Re: The Wikibook on Category Theory

[Charles Wells <charles@abstractmath.org>]

I like the idea of n-labs and wikibooks sharing material.  They really do
serve different functions, but sharing could make both of them better.

A textbook needs to give the basic ideas of category theory in a linear
fashion with some proofs spelled out and lots of exercises.  The idea is
that students could read the introduction and find out which chapters they
need to to learn the category theory appropriate to their interests.  The
chapters should be clearly organized in a tree so you can see what each
chapter has as prerequisites.

n-labs material on category theory needn't be and shouldn't be  organized
that way.  It is a *lab.  *Still, some of the entries in n-labs could be
more complete and better organized, and material in the wikibook could
provide some of that.  And certainly lots of stuff in n-labs could be moved
over to a wikibook and, er, textbookized.

I don't intend to do a lot of work on the wikibook.  I have co-authored two
books in categories already.  I was hoping to get it organized so people
would have a place to write about useful topics, but the response has not
been great.

One thing that bothers me about wikidom is that there is a wikibook on
category theory and also a wikiversity "learning project".  The latter is
mostly stubs.  I am not entirely convinced they should be separate.  If they
have to be separate, there could be lots of sharing back and forth between
those two as well.

Another thing that bothers me is that the advice on wikibooks says don't
include lots of links.  For one thing, wikibooks has a system that can
generate a PDF file of a book and if you print it out you can't hit the
links.  These days when I write wikipedia entries, abstractmath pages and
blogs I include lots of links.  It goes against the grain, for example, to
mention homology groups in an example on functors without linking to the
wikipedia article on homology.   In five years we will all have decent
electronic text readers and that won't be a problem except for old fogies.
(I was born in 1937 so I can diss old fogies if I want to.)   I have not
included links in the little I have written in the wikibook on category
theory, but I may change my mind.

Charles Wells



On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Urs Schreiber <urs.schreiber@googlemail.com
> wrote:

> On 8/18/09, Michael Shulman <shulman@math.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> > I love the nLab too, but I'm not sure that "merging" is the right
> >  word; probably the two are serving slightly different purposes.  The
> >  overall nLab is not really organized like a textbook or designed to be
> >  read linearly; writing a textbook requires additional thought.  But
> >  there is certainly no reason why the two can't share material and link
> >  to each other as appropriate.
>
> I agree. Maybe "merging the effort" wasn't a good choice of words, but
> when I saw the wikibook I had the strong impression that there were
> similar intentions here to a large piece of the nLab and I thought it
> should be useful and easy to transfer content and join forces where
> reasonable and desirable.
>
> >  And/or one could choose to write a
> >  textbook as a section of the nLab rather than on Wikibooks (if, for
> >  instance, one preferred its offerings in the way of mathematical
> >  typesetting).
>
> Yes, that sounds like an interesting idea. Another advantage might be
> a greater and easier supply of cross-hyperlinks, either way.
>
> In any case, there are many category-theoretic entries (and not just
> those) on the nLab -- existing ones and not-yet existsing ones --
> where I would find more textbook-style material highly desireable.
>
> Best,
> Urs
>



-- 
professional website: http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/math/wells/home.html
blog: http://sixwingedseraph.wordpress.com/
abstract math website: http://www.abstractmath.org/MM//MMIntro.htm
astounding math stories:
http://www.abstractmath.org/MM//MMAstoundingMath.htm
personal website:  http://www.abstractmath.org/Personal/index.html
sixwingedseraph.facebook.com


[For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]