Community Portal
From TheTangentBundle
Scope
The purpose of maintaining these wikis is to teach and to learn from others. A loftier but perhaps achievable goal is to create an up-to-date, comprehensive and authoritative repository of established knowledge, as well as a forum for academic exchange.
If you spot mistakes, please let me know. If you would like to contribute, you can easily request to become an editor, or simply give me a shout if you'd like. We are always looking for help.
Goals
- Generate academic quality content
- Spread the word
- Improve site appeal
- Write documentation
Discussion
General discussions about article proposals and collaboration efforts take place on the TheTangentBundle talk page. Feel free to start a new thread there.
Questions
Most frequently asked questions
How is this project different?
This project is not what is nowadays thought of as an encyclopedia. Instead, it is meant to be a comprehensive, self-contained resource for use by students, educators and researchers.
Do we really need another online resource/encyclopedia/knowledge base
A truism learned from economics is that healthy competition almost always benefits the consumer. The same can be said of education.
How can I help
See Contributing further down below.
Who owns the content
All the content is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. While this is different from being in the public domain, it means that anyone is allowed to freely copy the material (with proper attribution) without leaving the project and its contributors open to exploitation.
Will it always be freely available
Yes. Hopefully philanthropy will be proportional to bandwidth costs as the site becomes more popular.
What about vandalism? Is this project a reliable and reputable source
In order to edit pages, a user must first create an account and request editing privileges. This prevents the majority of drive-by, anonymous vandalism that plagues projects like Wikipedia. As time goes on, the many eyes of peer review will hopefully take over to ensure that the majority of content is reliable and accurate, and only then can a reputation develop.
How do I cite an article
It is probably premature to do so, as most articles would be considered tertiary sources, and citing tertiary sources is academically frowned upon. As time goes on, it is hoped that more and more articles will be built from primary sources, and that more original content will be created, but it is always a good idea to look at the list of references at the end of an article.
Which subjects are currently available
The only subjects that are being developed by this project are Physics and Mathematics, since there is significant integration and overlap between them. Depending on the success of the project, other subjects in the physical and life sciences as well as engineering could be developed as well, but as of yet there aren't any interested contributors in these areas.
Contributing
Signing up
You can create a site-wide account at www.thetangentbundle.net which works on all wikis hosted on this domain.
Becoming a contributor
If you would like to contribute to these projects, please see request editorship or drop me a line. Help is definitely needed.
See also editing guidelines.
Ways to contribute
- Write articles.
- Correct or report mistakes.
- Produce quality diagrams and pictures to accompany articles (SVG, PNG preferred).
- Contribute material that is compatible with the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.
- Flesh out documentation and pages like this one.
More ways to contribute
- Spread the word
- Link to www.physics.thetangentbundle.net or www.mathematics.thetangentbundle.net.
- You tell us!
To do list
This project has a few things that need to be taken care of. See to do list.
