Talk:Main Page

Confirm Account Creation
What does everyone think about forcing account creation to be confirmed by an admin. --Joe (talk) 02:00, 27 May 2013 (UTC) Other options include disabling welcome bot (do we really need this anymore?) and setting it so that new users can't create pages. --Joe (talk) 02:03, 27 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm still a fan of the welcome bot.


 * How would it work? How does an admin guy know whether an account creation request is valid or not? Can we fix it so that if someone tries to edit a page, they are asked to write a post to (some page somewhere, on PW) where they introduce themselves and explain what they can contribute? Even a reply along the lines "I'm an anarchist who loves ridiculing mathematicians" would be an adequate reason to allow access - any obviously robotically generated request would be responded to by blocking the user. --prime mover (talk) 05:27, 27 May 2013 (UTC)


 * ... and if we can, we should automatically block any user (and the domain they rode in on) who tries to post a page containing the words "Feel free to visit my website" as this is clearly the work of a particular spamming engine. --prime mover (talk) 05:59, 27 May 2013 (UTC)


 * We could make them submit a short bio or something on account creation. Just so long as they mention math/proofs then they can get an account. If they don't' write anything then they don't get an account. --Joe (talk) 17:59, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

I saw this proposed as a turing test question, which seems appropriate for a mathematical wiki.--Linus44 (talk) 10:14, 27 May 2013 (UTC):


 * In the following question, the correct answer is indicated by the capital letters. They spell out a word that rhymes with the correct answer. Ignore the literal content of the question and insert the number that sounds just like the word spelled out by the caps.
 * What is the Only correct aNswer to the following question
 * 2 + 2 = __


 * No. That is a test that seems likely to result in weeding out dyslexics, which is not our intention. --Dfeuer (talk) 14:59, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Whatever we do, we should do it soon; the volume seems to be increasing. No objection to getting rid of Welcomebot. No objection to sensible restrictions on unconfirmed users. One minor concern: we tend to block account creation from spammers' IPs indefinitely. Doesn't this risk blocking out legitimate new users if those users are assigned a blocked address by, e.g., DHCP? --Dfeuer (talk) 02:13, 29 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Stop whining like a baby, you bossy little twerp. --prime mover (talk) 04:58, 29 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Do you even know how DHCP works? Every house (technically, router) has its own IP address and DHCP server; the DHCP manages internal addresses (192.168.x.x blocks usually) but does in no way affect the external IP. I deem the likelihood of someone buying a router that has been blocked due to a spam user and trying to register on sufficiently minuscule to gloss over it.


 * The problem is not WelcomeBot here, I don't see how it could be involved in this. Perhaps the ConfirmAccount extension could be a solution? It's a bit more work, perhaps, but it's preventive rather than enforcing work. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 07:09, 29 May 2013 (UTC)


 * First off, a router may not have a static IP (I believe Verizon assigns one to mine dynamically each time it boots). Second off, not everyone necessarily accesses PW from a house, and some networks may expose dynamically assigned addresses (though this is probably rare). --Dfeuer (talk) 07:31, 29 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I've disabled account create for now. The confirm account extension doesn't want to work, I'll look into it. --Joe (talk) 17:27, 29 May 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I've setup the confirm edit extension. If anyone wants to setup groups for people to tick and stuff check out this page and let me know. Account requests can be found on Special:ConfirmAccounts (for those with access). Also, this extension can replace WelcomeBot, I've turn this feature on to try. --Joe (talk) 22:49, 30 May 2013 (UTC)


 * May I suggest adding a group of users who can confirm? Currently only bureaucrats can do so, but I would think any frequent or formerly frequent contributor to the site should be able to distinguish a real person from a spammer with sufficient robustness. --Dfeuer (talk) 23:09, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll make it so that sysops can. Done.--Joe (talk) 23:10, 30 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Bureaucrats only still. --Dfeuer (talk) 01:05, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Further issue: Special:RequestAccount refers to Terms of Service, which does not exist (I was just pointed to this by the first entry in the approval queue). This needs to be fixed, as well as Copyrights which I see every time I edit a page. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 08:47, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * We have also been thinking of moving to CC-by-SA (on the grounds that it's most liberal) from the GNU FDL 1.2 but nothing's moved on that one. We needed to get an okay from the active users, and IIRC nobody objected. Except the contents of talk pages which were to remain under the personal control of whoever contributes to them. --prime mover (talk) 10:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * That's still my point of view as well. Alas, any time I would spend on writing some text for these pages would have to be shared under the "study avoiding behaviour" header, so I won't. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 10:17, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Interestingly, there is an open account request which complains about a lack of ToS. I'll try to make the change for the license later today or this weekend. Anyone have any ideas on how to go about these missing pages? --Joe (talk) 10:55, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Just use the ToS from CC-by-SA? --GFauxPas (talk) 15:10, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It is my point of view that the license for work done by no-longer-active contributors cannot be changed without their explicit permission. Yes, CC-by-SA makes more sense than GFDL, but we shouldn't really be playing fast and loose with a license change.... --Dfeuer (talk) 15:16, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * That's just tough. Who's going to tell? You? --prime mover (talk) 21:03, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Strongly disagree. Locking pages into their current states goes against the whole point of what a wiki is. "If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here." --GFauxPas (talk) 15:19, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * The users who contributed previously were releasing their work, to which they individually hold the copyright, under the terms of the GDFL. How are we to know that they would approve of it being used for purposes allowed under CC-by-SA that are not allowed by the GFDL? --Dfeuer (talk) 16:59, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * We don't care. --prime mover (talk) 21:03, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * "How are we to know[?]" Because this is a wiki. --GFauxPas (talk) 17:59, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

We could also just get rid of the ToS check box. I don't think we really need it. --Joe (talk) 17:11, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * One thing that pleads in favour of a ToS is that we can ask pre-emptively for consent regarding a change of licence, and include some basic things about the right for deleting inappropriate content (to be judged by admin/bureaucrat consensus) and may be some other things that may come in useful in the future. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 18:34, 31 May 2013 (UTC)


 * I say just go to CC-by-SA and if people get upset then we tell them respectfully to swivel. But seriously, if a person does not want their material to be available with maximum freedom then let them feel free to delete it. If this makes a gap we will have a record of what they wrote so we can fill it. There are one or two pages I can think of which may fall into that category and if that happens I'm going to be the last one to cry. --prime mover (talk) 21:03, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

A minor point re:account creation: when requesting account is says "To protect the wiki against automated account creation, we kindly ask you to solve the simple sum below and enter the answer in the box", but then it's just a normal captcha. --Linus44 (talk) 08:46, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Feature missing: warning on leaving edited page
The latest version of MediaWiki seems to have an important feature missing: the ability to warn the editor when a page has been edited but not saved. I rely on that extensively - as it now stands, if I have many windows open all with outstanding edits on them, just doing a "close" when I've finished will lose me everything. I have to remember to go through each of my open edits and explicitly do "save page" on all of them, in case I've done a small tweak when opening a page to pick up a piece of code for somewhere else. --prime mover (talk) 11:33, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Terms of Service
I have added that Terms of Service page as discussed above. Please feel free to comment and discuss this before we can declare it "live" on the News page.

This is a distillation of some suggestions put together by Lord_Farin in recent communication external to. --prime mover (talk) 10:05, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh yes, and we also need to amend the text in the paragraph that appears directly beneath the edit panel - I can't find it anywher (although still looking) - is it metaware with bureaucrat access? --prime mover (talk) 10:08, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you, PM: that seems like a fine distillate of my ToS proposals. Let me recall the original licence change suggestion, in particular, the distinction I proposed between content and talk pages. I would like a paragraph devoted to the latter, which includes:
 * Exemption of the talk pages from the CC-by-SA licence, that is, their designation as essentially ephemeral;
 * A note on the possibility to file reasonable, specific requests for talk page (partial) hard-deletion by the bureaucrats (I would like a confirmation from Joe that this is in fact possible, and I would like to indicate that archetypal use would be for erasing ill-representative, tragic cases of hot-headedness c.s.);
 * so as to avoid potential quenching of the freedom of discussion on the talk pages by the prospect of them being released indefinitely on the internet, and to avoid us being legally bound to retain such abominations, should they arise.


 * It may furthermore be a good idea to explicitly require some sort of commitment in the direction of proper behaviour regarding politeness, refraining from ad hominem argumentation and other reasonable conditions on behaviour to stimulate a good climate on the site. (I say "explicitly" for it may be argued that users bind themselves to this by accepting point 2 of the ToS. Even if this is "reasonably within the intention of the ToS" as currently formulated it can't harm to point this out to users; we've had some nasty experiences in the past.)


 * That's it for now, thank you for your work on it. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 13:32, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Upon reading Copyrights, I notice that my points have already been addressed to some extent. A pointer towards this page in the ToS will suffice to deal with the first of my points as far as ToS is concerned. The remaining points on being ephemeral, deletion etc. should be formulated on the Copyrights page. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 13:55, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Copyrights updated as appropriate. How does that work for you?


 * I wonder whether to extract the salient points of CC-by-SA and GFDL and list them as one-liner bullet points. --prime mover (talk) 15:07, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Looks good. Fixed minor typo. Furthermore, I've added a "I will behave" statement to the ToS. This should by and large cover anything we expect from new users. I think we should limit the time spent on this; we're not lawyers (not on duty, anyway), so the text needn't be flawless. We can always amend it if something comes up. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 21:26, 2 June 2013 (UTC)


 * We still need to word some stuff about user pages in Copyrights (and indeed to decide whether perhaps the users own copyright on their own page to the extent that copyleft does not apply). I'm out of my depth here. --prime mover (talk) 22:14, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

account request email
It might need a little work ... the quotes appear in my intray as  &amp;quot;  and the link appears as  &amp;quot;//www.proofwiki.org/wiki/Special:ConfirmAccounts&amp;quot; . --prime mover (talk) 18:08, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Possible bug in mediawiki
This may need to be borne in mind ...

You have page A and page B, and you see they need merging, so page A is merged into page B and A is turned into a redirect to B.

Someone else decides, no, A is a better name, and renames B so as to replace A again, so B is a redirect to A.

Having done that, all the page edit history of page A has vanished, and it appears may be irretrievable.

Note this for pages Probability of Subset of Event (page B in this case) and Probability Measure is Monotone (page A). I can no longer find the page history (going back to 2010) for Probability Measure is Monotone as it has vanished without trace. --prime mover (talk) 05:27, 8 June 2013 (UTC)


 * It's back now. Now I'm confused. --prime mover (talk) 05:50, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

MathJax link
The MathJax link at bottom right of all pages does not work. It tries to go to an https site, whereas the actual site is http. I'd fix it myself but I don't think I have access to that area of teh codez. --prime mover (talk) 06:50, 8 June 2013 (UTC)


 * I get the message that the SSL certificate is not trusted by my browser. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 07:39, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I've notified the MathJax people. I'd prefer to not have to point to their http site. --Joe (talk) 02:40, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Account creation again: user biographies
We ask a prospective user to enter a few (or many) words about themselves when they request an account.

How about those words get added automatically to that user's user page? --prime mover (talk) 12:45, 10 June 2013 (UTC)
 * We can do that, what does everyone else think? --Joe (talk) 12:46, 10 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Fine with me. It seems the information in these biographies cannot be recovered otherwise, which makes this course of action even more valuable. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 13:17, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

MathJax buxfixes
The latest version of MathJax has fixed the presentation bug on primed uppercase letters.

Whereas in the past, in order that the prime did not collide with certain letters (including $S$ and $T$), you needed to write them as  and , etc., that is, putting a tiny gap between the letter and the prime.

However, now  and   render adequately: $S', T'$.

So whenever you see  etc., you should now be able to replace it with   etc. --prime mover (talk) 20:45, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

gone slow again
Response time has deteriorated again, it taking several seconds to do what is usually instantaneous (e.g. load pages, get MathJax libraries up, go into Edit mode for a page, etc.) Is there something going a bit wrong? --prime mover (talk) 19:27, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Nothing that should cause that unless there was a heavy load. I've increased some buffer sizes to hopefully limit some of the disk writing. Is this constant or intermediate. --Joe (talk) 19:47, 16 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Seems fairly constant at the moment. I'll see what it's like in the morning (UK time). --prime mover (talk) 20:48, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Guess who's back
As of this day, I am back on the PW premises. I will need some time to get back up to speed, so please be patient regarding the large tasks I have taken on and postponed in the past months. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 20:32, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

MathJax problem
It renders so far down the page but stops part way down with this:


 * Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/fonts/TeX/Main/Regular/GeometricShapes.js

... presumably trying to get the $\blacksquare$ symbol to come up. --prime mover (talk) 16:51, 22 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Further research: It's intermittent. --prime mover (talk) 18:44, 22 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Further update: it's woefully flakey. It seems to take a long time to load (a goodly proportion of a minute, maybe longer) and sometimes actually fails, giving a pageful of "Math Processing Error". Does anyone else have this trouble or is it that I need to upgrade my machine? --prime mover (talk) 12:22, 1 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I've updated MathJax, hopefully that will fix your issues. Otherwise, which browser are you using? Is it up to date? Do you have any plugins installed that could be screwing with the JS? --Joe (talk) 14:26, 1 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Chrome, yes, no. --prime mover (talk) 15:25, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be okay at the moment. Maybe you fixed something. :-) --prime mover (talk) 18:34, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Trigonometry
I've made some inroads into some basic trigonometry: refactored and tidied up the existing theorems, and filled out the basic stuff. There are some messy old theorems which I haven't done the hard slog on, because I'm lazy like that, so if anyone wants to finish off Sine to Power of Even Integer and its relatives, and Sine of Integer Multiple of Argument etc., then feel free. I may get round to them later when I'm recovered. --prime mover (talk) 21:56, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Questionable proof structures
I've just read in :


 * It is important to distinguish between '$A \implies B$' on the one hand and '$A$, hence $B$' on the other. The distinction may seem pedantic in cases where $A$ is true, but to ignore it can easily give rise to confusion. E.g. compare the following two statements about positive real numbers $x$ and $y$:
 * (a) $x > y \implies \left({x^2 > x y \text{ and } x y > y^2}\right) \implies x^2 > y^2$,
 * (b) $x > y$, hence $x^2 > x y$ and $x y > y^2$, therefore $x^2 > y^2$.


 * Here (a) is a conditional statement which tells us nothing unless we are told that $x > y$ to begin with. In any case, it is ambiguous: it is of the form $A \implies B \implies C$ and this can mean either $\left({A \implies B}\right) \implies C$ or $A \implies \left({B \implies C}\right)$, or more usually $A \implies B$ and $B \implies C$. With this meaning it is sometimes offered by some slipshod writers who intend (b) (which is unambiguous).

So how seriously does this compromise our house style which would structure the above proof like:

? --prime mover (talk) 21:55, 11 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm not a fan of using $\implies$ outside of logic (pre-empting some inevitable hipocrisy here, I was being lazy). If it's troublesome, couldn't one write:


 * We have that $x > y$. Moreover,


 * Therefore $x^2 > y^2$. --Linus44 (talk) 20:42, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

An update on the ProofWiki extension for MediaWiki
It has been a while since I have last informed you all about the progress on the custom-tailored extension to MediaWiki that I (with the aid of Joe) have been developing for a long time now.

The big thing holding back implementation was the unfortunate problem of sections created using the &lt;section&gt; tag (part of the extension) not showing up in the ToC.

The news that I have for you is that there has been a hack to avoid this problem. This hack (which messes with the order of execution in the MediaWiki parser) has the drawback that it will completely disable section editing.

Knowing that we &mdash; in general &mdash; disapprove of section-wise editing because of spacing issues with this functionality, I was wondering whether it would be a problem (awaiting a better solution, developed in cooperation with MW devs) to sacrifice section editing for the benefit of having a working tag extension (which subsequently would allow me to resume restructuring the PropLog department (for which I need double transclusion)). So, please share your thoughts on this proposed trade-off. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 15:32, 17 August 2013 (UTC)


 * My view is: go for it, see how it looks, see how it works, give it some solid examples. I would not miss the section editing ability, and IMO it's advantageous to us that it's not available.


 * As long as the results on existing transcluded pages can be made to look exactly as they do (or better) using the conventional technique, then we're good to go.


 * However, I will mention that I may not be an "early adopter", as I want to see how it shakes down first. --prime mover (talk) 16:00, 17 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The two transclusion mechanisms will exist side-by-side, because the new syntax is &mdash; slightly &mdash; more involved than the built-in version (I expect the new stuff to be replacing older material as need arises). So no worries there. I'll make sure to put up some documentation somewhere as well. &mdash; Lord_Farin (talk) 16:07, 17 August 2013 (UTC)