Maple Wiki

alec's picture

Everybody is invited to Maple Wiki .

It is hosted on Maple Advisor, a Maple community site independent of Maplesoft and/or Mapleprimes.

The site has started just a couple of days ago and doesn't have much of a content yet.

Alec

Comments

acer's picture

how to ensure correctness?

Hi Alec,

How should quality control be managed?

For example, I believe that this pair of paragraphs on this page are not correct.

"Only two possibilities exist: either a variable is local to the one procedure which it immediately occurs in, or it is global to the entire Maple session. Local variables are local only to their own procedure. They are not known in other procedures, even within procedures which appear within the procedure which defines them.

If you do not declare your variables to be global or local, Maple decides for you. If a variable appears on the left-hand side of an explicit assignment, then Maple assumes that you intend the variable to be local. Otherwise , Maple assumes than the variable is global to the whole session."

As I interpret those paragraphs, they are both contradicted by the following example,

For example,

> restart:

> x := 17:

> f := proc()
> local x, g;
>    g := proc()
>    local t:
>       t := x:
>       print(t);
>    end proc:
>    x := 13:
>    g();
> end proc:

> f();
                                      13

Upon reading the section "Implicit Local Variables" of the ?proc help-page it becomes more clear that the actual situation in Maple is at odds with the paragraphs above in several ways.

I'm not trying to pick on this entry in particular. I am wondering how to best manage feedback and discussion. Should the wiki have a discussion page for each information page? (I didn't see one. Sorry if I missed it.)

acer

alec's picture

Editing

Since it is wiki, everybody can edit it. The difference between anonymous editing and editing after login is that for anonymous editing RecentChanges page shows your IP address, and for registered users it shows the name under which they are registered.

If one wishes, (s)he can edit by adding something, not necessarily with deleting.

Certainly, I could add a discussion board or something like that, Plone, for instance. Perhaps, instead of current Forum (which I put there just for discussions of such topics as future site development etc.) - but that would be in a separate from wiki place (MoinMoin developers consider the absence of a discussion board in it as a plus.) 

I don't consider myself being a wikimaster - I just provide a space for it (and for other possible projects, such as independent patch library etc.)  If I understand it correctly, Wiki was mainly Alejandro Jakubi idea.

Alec

 

Not my idea

As shown here, it was a recurrent idea of many. May be that I have just insisted on it a bit more lately...

These few pages

are more initial tests and drafts than anything else. That is why I have placed  them  in my personal area. And they are in the spirit of wiki: something fast, hopefuly improving with time. Organization, content and quality control of the material should yet be discussed.

These particular paragraphs are literal copies from the Maple V manuals, from which I have taken notes many years ago. Hence, you may find outdated and/or incorrect statements. Take it, if you like, as material to start a discussion and further work. I think that it is better something than nothing.

Certainly, I do not see associated discussion pages. I do not know whether this MoinMoin wiki handles them. Assuming that there is none available, we have the email list. We may also add the comments directly on these draft pages. Presumably you should be able to edit them if you like and/or create your own.

 

alec's picture

I agree with that

I completely agree with Alejandro. At this moment, wiki is in the original testing and creation phase. It is more important to have more pages on various topics. And since it is wiki (a collaborative effort), everything can be easily edited by everybody - somebody anonymous already corrected the FrontPage for grammar :)

I think, there are associated discussion pages in MoinMoin - at least I've heard of them. I don't have much (or almost any other than reading) experience with wiki myself. That seems to be interesting though now, when I got involved into this.

Edit: OK, I found it on the SupplementationPage: people can add a discssion link to a page by putting

#pragma supplementation-page on

at the top of it. Also, it is possible to create Discussion links at the top of all pages, and I just did that.

New Edit: Actually, Discussion links don't seem to work that great - because one can't tell from the page whether there is something on the discussion page, or not. I guess, that's why they were disabled by default. It is easier to add comments at the bottom of the page: ---- (4 dashes) can be used to create a horizontal line, then a comment can be easily seen. Also, that can be titled as a Discussion, or a Comment. An additional advantage is that that avoids jumping from the original page to the discussion page and back to see the content (well, that can be avoided by opening them in different tabs in the browser, too - but that requires some additional effort.)

Alec

PS I'd like to be able to correct Maple help pages that easily - most of them need a lot of editing. That was one of my May's suggestions - convert them to wiki and put it on this site -Alec

Edit of PS: Unfortunately, there seem to be no easy way of patching help pages that would avoid including unpatched (copyright protected) content, so such patches can't be put in a public place. New help pages and new Definitions seem to be possible put in the Wiki (which is, as I understand, a public domain if the copyright is not mentioned, but could be protected by, say, Artistic license, if the author would like that) -Alec 

Licence

I see this statement about licence in Wikipedia:

All of the text in Wikipedia, and most of the images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content is freely distributable and reproducible. (See the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information.)

Opinions about this?

alec's picture

Maple Wiki license

This is one good way of doing that. Another one may be to choose Artistic license, or something different, for the whole site, as Wikipedia did. That, certainly, should be discussed. Currently, it seems as if we don't have any statement about licensing there. MoinMoin itself is GPLed, and jsMath has Apache version 2 license (which may be not compatible with GPL).

Alec

copyright

Just a small note on the PS. above and the sentence about public domain and copyright statements. It may be wise to ask wiki submitters to explicitly state that code they write and post is in the public domain (or, say, might be copied only if retaining some authorship note, etc), as far as redistribution goes.

It is my understanding that under Canadian (for example) copyright law no explicit statement of copyright is necessary for the author to have and retain certain rights over the redistribution of the material. In other words, it may not always be true that omission (in and of itself) to include an explicit copyright statement automatically places code in the public domain. In such situations it may be prudent to ask submitters either to agree to a sweeping release over redistribution rights or to include explicit release on a post-by-post basis.

And (slightly off topic), that doesn't seem to conflict with Will's attitude toward this site, which in one comment he has couched as, "Authors retain the copyright on all posts on MaplePrimes, you are free to re-use your posts on the site as you see fit."

alec's picture

I agree with that

I, certainly, agree with that, in general. For Wiki, the problem may arise if, first, the author forgets to sign. Then, if a page was edited several times by various people, it is not that easy to say who is the author of what (again, if their additions were not signed). It seems to be necessary to state explicitely some licensing that works by default (i.e. if another licensing type is not set by the author(s)).

Alec

PS Personally, I don't have any previous experience with wiki editing, so I would go with what Alejandro suggests since he is currently the only author of new pages in the wiki -Alec

alec's picture

Berne convention

Actually, after reading various choices of licenses, I think that none of them are suitable and your (pagan's) suggestion is the best one.

Berne convention says that

As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires.

That looks good. I put a link to it on the StartingPage.

Alec

alec's picture

Discussion links

Since there were practically no use of the Discussion links, I disabled them again in general site setup. For any particular page the discussion link can be added by editing it and adding at the top

#pragma supplementation-page on

In this case, when most pages don't have these links, they may be more useful - if such a link is present on the page, that means that there is a discussion page for it.

Alec

PS Also, I've changed the main entry point from FrontPage to StartingPage -Alec

alec's picture

jsmath

Just added jsmath there, so formulas now can be entered using LaTeX and displayed as nice looking formulas.

It works just by adding

#format wiki_math
<<JsMath()>>

at the top of a wiki page. Or replacing #format wiki (if it is present) with
#format wiki_math, and then adding the second line the same as above. Please
don't hesitate to experiment with that in

http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest
and
http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest1 .

Alec

gkokovidis's picture

Link location

Alec, your last two links above do not work properly.  When you move the mouse over them, you get: 

http://00002783/!x-usc:http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest and http://00002783/!x-usc:http://mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest1

It should be mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest

and mapleadvisor.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/JsMathTest1 

Regards,
Georgios Kokovidis
Dräger Medical


alec's picture

Thank you

Georgios,

Thank you!

I copied them from the MS Outlook and they looked normal, so I didn't check where they were actually pointing. I hope, I fixed them now.

Alec

PS Currently I am extending it. Just added the AMSmath, now am trying to install AMS fonts etc. -Alec

alec's picture

Maple format test

Please test version 1 (or, maybe, 0.001 :) of maple format in MapleTest, and LaTeX input, as well as new commands $\mi{ ... }$ and $$\mo{ ... }$$ (names suggested by Alejandro Jakubi) for Maple input and output, correspondingly, in JsMathTest1.

In addition to current text there, I tested code from Joe Riel's blog, Faster Permutations, by copying it from there and pasting in the middle of

{{{#!maple 

}}}

Seemed to look good.

Comments are very welcomed.

Alec

alec's picture

Comments

Also, comments can be entered (in wiki) in C-style, as /* a comment */ . Then they are usually invisible on a page, but clicking Comments at the top of the page (next to Edit) makes them visible.

If you visit wiki, take a look at recent Alejandro Jakubi articles, in particular, about Inert forms, Spherical coordinates, and Sets in Maple. I've added tables of Math characters and Delimeters available in the wiki.

Alec

Wiki Notation

It does take a bit of getting used to. However, after a while - it makes sense.

Regards, Glen

alec's picture

Wiki and rst

Exactly!

At the beginning (2 weeks ago), I tried to make rst working thinking that it would be much better (because I used to it), but yesterday I upgraded MoinMoin to version 1.7 and Python to version 2.5, installed docutils, so that rst is available, and today both Alejandro Jakubi and me played with it - and I already started to think that wiki format is more convenient :)

Alec

alec's picture

Maple input

I've just added macros for maple (red and bold) input, mi - with a prompt, and
mn - without a prompt. They were suggested by Alejandro Jakubi.

They can be used as

<<mi(some maple input)>>

and

<<mn(some maple input>>

Please feel free to experiment with them on their test page, MiTest.

I used them already in SearchAll.

Alec

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