MathWorld and Wikipedia

By Xah Lee. Date:

dear wikipedia addicts:

whence did wikipedia became rule this and rule that? Use your brain and respect yourself. When you stick to a rule, it would be because you judge it proper. Meanwhile, try to improve your own learning, and respect those who have more than you. Try to get out of the sophomoron status. Ingest some perspectives hither and thither: http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25 (actually, go read a few printed books by dead authors)

as to the edit in question, See: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WallpaperGroups.html

eric weisstein1999
MathWorld article on Wallpaper Groups, 2000.
eric weisstein2000
MathWorld article on Wallpaper Groups, 2000.

and you shall see how wallpaper group is waywardly categorized under Finite Groups. (if that is ever corrected, i demand an acknowdgement.) As to it asserting that the sphere is a minimal surface, i don't have a printed artifacts of evidence. But a gander at year 1999 version (http://icl.pku.edu.cn/yujs/MathWorld/math/s/s556.htm) and you'll see the veracity of the general comment of how bad the work was. And if you are a math professor teaching graduate courses, you are aware how full of egregious errors and inanities MathWorld is today.

MathWorld is to Mathematics as Wikipedia is to Britannica. Good for recreation, laughable for research. And that Eric W fellow is self-pitching auto-aggrandizing, so are wikipedians being OpenSourcing sophomorons in general. Nevertheless, they are tremendously useful as they are. They need not be burdened with the "encyclopedia" title. And i believe, thru evolution of the editing process and thoughts, eventually wikipedia can become a reference for experts as well. But that will not happen as long as these wiki-sophomorons chanting NPOV this or Wiki-Creeds that.


i check MathWorld perhaps once a month. Today i checked out the Whitney Umbrella. And lo! it says that the Whitney Umbrella x^2-y^2*z == 0 has a handle that's the negative z-axis. What sophoremoron: “umbrella must have a handle!”. Btw,i've also saved it for future proof. Btw, Eric, if you ever corrected this one, i demand a acknowledgement on this too. Xah Lee 00:06, 2005 Jan 13 (UTC)

On Wikipedia at xahlee.org