Singular Planet
468A collaborative travel guide for the mathematical tourist: A passion for math, science, and technology is a common denominator for most of us in the Primes community. We are also global in scope with representation from all corners of our planet. In addition, many of us have vocations that take us to other lands or welcome like-minded visitors from far away places.
The purpose of this book is to compile a comprehensive travel guide for those who have a unique passion for the high scientific arts. I suspect that most of us would get additional pleasure in visiting the Greek island of Samos because it was the home of Pythagoras and not just a place with great beaches. There must be countless unique spots around the world that only a math or science nerd would truly appreciate. Let's find out where they are!
Guidelines
- Types of places: Any and all categories. Institutions, museums, book shoppes, squares and monuments, cafe's, cemetaries, etc. etc.
- Level of detail: More detail is better. Addresses, photos, directions, phone numbers, Web links, etc. Also, we want your personal impressions, stories, experiences.
- How to post and comment: First, check to see if your country of interest is listed. If it is not, then you need to create one via "Add child page". If it is follow it and then see if your specific location is already there. If it is not, add it as a new child page otherwise select it and add it as a new comment. In general, we encourage you to add to existing content as well as creating new entries. There must be thousands of inspiring sites in London, Beijing, San Francisco, Cairo, ...
- Editing: You can edit your own or if you've noticed a mistake or another's post needs updating easiest is for you to enter a comment. Depending on the nature of the comment the original author or a moderator may make appropriate adjustments.
Happy travels!
Tom 4, your MaplePrimes Travel Editor
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- Hello there,
How may I plot
3 hours 36 min ago - Some precision
5 hours 11 min ago - Thank you, I am sure this
5 hours 22 min ago - simple
6 hours 6 min ago - error bar
7 hours 8 min ago - Listen
7 hours 34 min ago - errorbar
7 hours 54 min ago - Why plot?
8 hours 45 min ago - deleted
8 hours 38 min ago - lagrange
10 hours 15 min ago
Comments
Not a Wiki
The editing policy described above clearly marks this experiment as not a wiki.
A wiki allows users to update the content directly.
What is a Wiki
Wiki Design Principles
I'd suggest that the site designers spend some time looking at other successful wikis. One of my favourites is the original wiki:
Portland Pattern Repository
Some important things to note:
Anyone an edit any content at anytime. Comments are made as part of the editable text. This means users can make changes to other users comments as well as the main text. When good information is presented in "comments" it can be merged into the main section of the page and the comments removed.
This current system seems a lot like blogs with hyperlinks, which is not all that different than what we had before.
Also, why a travel wiki? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a wiki about Maple? I mean the whole point of this site is to build a community of Maple Users.
Darin
--
Kernel Developer
Maplesoft
We know
We never said that Singular Planet is a wiki. Tom did say that it is "Wiki-like" in that many people can contribute to the book in a freeform style.
We are looking into adding a proper wiki system to MaplePrimes. We hope that Singular Planet can be useful as it is now.
I'll let Tom reply about the topic of the book.
____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft
Why a travel guide?
It's true that a travel guide does not jump into one's mind when one thinks of a Maple site. There are two principal reasons why I chose this:
1) as we are entering some new territory for us. The notion of collaborative content (wiki or non-wiki) is still a bit of an art -- though, as you point out, more and more successful sites are emerging. A "fun" context would be something that helps us work out some of the technology and infrastructural side and is very consistent with the spirit of the beta. The theory is that this experience will identify challenges and allow us to work out solutions prior to something more ambitious. And there will definitely be focused Maple Wiki's.
2) from the beginning, we had envisioned this site as more than Maple Q&A (though admittedly, this will be the thing that draws people to the site). My thinking goes along the line of "if we had the attention of hundreds of people skilled in Maple, math, and computers, what could we build?". This is the flipside of the Primes question, "how do we get better information out to our users?".
To tell you the truth, IMHO, 2) is in no way frivolous or meaningless. Anyone who has travelled knows the great pleasure in discovering out of the way places that has real meaning for them ... and for many of us in the Primes community, real meaning is often derived from math and science. If I had known that Goettingen was a center for German math history, I would have instantly put it on my itinirary on my vacation 2 years ago. Reality is, this type of info just doesn't exist anywhere in a convenient form ... but it is something that is enriching though it may have very little relevance to effective use of Maple. If not here, then where? If not us, then whom?
Thanks for your comments and concern about the focus of the site.
Tom 4.
Virtual tourists
The web site inSecula contains a lot of pictures of museums around the world.
You can find science museums among them, like la Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, France.
Travel Guides
If this were a wiki travel guide I would have liked to contribute. Is it still possible to contribute somehow? I write www.bigtravelweb.com - a South America travel guide - in my free time. I find the most important information tourists seek on destinations is normally with regards to the climate and maps. Good luck with the project!