Paul Brown wrote:
On 10/17/07, PR Stanley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
I'd probably agree with most of that.
I read a fair bit of stuff on Wikipedia. Some articles are really quite
interesting, some are far too vague to comprehend, some are just
explained badly, and a fair few are near-empty stubs. It's pot luck.
Do I trust the material to be "correct"? Well, let me put it this way:
If I read something from Wikipedia that's "wrong", what's the worst that
could happen? It's not like I'm going to *use* this information for
anything important, so... ;-)
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
