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PlanetMath

PlanetMath
Pmlogo.png
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia project
Available in English
Owner PlanetMath.org, Ltd.
Created by Nathan Egge, Aaron Krowne
Website planetmath.org
Commercial No
Registration required to edit
Current status Inactive
Content license
CC-BY-SA

PlanetMath is a free, collaborative, online mathematics encyclopedia. The emphasis is on rigour, openness, pedagogy, real-time content, interlinked content, and also community of about 24,000 people with various maths interests. Intended to be comprehensive, the project is currently hosted by the University of Waterloo. The site is owned by a US-based nonprofit corporation, "PlanetMath.org, Ltd".

PlanetMath was started when the popular free online mathematics encyclopedia MathWorld was temporarily taken offline for 12 months by a court injunction as a result of the CRC Press lawsuit against the Wolfram Research company and its employee (and MathWorld's author) Eric Weisstein.

The main PlanetMath focus is on encyclopedic entries, and some forum discussions. In addition, the project hosts data about books, expositions and research-level (not necessarily published) papers. A system for semi-private messaging among users is also in place.

An all-inclusive PlanetMath Free Encyclopedia book of 2,300 pages is available for the encyclopedia contents up to 2006 as a free download PDF file.

PlanetMath implements a specific content creation system called authority model. This is a set of rules determining who can add, modify or remove content. Only registered users can create or edit entries.

An author who starts a new article becomes its owner, that is the only person authorized to edit that article. Other users may add corrections and discuss improvements but the resulting modifications of the article, if any, are always made by the owner. However, if there are long lasting unresolved corrections, the ownership can be removed. More precisely, after 2 weeks the system starts to remind the owner by mail; at 6 weeks any user can "adopt" the article; at 8 weeks the ownership of the entry is completely removed (and such an entry is called "orphaned").

To make the development more smooth, the owner may also choose to grant editing rights to other individuals or groups.

The user can explicitly create links to other articles, and the system also automatically turns certain words into links to the defining articles. The topic area of every article is classified by the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).


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