User:Foobarnix/Article builder 1

Revision and cleanups to individual sporadic group articles

I have been working to clean up and standardize the 26 articles on the individual sporadic groups (e.g., Mathieu group M11). I especially have tried to make the lead consistent in format and content. I have also created a History section in each article if it did not already exist. I was careful not to remove any existing material, but I often have moved sentences from the lead to the history section. I believe some hard thinking needs to be done about the overall format of these pages. For example, each page should include a somewhat standardized Properties section. I also think an effort should be made to include a little more about the discovery and history of some of these groups.

I am somewhat conflicted about the best format for citations. Almost all of the sporadic group articles exclusively use parenthetical referencing rather than inline citation using ref tags. I am not a fan of this method and find it confusing because it is difficult to link to an individual mathematician (or another group) while at the same time using his (its) name in the parenthetical reference. But who knows, perhaps this method is better in this case.

All of the articles use the Template:Group theory sidebar and this template also needs work, but I would not know where to start. Editor GodMadeTheIntegers recently revised it with the comment "Rm the (incomplete!) list of sporadic groups -- see talk page. New concise classification, Lagrange+Sylow+Hall theorems, and some basic examples." and I think that this is a step in the right direction. The problem is that this sidebar no longer provides a link to the other individual sporadic groups–a feature that I used to find quite useful. I encourage GodMadeTheIntegers or someone else to continue revising this template.

I welcome all comments on this page. Feel free to add new sections.--Foobarnix (talk) 22:16, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Overall organization of the 26 articles

I have completed my cleanup of all the leads. I would like to come up with some ideas for a consistent overall format for the set of 26 articles. Topics frequently covered are listed below. Every article has a Maximal subgroups section but the format varies widely. Should there be a more formal organization by sections to reflect at least some of these topics? Why is Representations a section in some articles and not mentioned in others? Why is Presentation a section in Held group, and not mentioned at all in any other group? (Is it an ommission or just not relevant?) Similar questions occur for some of the other (overlapping) topics.

pariah or happy family?

Schur multiplier

outer automorphism group

Presentations

Representations

Subgroup structure

Conjugacy classes

automorphism group of a Steiner system?

Number of elements of each order

Discoverer and year of discovery

The inverse Galois problem solved for this group?--Foobarnix (talk) 19:28, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Maximal subgroup section

I have completed a cleanup of this section in all 26 articles with the following exceptions.

• Just 2 of the 26 articles (Mathieu group M24 and the Monster group) have a Maximal subgroup section full of a lot of technical explanation. Should this material be moved to another section? The other 24 articles have a short consistent format for this section.

• Just 2 of the 26 articles (Janko group J1 and Suzuki sporadic group) present the Maximal subgroup information in a table. The table looks nice and includes some extra information such as order and index of the subgroups. It seems to me that such a table format should either always be used or never be used.--Foobarnix (talk) 19:53, 2 May 2015 (UTC)