Aims And Ideals

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Advice For New Users

So, what is this site for?

It has several purposes:

For teachers looking for extension material
For speakers looking for talk outlines
For students looking for project ideas
For anyone to discover that maths is not a collection of isolated facts,

... it's a richly interlinked, inseparable web of ideas.

It's pretty bleak ...

Yes. The site - at the moment - is stark. Simple black text, few pictures, fewer animations, and very little colour. In short, some people will find it a complete turn-off.

Maybe that will change with time, but for now, the purpose is not "entertainment". We are working to bring richer content to it, but the initial aim is to create connections.

The purpose of this site is not to be an encyclopedia. We can't compete with Wikipedia or MathWorld, and nor would we want to. That would be a waste of effort.

So what is the purpose?

We want to create an interconnection-rich set of pages, each with a single topic. Each page should be small, concise, and have a taster of the topic, and then perhaps give a reference to a page elsewhere with more details. Perhaps even giving a search term, so even if the destination pages change, Google can still give good references.

We are not competing with:

The idea is to create a large number of small pages. Each page just touches on the main points of a single idea or topic. These then get linked automatically to each other by the underlying system. It's the interlinking that drives this site.

Unlike WikiPedia, you don't need to do anything special to make the linking happen. If some text matches a page name, the link will come. You don't even need to run words together. Even if there are spaces between words, just as in normal text, the links will still be made.

Sometimes, of course, there may be links we don't want. We can deal with that when it happens. To start with we simply need a lot of pages. I've started, and I'm simply going to do a brain- dump of everything I can think of.

What should you do?

Fix things

If you see an error, you can fix it. At this stage almost every page can be edited by literally anyone. When the site goes live and gets advertised I'll lock down some pages so they require passwords. For now, please, read the good style page, and edit.

Contribute pages

All I want is two pages per week. That's all. If you put in more then that would be fantastic. I'm continuing to work on the navigation side, so you can start with a page and get a cloud of related pages, or two pages, and get a path between them. I'll also be contributing.

You are the first, and your efforts are critical. If it seems like something isn't working, please, try it again, making clear and precise notes of exactly what you do so I can reproduce it. There will be teething problems, but the most critical thing is to get the initial material.

Who am I writing for?

I see this as aimed at all ages from 14 up, but really technical material should be left elsewhere and referenced. This site is intended to create links, not to become an encyclopedia.

Please help make this work.

Thank you for your efforts. You are the chosen few, and I think we can create something fantastic.

Looking forward to working with you.

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