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by phkahler 2083 days ago
>> My key take-away is to consider how the language interacts with its ecosystem, not just how it should ideally operate in isolation.

Please please, how do we convey this to the mathematicians that infest wikipedia?

1 comments

I would love someone like gwern [0] to write an analysis of how Mathematics articles on Wikipedia start off being understandable by most and then get lapped into a submicron finish that only reflects an insular subset of folks. These mathematical nuggets sit like hard grains in mud (sorry wikipedia) that only mathematicians can understand.

And in so doing, they slowly bootstrap themselves so far away from any grounding context that it is incredibly difficult for anyone to _learn_ mathematics from reading wikipedia articles.

There are groups doing great things like Setosa [1], nLab [2] and for concepts, Simplicable [3]

[0] https://www.gwern.net/

[1] https://setosa.io/ev/

[2] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage

[3] https://simplicable.com/new/communication

I had not realized that was going on, but it makes a lot of sense now you mention it.