User:Lorenzo.Najt

Personal[edit]

I'm a math graduate student at UW-Madison. I've recently started contributing to wikipedia.

Editing philosophy[edit]

- My editing philosophy is probably wrong in ways I will realize in 4-5 years time. If you can save me a few years, just let me know!

- Math wikipedia should be an interconnected set of notes that are refined through many different minds reading and improving the exposition. Most textbooks or lecture notes have obvious flaws and typos. We can eliminate these in a continuously and communally edited document.

- Someone studying a new concept or theorem should be able to find folklore insights on or through Wikipedia, as well as pointers to how a concept fits into the broader landscape.

-- There are many topics for which I've been exposed to the conceptually insightful viewpoint only years after first learning about them. They should be on the corresponding wikipedia page.

- Wikipedia should also be a convenient and reliable reference for researchers wanting to quickly look up hypothesis, terminology or formulae.

- It's better to put content out there than for it to be perfect. I will do my best to catch typos and errors and perfect formatting in the content I contribute, but am also relying on the anonymous crowd to catch things I miss. I will see how well this works. Hopefully I will learn a lot from edits made to content I contribute!

- There are going to be diverging views about what bits of folklore or connections to the web of mathematics are 'essential.' Hopefully these disputes can be resolved in a reasonable manner.

-- I think it is more costly to declare something essential to be inessential, and will generally try to err against such errors. The obvious cost I'm ignoring when I do this is that articles become bloated, making it difficult for readers to find information on a page. However, there are organizational ways to deal with bloat, such as by creating new pages with pointers to them, or using better formatting and page organization tools. I would like to become better at using such tools.

- Proofs: I am a fan of putting proofs and examples on wikipedia, especially as this allows people to add remarks, correct typos, and point to other concepts in a way that is usual inaccessible in lecture or textbooks. It can also be a problem if they break the flow of a page, so long proofs should go in the following environment:

{{Collapse top|title=Proof of ...}}
The proof of ... proceeds as follows:

...
{{Collapse bottom}}

--> Perhaps some of the writing I want to do would be better suited for this: libretexts.org

Recent content contributions[edit]

Articles I've contributed to recently, listed here so I keep going back to correct typos and improve writing/formatting:

Drafts I'm working on currently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:%E2%99%AFBIS