PlanetMath is a free, collaborative,

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, is a digital encyclopedia accessible through the Internet. Some examples include pre-World Wide Web services that offered the '' Academic American Encyclopedia'' beginning in 1980, Enc ...

. Intended to be comprehensive, the project is currently hosted by the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

. The site is owned by a US-based nonprofit corporation, "PlanetMath.org, Ltd". PlanetMath was started when the popular free online mathematics encyclopedia MathWorld was temporarily taken offline for 12 months by a court injunction as a result of the

CRC Press The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information technol ...

lawsuit against the Wolfram Research company and its employee (and MathWorld's author) Eric Weisstein.

Materials

The main PlanetMath focus is on encyclopedic entries. It formerly operated a self-hosted forum, but now encourages discussion via Gitter. An all-inclusive PlanetMath ''Free Encyclopedia'' book of 2,300 pages is available for the encyclopedia contents up to 2006 as a free download PDF file.

Content development model

PlanetMath implements a specific content creation system called ''authority model''. An author who starts a new article becomes its ''owner'', that is the only person authorized to edit that article. Other users may add corrections and discuss improvements but the resulting modifications of the article, if any, are always made by the owner. However, if there are long lasting unresolved corrections, the ownership can be removed. More precisely, after two weeks the system starts to remind the owner by mail; at six weeks any user can "adopt" the article; at eight weeks the ownership of the entry is completely removed (and such an entry is called "orphaned"). To make the development more smooth, the owner may also choose to grant editing rights to other individuals or groups. The user can explicitly create links to other articles, and the system also automatically turns certain words into links to the defining articles. The topic area of every article is classified by the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

(AMS). The site is supervised by the Content Committee. Its basic mission is to ''maintain the integrity and quality of the mathematical content and organization of PlanetMath.'' As defined in its Charter, the tasks of the Committee include: * Developing/maintaining the standards for PlanetMath content * Improving individual PlanetMath entries in its Encyclopedia, Book, Paper, and Exposition) * Developing topic areas * Developing/improving site and user documentation * Managing the PlanetMath Request list and Unproved Theorems list * Improving categorization and other meta-attributes of entries. * Developing software recommendations for improved content authoring and editorial functions.

Technical details

PlanetMath content is licensed under the copyleft Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. All content is written in

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

, a typesetting system popular among mathematicians because of its support of the technical needs of mathematical typesetting and its high-quality output. PlanetMath originally used software written in Perl and running on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and the web server Apache. It was known as ''Noösphere'' and has been released under the free BSD License. PlanetMath retired Noösphere in favor of another piece of software called ''Planetary'', implemented with Drupal.

Related projects

Encyclopedic content and bibliographic materials related to

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

and

mathematical physics Mathematical physics is the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the de ...

are developed by

PlanetPhysics PlanetPhysics was a virtual community with several Internet sites supported by a non-profit organization registered in the USA in an open science, open data, peer-to-peer review mode that aimed to help make physics, and related mathematics, knowl ...

. The site, launched in 2005, uses similar software (Noosphere), but a significantly different moderation model with emphasis on current research in physics and peer review.

References

External links