[SolarNet]

And I feel like this is where better hyperlinking of papers could be used. Like not just citations, but the ability to click through to the "proven elsewhere" perhaps with a short paragraph of how the given citation proves it.

[thrmsforbfast]

Hyperlinking wouldn't provide much help. It's easy to prove this because academics have been hyperlinking for hundreds of years. A lay person finding the connection between [21,45,48,60] and the "trivial" step of theorem 15 is the problem.

So, hyperlinking is not what is needed for outsiders. What's needed is lots of extra exposition and explicit connection-building/hand-holding/narration.

The result of the hard work of doing so is typically called "a book". Which, hopefully, makes it clear why no author does this exposition and connection-building work for everything they write...

[abdullahkhalids]

Paper writing is hard. Adding more material - even supplementary material just slows down the work of good people.

On the other hand, I do feel like there should be websites where papers can be annotated by readers, who can provide missing details etc. Though this does require a lot more papers to be open access.

[visarga]

On the other hand almost all papers have a short introductory section where they present basic concepts in a concise way. I find them great for learning and reinforcing concepts. They should be collected together in a wiki. We would have dozens of variations for each concept and great coverage.

[jerf]

See: https://fermatslibrary.com/journal_club

Primary problem is interest, really. No one's going to annotate "The Last Ditch Journal Of Applied Theorem"'s non-headliner papers.

[mitchty]

Basically something like rapgenius but for papers?

[roywiggins]

https://fermatslibrary.com

[roywiggins]

Wikipedia hyperlinks definitions, but if you don't have a background in the field, following all hyperlinks off hyperlinks produces something of an exponential explosion of things you'd have to understand before you can understand a particular article.