricks is useful *without any hint in advance* as to which might be. (Yes, I’m aware of the “how to prove it” books…).

Yet another thought would be to show how applications of tricks and heuristics show up in the original definitions of new theories (how what was a trick might have turned into a field or a theorem). After all, not everything in maths today was always so formal, and any new research necessitates looking at things before they are crystal clear.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Take them for what little they’re worth

By: Tricki salutes Wikipedia « What Is Research?

Tricki salutes Wikipedia « What Is Research? — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 00:42:01 +0000

[...] Tricki, Wikipedia, Wikis — vipulnaik @ 12:41 am Tim Gowers of Polymath fame announced in this blog post the release of a Prelive version of Tricki. Tricki stands for “tricks wiki”, and Gowers [...]

By: gowers

gowers — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:06:07 +0000

There’s a forum called Feature Requests on the Tricki. I’ve added this useful suggestion there (which I am not technically competent to judge), as well as a request related to Alex’s comment above. I’m hoping that people will actually use these forums, as it seems to me a good way of helping the Tricki to develop in good directions and avoid annoying aspects that get worse as it expands.

By: Emmanuel Kowalski

Emmanuel Kowalski — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:27:24 +0000

If most of the links are dynamically generated from a database, it might be fairly easy (?) to add to the front pages some rough visual indication of the length of the articles which are linked, and this might be enough to give an idea of their stub-like nature.

By: gowers

gowers — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:52:39 +0000

Alex, I’ll have a word with Olof and the other Alex and see if we can come up with an idea for this. The obvious idea — just manually putting in a warning that a link is to a stub-type article — has the problem that when a stub is turned into a proper article it is difficult to update all the links. But perhaps we could add a facility for finding all links to a given article, which would make that more feasible. But much better than that would be a way of labelling an article as a stub in such a way that the warning appeared automatically on all the links to that article. I’ll see whether O&A think that is technically feasible.

By: toomuchcoffeeman

toomuchcoffeeman — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:56:10 +0000

It would be nice if the commenter above did not require the moon on a stick Learning to forage is a much under-rated part of the mathematician’s training, IMHO.

(this is not meant as sniping, in case it comes across as such)

By: alex

alex — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 03:07:51 +0000

It would be nice if there was a way to limit your browsing to articles that have a good amount of material in them. Its inconvenient to browse through a list of articles, and on clicking on them to discover they are all essentially empty pages.

Perhaps much like wikipedia you could label some articles as stubs? And there should be an option to avoid stubs while browsing?

By: Tricki is up (kinda sorta) « Epsilonica

Tricki is up (kinda sorta) « Epsilonica — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:53:46 +0000

[...] I was starting to think it was some kind of vapourware, but the Tricki is up to view (via Tim Gowers ). You can’t edit yet, and it’s small. The articles there at the moment are well written [...]