Tricki - General discussion

Tricki Papers

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:52:08 +0000

I am not very familiar with Tricki, so I hope I am not repeating a discussion that has already occurred. But I have an idea that I think would do the Mathematics community a lot of good. I am not sure that Tricki is the best place to implement the idea, but I'd like to see what you all have to say.

As a graduate student, I know I have poured over many papers for extended periods of time, trying to understand a bit that is not written very clearly, or has some missing details, or that just went over my head.

A toast to the webmasters!

JoseBrox — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:29:20 +0000

Hi!

I just wanted to congratulate the webmasters for their quick and professional work at the basement of the Tricki. I know that "people in the shadows" does not always get as recognized as they should just because when they are not noted is when they are working at best. But it is obvious that they are doing a strong effort to put the Tricki online at full capacity as fast as possible, releasing us from debugging tasks and therefore allowing us to concentrate on writing articles and organizing other things.

Stubs

gowers — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:41:00 +0000

I want to draw attention to the fact that we mean by a stub something slightly different from what is meant on Wikipedia. Here an article has to be more content-free to count as a stub: basically, the idea is to protect readers from following links and finding that there's nothing there. But if an article contains enough of an explanation to make it clear what the trick is, then even if it is still far too small, I think it shouldn't be a stub, because there is a chance that the reader can get from it what is promised by the title.

Titles of articles

gowers — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:19:29 +0000

I have only recently developed a conscious policy about the titles of Tricki articles – it's one that I was sticking to quite a lot of the time, but not always, and without really thinking about it.

It's that if your article is about a particular technique (as opposed, say, to a subject-area front page), then you should try to think of a good title that takes the form of a command.

HTML markup for envirionments

bill — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:53:42 +0000

Do the various environments e.g. theorem, lemma, question result in any sort of identifiable information in the HTML markup. For instance, a

[lemma]

might result in the HTML element of interest carrying a class='lemma'.

I've searched a little through random articles and can't find any examples of this.

Licensing policy

olof — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:06:45 +0000

Several people have asked about the Tricki's licensing policy, so I thought I'd start off a thread about it. I don't know much about such matters, but there seem to be two main types of 'open' licence, the Creative Commons licences and the GNU Free Documentation License. As far as I can tell, the latter seems to be aimed more at software documentation, though it's also used for material on Wikipedia.

Editing articles

SixWingedSeraph — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:32:59 +0000

1) I have just finished the first draft of my first article ([Recognize that the same object fits a pattern in two different ways]). While I was writing it I saved it many times using save-and-edit and then previewed to see if my formatting was working. This resulted in an enormous list of revisions which were really just stages in writing the article. I think this happened because the first time I saved anything I hit the save button instead of the save-and-edit button. In other words, it appears that "save" means what "post" means in blog software.

Figures

devin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:27:05 +0000

A quick question: how do we upload images to tricki?

Content of front pages

emerton — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:41:09 +0000

I have edited/created a couple of front pages in the last day or so, and so have given some thought to what there content should be. Looking at some other examples, it seems that people have tended to use them simply as a holder for links to other, more specific articles.

Linking to front pages

emerton — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:13:14 +0000

I wonder if there would be any way to create links automatically to front pages. E.g., if one writes a group theory article, is there some way that it might be automatically added as a link on the group theory front page?

Possibly one would not want links like this do be added indiscriminately to all parent articles of a given child article, but front page articles are somewhat different in nature to the more content-filled articles.