[benrbray]

Wikipedia is can actually be a great source of high-quality mathematical exposition. It is often not the best source, but I often use it as a jumping-off point for learning about advanced topics. It helps me turn "unknown-unknowns" into "known-unknowns".

[jacobolus]

The key words here are can be. Some mathematics articles are high quality, but most are somewhere between completely inadequate and blandly mediocre. If you click through all of the math-related wiki-links in even the best mathematical articles, at least half of them are going to be a disappointment. Many articles are little more than a dry definition. In general articles are missing context, history, proofs, figures, references, .... Topics that dozens of top mathematicians focused decades-long careers on, for which there are multiple hundreds-of-pages-long excellent textbooks and dozens of papers describing the historical development, have a few measly paragraphs of text and no figures. Some high-level articles contain little more than a bullet list of wiki links. Biographies of mathematicians (except for a few exceptional famous people) generally have little to no mathematical content, and do not put work in context. Mathematicians writing in English (and some older ones in German/French) get coverage but there are huge gaps in biographies of e.g. Soviet mathematicians.

The best coverage is probably of the content of typical secondary school / undergraduate math curriculum. But even then articles are often full of lists of trivia while neglecting motivation and central ideas.

The same is true for many other parts of Wikipedia though. Writing good Wikipedia articles takes a ton of work (research, organizing, writing, revising, drawing figures, building consensus with other editors, ...), and is a distributed volunteer effort, so the quality of material that does make it online is still surprisingly impressive.

[kragen]

If we can get those top mathematicians to license their textbooks and papers under CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA, we can incorporate their explanations and figures into Wikipedia.

[mateo1]

Collaborative encyclopedia writing with anonymous people on the internet turned out a lot better than expected in most cases, but writing correct and coherent mathematical proofs is not one of it's areas of success.

[krastanov]

I have not explored the English Wikipedia math proofs, but the ones on the French Wikipedia are absolutely outstanding.

[mateo1]

It could be because they are written by a single person and not edited often.

[SemanticStrengh]

Hi, sorry to hijack your comment but I saw in your description that you are a researcher in quantum computing. Slightly out of domain but I was wondering what you think about this cannonical quantization of gravity https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31290590&goto=threads%... Feel free to ignore

[layer8]

One problem with mathematical articles on Wikipedia is that there’s no DAG structure to follow. You often end up running in circles trying to understand related concepts. For many mathematical definitions/objects/theorems there’s also a lack of motivation or rationale given. Why do we have that concept/theorem? How/where is it being used in practice?

[sshlocalhost98]

I had to agree with this. While Wikipedia doesn't necessarily provide a sound information, it does provide links to different topics, which honestly I had not idea how to 'google search'