Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics

This project aims to enable Wikipedians to cooperate, make suggestions and share ideas on the organization and improvement of the mathematics coverage of Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to join in this endeavor.

Many such suggestions and guidelines have been developed since the project began. A particularly useful collection can be found in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics, which contains a detailed discussion of issues related to writing mathematics articles on Wikipedia.

However, it is important for all of us to remember that these are only suggestions: they should help to give us focus, and inspire our contributions, but no one should feel obliged to follow (or even read) them. This WikiProject is not prescriptive. The suggestions are intended to be helpful for those who are not sure what to write, or how they can contribute, but they should not distract anyone wanting to contribute from our main purpose: to write and improve mathematics articles!

Project background and scope

This WikiProject began in 2002 to assist the creation, improvement and organization of articles in the area of mathematics. The initial goals of the project were to provide:

a standard "bare bones" format for mathematical articles
useful links for article writers
a location to discuss issues relating to this section of Wikipedia
standards for mathematical notation using wikified HTML and TeX.

In its broadest terms, mathematics includes its overlaps with physics, computer science, operations research, and other areas. However, there are now separate WikiProjects in many of these areas, and so the focus of WikiProject Mathematics has shifted towards articles which are primarily mathematical (although it still includes many aspects of theoretical physics, for example).

Much progress has been made. The overall organisation of the project is now pretty much in place, and a "house style" for mathematical articles is reasonably well established. The indices of mathematics articles now has over 30000 entries, and this list is automatically updated by a bot using the list of mathematics categories to identify relevant articles. There are also lists of articles by topic which organize articles by subdiscipline and other criteria.

When contributing new articles which are (even only remotely) related to mathematics (including biographies of mathematicians, and so on), please add at least an approximate mathematical category. This enables us to identify, and hence review and add to (or mercilessly savage!), each other's contributions.

The main issues for the project are now probably the following ones:

Bringing stubs up to a reasonable standard. There are always plenty of pages that are definition-only. We need to add motivation and examples.
Developing important articles into good expositions. As anyone who teaches the subject knows, the gap between stating some true facts, and really putting over a topic, is quite large. Here we can consider also the need to add history and proper attributions.
Expanding coverage to bring the subject up-to-date. This is a huge task, so the main requirements are patience and determination. In particular, a lot of work is still needed to bring the more advanced material up-to-date, so expert contributions are to be encouraged.
Keeping track of all relevant articles, by listing, categorising, and assessing them. As mentioned above, it is important to add even an approximate category to each mathematical article. There is also a subproject whose aim is to assess the broad field, and the importance and quality of our articles. Anyone can contribute to this task by adding or updating {{maths rating}} templates on article talk pages.
Identifying pseudo-mathematics, hoaxing, and other unattributable material. Most Wikipedians, naturally enough, don't feel qualified to pronounce on articles purporting to be mathematical, so it is up to us to identify crankery, hoaxes, and material with dubious or unverifiable sources. Anything suspect should be reported on the talk page of this page.

Things to do

Looking for something to do? The following table lists some of the places on Wikipedia where mathematics-related requests, suggestions, and tasks have been collected together.

What	Where
Catch up on the latest conversations	Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics
Expand a mathematics "stub"	Category:Mathematics stubs
Apply your expert knowledge to improve an article	Category:Mathematics articles needing expert attention
Request a new mathematics article or write a requested article	Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Mathematics, Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/missing mathematicians
Edit a mathematics article needing attention	Bot cleanup listing - goes live Mar 1, 2022. Also available from PetScan cleanup intersection query. (manual)
Flag a mathematics article needing attention	Edit the article itself and add a problem tag template. See Wikipedia:Template index/Cleanup for a list of tags.
Suggest or edit a redirect which could have its own article	Category:Redirect-Class mathematics articles
Add or improve references in a mathematics article	Bot cleanup listing for reference problems - goes live Mar 1, 2022. Also available from PetScan (manual)
Turn a "red link" blue	User:Mathbot/List of mathematical redlinks
Maintain the mathematics portal	Portal:Mathematics
Review or respond to recent activity on mathematics articles	Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Article alerts and for new articles: User:AlexNewArtBot/MathSearchResult
Help to resolve a dispute	Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Maths, science, and technology
Ask or answer a question about mathematics	Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics
Assess an article's importance and quality	Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics#Assessment of mathematics articles
Articles up for deletion	Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Mathematics
Work on drafts	Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of math draft pages

Some issues to think about

Probably the hardest part of writing a mathematical article (actually, any article) is the difficulty of addressing the level of mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader. For example, when writing about a field, do we assume that the reader already knows group theory? A general approach is to start simple, then move toward more abstract and general statements as the article proceeds. The suggestions below are intended to help us achieve this.

When describing a concept in terms of some other concept (for example, explaining rational numbers in terms of integers), be sure to:

add a (prominent) link to the relevant article (in this case, integer) — as with other Wikipedia articles, avoid duplicate links;
if it makes sense, add a very quick (and naive) explanation/description (in this case, "positive or negative whole numbers" might work).

If the relevant article has not been written yet, then create a good stub, and add a mathematical category. This will list the article in several places (for instance on the list of mathematics articles) and there is a reasonable chance that someone will expand on it.

Some terminology varies from author to author in the literature. It is therefore a good idea to check any pre-existing articles related to a topic to see if there is already an established usage. Proposals for changes in usage are always welcome: the talk page of this page is one forum where issues such as this can be raised.

New contributors may find it helpful to spend a bit of time perusing some of the existing content; this should provide some idea of what type of information is already available, and how much detail is appropriate in a Wikipedia mathematics article.

The project Wikipedia:WikiProject General Audience, whose goal is to help make articles more accessible, is also worth consulting.

Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines provides guidance for writing readable and well-referenced scientific and mathematical articles.

Conventions

The following pages attempt to describe certain conventions for articles with mathematical content. Please read, comment on, improve, criticize, and if appropriate, follow these standards.

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics), including Mathematical conventions (a working list of terminology and notational conventions)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (theorems)
Wikipedia:Algorithms on Wikipedia (proposed)
Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines

Also see:

Classification

There is no one single, prescribed method for classifying mathematics articles. Both the lists and the categories have grown organically, rather than being imported. See also areas of mathematics.

Noteworthy publications in mathematics

While we generally focus on ideas rather than the packages they're delivered in, sometimes publications are worthy of covering in their own right. For example, we have written about textbooks and monographs that meet Wikipedia's article-worthiness standard for books, and there's plenty more to do in that regard.

Assessment of mathematics articles

Mathematics articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
Quality	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA	10	4	12	4		1	31
FL			2	2			4
FM					67		67
GA	16	23	57	91		8	195
B	116	268	521	412		73	1,390
C	63	555	1,060	1,393		869	3,940
Start		70	2,421	6,494		3,144	12,129
Stub		2	93	5,013		1,280	6,388
List	2	18	85	215	7	82	409
Draft					146		146
Category					1,746		1,746
Disambig					59		59
File					339		339
Portal					2		2
Project					51		51
Redirect		4	39	485	758		1,286
Template					926		926
NA	1		1	20	189		211
Assessed	208	944	4,291	14,129	4,290	5,457	29,319
Unassessed			1	3		16	20
Total	208	944	4,292	14,132	4,290	5,473	29,339
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 119,293			Ω = 4.96

The subproject Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 provides a system to assess mathematics articles for their quality and importance, and to classify them broadly by field. This system was originally developed as part of Wikipedia 1.0, and these assessments will be used to help us to determine which articles will appear in the Wikipedia 1.0 CD.

However, article assessments are useful more generally to track the project's progress, identify weak spots in its coverage, and highlight articles which could become Good Articles or Featured Articles. Articles are assessed by placing (or updating) a {{maths rating}} template on the talk page of the article. Furthermore, the template provides an opportunity to add a brief comment on the article suggesting improvements that could be made.

The table above summarizes the current state-of-play. The links in this table point to assessment pages on which articles are listed by field and quality, complete with any comments that editors have made.

Any article can be assessed for its mathematical content, and anyone can rate an article. The only exceptions are the Good Article and Featured Article quality grades. These should only be added to articles which have been through the standard Wikipedia Good Article Nomination and Featured Article Candidacy procedures.

Recognized content

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Recognized content for an up-to-date list of recognized content in the project.

Visit the WikiProject Mathematics on Wikidata

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Barnstars

{{The Mathematics Barnstar|put your message here ~~~~}} — An award placed at another user’s talk page to recognize them for making significant contributions to Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to mathematics, or to WikiProject Mathematics itself.

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