Timeline for Polymath-type projects for textbooks?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 29, 2020 at 10:25 | review | Close votes | |||
| Oct 4, 2020 at 3:04 | |||||
| Sep 29, 2020 at 10:08 | comment | added | a3nm | Does this answer your question? Examples of (Git) open math (texts) projects | |
| Dec 29, 2018 at 19:06 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Jan 15, 2018 at 15:22 | comment | added | Tom Leinster | The question in the title is different from the question in the text. Which one do you want answered? I.e. do you want a list of polymath-type textbooks, or do you want a list of reasons why there aren't many crowdsourced projects for math textbooks? If it's the first one, then maybe this is a duplicate of the question @darijgrinberg mentions. If it's the second, there are some clear reasons: most textbooks come about through an author teaching a course for several years then deciding to turn the notes into a textbook, and by that stage it's too late for crowdsourcing. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 15:18 | comment | added | darij grinberg | ... of notations, changes the spelling to American English, or adds a short informal summary that may and may not square with the original author's intent. The Wiki or github mechanics can be of much use in textbook writing, but you should not expect a number of contributors comparable to Wikipedia's. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 15:15 | comment | added | darij grinberg | Related question, providing some examples of crowdsourced textbooks: mathoverflow.net/questions/282340/… . Usually, the inhibition threshold for contributing to such a project (beyond fixing typos) is relatively large because one needs to get familiar with the style and the prerequisites of the text and have something worth contributing (not easy when several good hands have already worked on the text). Unlike on the Wikipedia, authors don't usually want a pull request that just replaces notations by a different set ... | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 15:11 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @AlexandreEremenko: Wikipedia suffers from its own set of problems, but most importantly it is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a textbook. The fact that a few of its articles are textbook-quality and textbook-level-of-detail is a fortunate accident. Textbooks are written very differently and with different requirements. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 14:51 | answer | added | Adam P. Goucher | timeline score: 13 | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 14:50 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | Keep in mind that doing this is not always an altruistic task. In many such cases I suspect the writing such notes and textbooks provides a useful learning opportunity to the author. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 14:02 | comment | added | user60665 | @FredRohrer Very nice example! That is exactly the kind of project I had in mind! I wonder if there are others in different fields. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 14:00 | comment | added | Alexandre Eremenko | Mathematical articles in Wikipedia are an example of what you can achieve in this way. Most of them are of poor quality. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 13:58 | comment | added | Fred Rohrer | But there are. | |
| Jan 15, 2018 at 13:47 | history | asked | user60665 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |