Musings

Jacques:- Your remark about my advocating hard for one model and then doing another, is a little sad. Are you against the idea of people learning something from their discussions and modifying their ideas? I’m certainly not against it. And I’ll venture that you should not be either. There’s no shame in changing one’s mind, and the reason I raised the idea in the first place (on the first post) was to try to get people’s opinion. That’s why I blog, in fact… to hear others’ opinions on things, to help me learn. I learned that the private aspect that people were concerned about having is *indeed* important when setting something up that involves people who are just learning to find their own voices in the field. They don’t want to do that in public, and I had not appreciated that as much in my original thoughts. So I set up a private system for my students and myself to work on projects within our group. This is in fact different from what the other model was proposed to achieve and so there simply is no contradiction. I still think that the public and (globally participated in by many reserch groups) model that I advocated has a place too. See my recent comment to Moshe in the recent thread of Urs) But that was not what I was trying to set up in the instance I talked about in the more recent post, and privacy was much more paramount in this case, and I focused on that, mindful of things that people -including yourself- had said in the comments of that first post.

There’s nothing wrong with learning from other’s opinions, experience and ideas, Jacques. That’s all I did.

Cheers,

-cvj

I have made several MediaWiki installs over the past few months, and I’ve recently started playing around with GroupWiki, a MediaWiki fork which seems to allow finer control over who can edit which page. MediaWiki appears to be sturdy software, but as soon as I try to add any but the most trivial features, I stumble into a thicket of PHP which resembles nothing so much as the mutant offspring of MS-DOS batch files.

One thing I have sorely missed while doing math markup in Wikipedia articles has been the ability to use \newcommand. Perhaps I rely upon macros too much, but they can be an awfully nice way to enforce consistency and make the markup human-readable. (Once I had a healthy set of definitions built up, I discovered I could type my notes in LaTeX as fast as my professors could lecture, which was convenient.)

In my experience, wikis have been a good way to generate material when the goal is a specific document: a set of class notes, a journal article, etc. They don’t have very convenient features for handling discussions. To have a semblance of threading on a Wikipedia talk page, for example, you have to indent each paragraph manually with lots of colons (which the parser turns into nested <dd> and <dl> tags, in a manner which breaks if you also include <div> tags, as I discovered yesterday afternoon). Recently, I started hacking on a MediaWiki extension which lets you drop a tag onto a wiki page and conduct a blog-style discussion within the wiki. If the people around the office find it useful, it might turn out to be a good tool.

It might be worth pointing on the String Vacuum Wiki. I’m not sure what its status is, but it’s definitely an attempt to do this sort of thing.

UniWakka does support Latex-like Math.

It might also be worth pointing out the “Physics Tools for the LHC” Wiki, which if I remember correctly was created by Matthew Schwartz. This followed discussions at various workshops at which there was broad agreement that such a Wiki would be useful, but it has seen little use so far. The hope, as I understand it, was that a knowledge base of how to use and interface various Monte Carlo tools could be accumulated in one place. I expect such a site would have to develop a critical mass of existing content before many people start to use it.

In a small MC software project with just a few participants, we have recently found PBWiki to be a useful (because free and easy) way to set up a collaborative online space. I wouldn’t want to use it for anything requiring TeXed equations, though.

physicswiki

is a working example of TiddlyWiki used with jsMath, with many modifications.

“This is my Wiki. There are many like it, but this one is mine…”

I’m flattered you think TiddlyWiki+jsMath is “mind-blowingly cool”, though honestly my plugin is tiny, Jeremy Ruston is to credit for TiddlyWiki, and Davide Cervone for jsMath. I have a rather extensive (private) site now with my notes on it, and tons of plugins. With the plugins you can add a calendar, to-do list, FAQ, math, alternate wiki rendering, XHTML, arXiv references, RSS Feed, XML Reader (in fact I read the arXiv in my TiddlyWiki), trackbacks; blog-like plugins like CommentPlugin and RecentPlugin together make a decent blog-like site. Personally I thought the CommentPlugin turned every tiddlywiki into a bathroom wall, or “sandbox” in wiki lingo, and it was just a mess. (I generally hate all forum-like sites because I hate reloading the page 800 times to have a conversation)

Obviously I’ve been thinking about these issues for a few years, so I’ll share some. (Hey, maybe I should start a blog too…) While you’ve been figuring out how to get TeX on your blog, I’ve been doing the same for wikis. Though, I’ve probably been less visible to the physics community than you. ;)

I started my original ZWiki Notes page for exactly the reasons you cite, and a few others. The original site had an email interface, so that email discussions among myself and collaborators, which typically contain some tex, would be rendered. This worked fine in principle unless you made a mistake in your tex, and then you had to go on the web and fix it, or the page containing the email would break. I did later adapt itex to run in ZWiki too. Though I stopped using ZWiki, I still cringe a bit every time I write tex in an email (or some ascii-art math), and I still want a tool like this. FYI, my LatexWiki plugin for ZWiki has continued in the Axiom Project (a symbolic algebra software that all physicists should take a serious look at!)

This really hits at the heart of the problem though. A Wiki is designed to be simple. Its text markup rules are supposed to be so simple that you’ll never screw them up. And, it’s supposed to be tolerant of your mistakes, and render the page in some sensible way anyway. Obviously, this limits the complexity of wiki input. TeX math is simply, not simple. Not everyone has adhered to this (perhaps for the better), and everything from tables to math to music notation have been added to wikis. Wikipedia certainly supports the largest set of weird kinds of input that are neither simple nor error-tolerant. But if you’re going for complex input, why bother with a wiki in the first place? Why not write it directly in TeX/XHTML/RTF? A strong argument can be made however for adding tex math to a wiki, as it is common practice to include simple equations in simple (email) conversations.

HTML, TeX, and various other document types are based around a write/compile/check cycle. Once any input format gets too complex, you’ve just got to check everything you write. (Including, this blog entry, grr…) In such circumstances, you want to keep the write/compile/check cycle as short as possible.

So, TeX on a blog or wiki is halfway between the wiki idea and a full blown tex document. You need a write/compile/check cycle but you want it to be fast. The TiddlyWiki+jsMath accomplishes most of this, but I lost the original idea of collaborating in email. Maybe I should get over my love affair with mutt+vim and move to the web era for communication/collaboration…or maybe someone will be adventurous enough to add some kind of email gateway to ZiddlyWiki.

It’s clear that TiddlyWiki represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about documents. Jeremy Ruston and Gregg Wolfe recently visited northern CA and I had some very interesting conversations with them on this topic. There is, for instance, a book on web campaigning available. You can zip up your tiddlywiki after taking some notes, and email it to someone (thus keeping it private). People generally keep one on a USB stick. Many people take notes in class using it. People embed gmail using an <iframe> and check their email inside a tiddlywiki.

Regarding your comments about itex, one should keep a few things in mind. LaTeX is a macro system. Most modern markups and computer languages are described by a GLR grammar (because it is very predictable). itex uses a grammar (flex/bison). It is generally not possible to translate a macro expansion system into a grammar. The fundamental reason is that the latex macro expansion is Turing complete. You can, in general, use it to perform computations. Most other “simple” languages such as HTML, fortran, or C are not Turing complete – though C++ is Turing complete via its template system and the C Preprocessor is a macro expansion system and is Turing complete. Therefore, itex can never emulate all of latex. You may have programmed in more macros that don’t require Turing completeness than are present in jsMath, but itex will never be capable of truly parsing latex. (try feeding it the revtex file, for example)

jsMath (used by my TiddlyWiki plugin) is a literal and faithful translation of the TeX parsing rules as laid out in the TeXbook into javascript. (quite a feat, if you ask me!) Thus, in my mind, it is the best it could possibly be, without actually being Turing complete. (though it might actually be – I’m not sure) I think it would be better to simply define your favorite macros such as AMS Symbols. So, arguing that we need more of latex in tex converter X (i.e. itex, tex4ht, jsMath, etc) is arguing to turn X into a turing complete macro language. Here lies madness. Instead, I think it would be better to define some subset of commonly used TeX in a way that can be recognized by a parser. (In particular, the subset corresponding to MathML is an obvious choice). This is exactly what itex is. Don’t confuse your favorite set of macros with TeX itself. Everyone has different favorites.

I do agree with you on jsMath’s speed. The fundamental reason is that it must “measure” the size of glyphs by making a hidden <div>, drawing them, and then asking for the size of the <div> using javscript. Not exactly efficient. I have started a LaTeX MathML plugin that converts tex directly to MathML, based on ASCIIMathML. (This isn’t quite finished or fully working, feel free to grab it and try it though – if you enhance it, please shoot me an email) As soon as this is working I’m going to dump jsMath because I do believe the future is MathML. MathML rendering is still rather horrid in appearance though. It’s just not as pretty or finely-tuned as TeX. But, the more of us use it, the more we’ll complain about and fix these kinds of things in browsers.

Happy Holidays to all!

Why that “VS” ?
It looks like that forum VS blog, or forum VS wiki (dirty wiki with comments no more pure wiki! wanna comments? install forum !).

There is no need to separate, rather there is need to converge.

Say, Trac - wiki + issue tracker.
Say, NPJ: wiki + blog +issue tracker plugin