Talk:Mathematical knowledge management

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

notability tag[edit]

This article has stood for quite a while with no real sources. MKM is not a recognized subject and the only organization devoted to it was short-lived, having folded in 2015. This article probably should be deleted for lack of notability, if nothing else substantive can be found. Agricola44 (talk) 21:30, 20 April 2016 (UTC).[reply]

The topic continues to be of some interest and the body of mathematicians, programmers and data scientists who reference MKM continue to reference the subject. As an emerging, interdisciplinary field of research in the intersection of mathematics, computer science, library science, and scientific publishing, significant benefit is starting to be realized. Its main objective is to develop new and better ways of managing mathematical knowledge using sophisticated software tools, and is especially useful in some AI applications where this topic helps provide some guidance. As to being referenced and recognized as a separate subject, NIST.gov has MKM as a separate topic with recent (2018) articles. MKM is referenced by name and discussed at a recent Symposium on Data Analytics for Advanced Manufacturing. Let's hold off deleting this, yet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:DC60:B960:9465:D745:C6EB:880D (talk) 19:00, 17 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Relevant things supporting notability[edit]

Relevant article one might cite in future edits of this page: Michael Kohlhase, "Mathematical Knowledge Management: Transcending the One-Brain-Barrier with Theory Graphs", EMS Newsletter pp. 22-27 in June 2014. PDF: https://kwarc.info/people/mkohlhase/papers/ems13.pdf 188.195.3.94 (talk) 08:28, 3 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Also, classifiers for mathematical knowledge management are to appear in the Math Subject Classification 2020, see https://msc2020.org/#/msc2010 (search comments there for "MKM"). 188.194.210.174 (talk) 14:06, 17 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

How about Useful -- A Protest against the Cancel Culture of Notability[edit]

I landed on this page from another reference, and it helped me a lot.

"Notable" is the root concept of "Nobility", and in our world today is a conservative re-enforcer of "Them that has, Gets".

Thus it is deeply anti-democratic, as seen in the increasingly in-grown culture of too many [far from all!] WP editors.

From what I can see, the great success of Wikipedia is based on

[1] usability -- it quickly and cleanly in-forms especially when outside events triggers a "need to know".
[2] neutrality -- no need to block learning by provoking a defensive skepticism about being manipulated by biased sources.

My argument is for a slight extension of Know-ability to include evidence of unexplained or biased occurrence. This might shift WP's intents missions of helping people learn, and love to participate in learning. Such explicit metrics -- that can be measured and evaluated -- are required by the Ethics Codes of professional fundraisers for for non-profits.

Participation is a Best Practice found by evaluation research. Failure to seek, find and implement best practices has been used since the late 1800s by courts to judge Professional Incompetence and be used to award damages. It's not new: Colonial New England had a productivity advantage over UK because of the Lincolnsire (sp?) system - big barns of kids with "Each-One Teach Some".

Many of these issues came up 50 years ago when NSF spent millions setting up an earlier version of WP, including leveraging a version of the Internet.

Many thousands of students and professors from around the world wrote articles covering the STEM curriculum.
Reagan shut down the program, fulfilling promises to folks alarmed by NSF development of explanatory modules on "Evilution".  Everybody working on the program were de-funded or fired.

Un-scientifically, that major NSF program was not well documented and evaluated, and soon disappeared without issue. So it wasted the huge contribution by perhaps millions of participant, and vast tranches of tax-payer dollars.

So why? My take? This is a commonplace. Because such programs are controversial. As Oscar Wilde wrote:

A creative force need be covert and irrational, or at least ambiguous.
Because -- To be Understood is to be Found Out/ And to be Found Out is to be Destroyed. [Lady Windermere's Fan]

Perhaps, for similar reasons, WP has to appeal to Arch-Conservative Labels like "Notability".

Some of us still struggle to be optimistic.

After all, Pessimism is too often self-fulfilling. 

Still, it's kinda fun to consider the evidence that Wikipedia, luxuriating in its world-changing success, is a refugee from

* Science
* Ethics
* Progress
* More explicit and measurable service to humanity.

In its continuing Witch Trials on Notability ...

-- Does WP fail to meet one dictionary definition of Nobility as the engine for Notability: "high moral character"?
-- Is this behind WP's failures to meet the emerging empirical tests on implicit, but pervasive and systematic bias?


04:38, 8 June 2020 (UTC)GreggEdwards GreggEdwards (talk) 13:27, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This section was deleted from this discussion a few days ago. While he "just" moved it my personal Talk Page, which essentially nobody visits or sees, it feels to me to be similar to the initially non-violent suppression by totalitarian regimes to move heretics so far away as to render invisible their ideas.

I have been unable to find a reason for this banishment. The deleter says on his personal page that he is busy at his university and cannot be expected to respond anytime soon to messages. Does this mean that he feels free to intervene as an Administrator upon whim, and feels no responsibility for his powers of Office?

As a former 5-term elected public official, I saw the strong expectation that upon declaring a leave of absence from responsibility then the powers of that office would not be exercised. Offenders, or any dereliction of duty in a functional democracy, are immediately back-lashed.

Ironically, the cancelled ("moved") section was a protest against Cancel Culture.

When I started an earlier version of Wikipedia while a NSF program manager (1969-1982)

-- that engaged over ten thousand mostly academics to write-up the content of STEM and allied curricula into single-concept, mostly self-contained modules, peer-reviewed for accuracy, usability, and easy understand-ability  -- 

I witnessed the gale-force of many political activists and academics to Cancel the expression of unwanted or competing views.

These same intuitive and "Populist" forces are still strong today in mass political movements all over the world. Indeed, such forces against carefully fair and thoughtful information shut down after the 1920s Tennessee Scopes "Monkey" trials the expression of scientific and humane advances in most local media and in almost all text books. After Sputnik highlighted the dark-ages of educating materials in America and most of the world, it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that NSF was tasked to and began to make some progress in introducing a flow of advancing knowledge into education, and partly thereby, the media.

Cancel Culture, and its colleague of popular tests of Notability, are forever lurking with their deep intuitive appeal to take over any established font and to be-night its "enemies".


Ironically, before it was "cancelled", the offending section was a protest against the power of cancel culture as a prime mover in shaping math knowledge. GreggEdwards (talk) 13:27, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry if bothered you. I was trying to help. Anyway, just how many people do you think read a talk page of an obscure wp article, to find out about "the Cancel Culture of Notability"? - Nabla (talk) 01:12, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]