| Main page | Discussion | Content | Assessment | Participants | Resources |
How to help – open tasks and things to do
Contributors – a list of project participants. Please introduce yourself.
Advice on using Wikipedia for mathematics self-study
Recent activity on mathematics articles
500 mostpopular articles
Mathematics reference resources
Manual of style for mathematics
Conventions – naming and terminology conventions
Guide to creating mathematical formulas andcomparison of different encodings
WikiProject Mathematics Competitions (Defunct)
Proofs – essay on proofs and proof style
Foundations of mathematics – an essay
WikiProject Golden ratio (Defunct)
This project aims to enableWikipedians to cooperate, make suggestions and share ideas on the organization and improvement of themathematics coverage of Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to join in this endeavor.
Many such suggestions and guidelines have been developed since the project began. A particularly useful collection can be found in theWikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics, which contains a detailed discussion of issues related to writing mathematics articles on Wikipedia.
However, it is important for all of us to remember that these are only suggestions: they should help to give us focus, and inspire our contributions, but no one should feel obliged to follow (or even read) them. This WikiProject isnot prescriptive. The suggestions are intended to be helpful for those who are not sure what to write, or how they can contribute, but they should not distract anyone wanting to contribute from our main purpose: to write and improve mathematics articles!
ThisWikiProject began in 2002 to assist the creation, improvement and organization of articles in the area ofmathematics. The initial goals of the project were to provide:
In its broadest terms,mathematics includes its overlaps withphysics,computer science,operations research, and other areas. However, there are now separate WikiProjects in many of these areas, and so the focus of WikiProject Mathematics has shifted towards articles which are primarily mathematical (although it still includes many aspects oftheoretical physics, for example).
Much progress has been made. The overall organisation of the project is now pretty much in place, and a "house style" for mathematical articles is reasonably well established. Theindices of mathematics articles now hasover 30000 entries, and this list is automatically updated by abot using thelist of mathematics categories to identify relevant articles. There are alsolists of articles by topic which organize articles by subdiscipline and other criteria.
When contributing new articles which are (even only remotely) related to mathematics (including biographies of mathematicians, and so on), please add at least an approximate mathematicalcategory. This enables us to identify, and hence review and add to (or mercilessly savage!), each other's contributions.
The main issues for the project are now probably the following ones:
Looking for something to do? The following table lists some of the places on Wikipedia where mathematics-related requests, suggestions, and tasks have been collected together.
Probably the hardest part of writing a mathematical article (actually,any article) is the difficulty of addressing the level of mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader. For example, when writing about afield, do we assume that the reader already knowsgroup theory? A general approach is to start simple, then move toward more abstract and general statements as the article proceeds. The suggestions below are intended to help us achieve this.
When describing a concept in terms of some other concept (for example, explainingrational numbers in terms ofintegers), be sure to:
If the relevant article has not been written yet, then create agood stub, and add a mathematical category. This will list the article in several places (for instance on thelist of mathematics articles) and there is a reasonable chance that someone will expand on it.
Some terminology varies from author to author in the literature. It is therefore a good idea to check any pre-existing articles related to a topic to see if there is already an established usage. Proposals for changes in usage are always welcome: the talk page of this page is one forum where issues such as this can be raised.
New contributors may find it helpful to spend a bit of time perusing some of the existing content; this should provide some idea of what type of information is already available, and how much detail is appropriate in a Wikipedia mathematics article.
The projectWikipedia:WikiProject General Audience, whose goal is to help make articlesmore accessible, is also worth consulting.
Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines provides guidance for writing readable and well-referenced scientific and mathematical articles.
The following pages attempt to describe certain conventions for articles with mathematical content. Please read, comment on, improve, criticize, and if appropriate, follow these standards.
Also see:
There is no one single, prescribed method for classifying mathematics articles. Both the lists and the categories have grown organically, rather than being imported. See alsoareas of mathematics.
While we generally focus on ideas rather than the packages they're delivered in, sometimes publications are worthy of covering in their own right. For example, we have written about textbooks and monographs that meetWikipedia's article-worthiness standard for books, and there's plenty more to do in that regard.
| Mathematics articles by quality and importance | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quality | Importance | ||||||
| Top | High | Mid | Low | NA | ??? | Total | |
 FA | 10 | 4 | 13 | 4 | 31 | ||
| FL | 2 | 2 | 4 | ||||
| FM | 68 | 68 | |||||
 GA | 17 | 23 | 64 | 107 | 5 | 216 | |
| B | 112 | 263 | 524 | 409 | 78 | 1,386 | |
| C | 62 | 556 | 1,078 | 1,517 | 994 | 4,207 | |
| Start | 1 | 74 | 2,451 | 7,387 | 3,224 | 13,137 | |
| Stub | 87 | 5,135 | 1,778 | 7,000 | |||
| List | 2 | 18 | 89 | 221 | 7 | 88 | 425 |
| Draft | 4 | 4 | |||||
| Category | 2,051 | 2,051 | |||||
| Disambig | 69 | 69 | |||||
| File | 347 | 347 | |||||
| Portal | 2 | 2 | |||||
| Project | 52 | 52 | |||||
| Redirect | 1 | 5 | 46 | 560 | 891 | 1,503 | |
| Template | 1,006 | 1,006 | |||||
| NA | 9 | 9 | |||||
| Other | 1 | 2 | 168 | 171 | |||
| Assessed | 205 | 944 | 4,354 | 15,344 | 4,674 | 6,167 | 31,688 |
| Unassessed | 1 | 7 | 8 | ||||
| Total | 205 | 944 | 4,354 | 15,344 | 4,675 | 6,174 | 31,696 |
| WikiWork factors (?) | ω =129,094 | Ω = 4.97 | |||||
The subprojectWikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 provides a system to assess mathematics articles for their quality and importance, and to classify them broadly by field. This system was originally developed as part ofWikipedia 1.0, and these assessments will be used to help us to determine which articles will appear in the Wikipedia 1.0 CD.
However, article assessments are useful more generally to track the project's progress, identify weak spots in its coverage, and highlight articles which could becomeGood Articles orFeatured Articles. Articles are assessed by placing (or updating) a{{maths rating}} template on the talk page of the article. Furthermore, the template provides an opportunity to add a brief comment on the article suggesting improvements that could be made.
The table above summarizes the current state-of-play. The links in this table point to assessment pages on which articles are listed by field and quality, complete with any comments that editors have made.
Any article can be assessed for its mathematical content, andanyone can rate an article. The only exceptions are theGood Article andFeatured Article quality grades. These should only be added to articles which have been through the standard WikipediaGood Article Nomination andFeatured Article Candidacy procedures.
SeeWikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Recognized content for an up-to-date list of recognized content in the project.
 Visit theWikiProject Mathematics on Wikidata |
| Code | Result | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| {{Template:User interest mathematics}} |
| Usage | ||
| {{Template:User WP Mathematics}} |
| Usage | ||
| {{Template:User WikiProject Mathematics}} |
| Usage |
{{The Mathematics Barnstar|put your message here ~~~~}} — An award placed at another user’s talk page to recognize them for making significant contributions to Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to mathematics, or to WikiProject Mathematics itself.
 | The Mathematics Barnstar | |
| {{{1}}} |
Or{{The Mathematics Barnstar|put your message here ~~~~|alt}}
 | The Mathematics Barnstar | |
| put your message here ~~~~ |
