Tricki now fully live

Update (25/4/09). Since the launch, the number of pages on the Tricki has doubled (from 104 to 208), and is increasing fast.

Main post. If you have visited the Tricki recently, then you will already know that it has gone live. I’ve delayed posting about it until we were sure that everything was fully transferred: if you visit the prelive site you are now automatically redirected to the proper site, which you can also get to by clicking here. The URL is http://www.tricki.org.

A few small points to note here. In response to comments, we have introduced some new features. One is a feature for marking an article as a stub. Our working definition of a stub is that it should have no substantial mathematical content, and should not link forwards to any articles with substantial mathematical content. (That is, a parent of a non-stub is always a non-stub.) The thought behind this is that there are two directed graphs of interest: one with all articles, whether written or unwritten, and the other the set of all ancestors of articles with interesting content. The stub feature allows one to explore either of these trees with ease, because if an article is marked as a stub, then all links to that article are clearly marked as well, with a little leaf symbol.

Tricki available for viewing

It’s been a long time coming, but the Tricki is now on the point of going fully live. If you need convincing that this is a stronger statement than earlier and almost identical statements I have made on this blog, then click here to be taken to the site.

At the moment the site is read-only. This is for two reasons. First, we would like to give people a chance to spot flaws with the site as it now is, while it is still relatively easy to correct them. These can be anything from technical bugs to the content and organization of the articles. Any suggestions for improvement will be greatly welcomed: the best way of making them is to click on “Forums” at the top of any page on the site and to start or continue a forum topic. Of course, you are also welcome to make comments on this blog post.

The second reason is that I will be on holiday for the next week or so, and I want to be on hand when articles start coming in, in case work needs to be done in fitting them into the organizational hierarchy of the Tricki, or making sure that they are consistent with the Tricki house style.

An advantage of this final delay is that if you will have a chance to browse the site and get an idea of what it is like before contributing an article, if you have a topic that might be appropriate. If you click on “Help” and then on “Formatting on the Tricki”, you will discover that writing an article is extremely easy (at least if you know what you want to say). In particular, if you want to type in mathematical symbols, you just have to write them in TeX or LaTeX and enclose them in dollars. I hope you will agree with me that Alex Frolkin and Olof Sisask have done an amazing job and will enjoy using and contributing to the site as much as I have.