notes

Here are your notes. I assume you don't mind me sharing them with
other people?

A few comments:

Like we talked about at the conference, I am envisioning a system
where a user can print out any selection that they might be interested
in, as a tailor-made "abridged version" of the whole collection.

As for the beginner's tutorials - these are a good idea: typically the
problem with "good ideas" around PlanetMath is figuring out a way to
get them implemented. Certainly creating an area of the site called
"beginner's tutorials" and stating its purpose and adding an example
or two couldn't hurt. But there are probably even better ways to
motivate involvement. E.g. perhaps you could put together a
tutorial-writing seminar at your school. (It could be as valuable a
social service as actually tutoring people in person.)

Plagiarism detection seems like a very tricky problem, especially when
it is so easy for people to copy things out of obscure books. I don't
think there is any fully automatic solution. The best thing we've
thought of so far is to just ask people to cite the sources they have
used (if any) and hope they are honest.

Many of these things have been discussed, of course, but surprisingly
few are concretely on their way to being implemented. If you want to
talk more about the strategy for implementing things like these or
about the Arxana draft I gave you, please don't hesitate to be in
touch.

*

Ability to browse online. Ability to search and access anywhere.
Search engine should be good enough that the user isn't forced to use
google e.g. to catch typos.

Ability to download local copy. Ability to search if unreliable
internet connection. Ability to download abridged local copy.

Ability to buy full or abridged book version, with decent index.

There should be beginner's tutorials! (The book should contain
these). All the information you can cram into a math encyclopedia is
useless if the student isn't able to understand it. Articles should
link back to subject tutorials. All the tutorials should easily flow
back to arithmetic. Tutorials should be printed at the beginning of
the full paper version of the book.

It would be nice to show visuals and animations, especially for things
like combinatorics, geometry, calculus.

Include exercises, especially in beginner's tutorials. (The learner
can use these to be sure the material is understood.)

Keep a hit-list of open problems. Optionally allow people to place
prize money on these problems, or link to existing prizes.

Allow posters to verify their identities. If at all possible, make it
count for "prestige" if your article appears in the abridged book
version.

Plagiarism detectors?

PageRank-like system + votes + editor intervention to rate importance
of materials.