[Haskell-cafe] Do you trust Wikipedia?

Paul Brown paulrbrown+haskell-cafe at gmail.com
Fri Oct 19 14:22:47 EDT 2007


On 10/17/07, PR Stanley <prstanley at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia?

I trust most of them to not be wrong, but I don't trust them to be right.

Mathematical concepts are bit like binary search -- getting the flavor
right isn't that difficult, but being concise, complete, and correct
is very difficult even for experts.  In non-mathematics books that
I've read (econometrics, operations research, etc.), some of the bits
of exposition on fundamentals (multi-var calc, stats/probability,
etc.) are not wrong but not quite right.

For lay purposes, wikipedia is probably fine, and any resource *that
people use* that makes an effort to educate and inform on mathematical
concepts deserves some thanks and support.

My $0.02.

-- 
paulrbrown at gmail.com
http://mult.ifario.us/


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