Someone has to be evil and mention this: MediaWiki If you are willing to sacrifice absolute editorial control, the wiki documentation can develop organically at its own pace and in the manner that the writers choose.
There is already a site that wove together Mathematica and MediaWiki. The same could probably be done for SAGE. Of course, that site hasn't done so well because the Mathematica user base is so small and the pre- existing documentation for Mathematica nullifies much pf the possible benefit of the wiki. Not to mention that MMA 6 broke the site... Doesn't MediaWiki already support some TeX/LaTeX? On Jul 22, 8:41 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I think SAGE might potentially greatly benefit from certain types of new > documentation. Unfortunately, after consider a number of possibilities, > I'm unsure about how to proceed. I'll discuss the best idea Josh Kantor > and I came up with below. Let me know what you think, or suggest > something else if you have any other ideas, or let me know what your > concerns are (or if you would like to volunteer some writing). > > We could create a new manual, similar in format to the "SAGE > Tutorial", "SAGE Reference > manual", etc., but instead entitled "SAGE Overview". This latex document > might > have chapters entitled as follows, and primary contributors as listed > to the right: > * Calculus -- me, Bobby Moretti, ?? > * Combinatorics -- Robert Miller, Emily Kirkman > * Algebra -- Martin Albrecht, David Joyner > * Number Theory -- William Stein, Jaap Spies, David Kohel > * Linear Algebra -- Josh Kantor, Robert Bradshaw, William Stein > * Numerical Computation -- Josh Kantor > * Plotting -- Tom Boothby, Josh Kantor, Me, Alex Clemesha > > Each chapter would have a few paragraphs that overview what one can do > in SAGE related to each topic, followed by sections that go into more detail > with examples. This is probably a very rough prototype of the sort of > information the numerical computation chapter might provide: > http://www.math.washington.edu/~jkantor/C_Fortran/C_Fortran.html > > The idea is that if you're a new users to SAGE, after getting > some very basic feeling for SAGE, you flip directly to the relevant > chapter of the book *for you*, e.g., if you do algebra you read that > chapter, if you do calculus you read the calculus chapter, etc. > And in reading that chapter, you get a pretty good sense of > what SAGE is capable in your specialty, where to find further > documentation (e.g., when you read about number theory, > you learn that SAGE includes NTL, that NTL can do blah, > and that you can find out more at location xyz). Also, there > are some (but not too many) doctested examples throughout. > > What do people think? People would contribute to this document > using hg_doc patches, just like they do now with tutorial, etc., > contributions. > > An alternative would be to create short books for each topical > area. This might be more manageable, or it might be less > manageable; I'm not sure. > > -- > William Stein > Associate Professor of Mathematics > University of Washingtonhttp://www.williamstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
