User talk:Wooden Goat

Welcome

Welcome to ProofWiki! Since you're new, you may want to check out the general help page. It's the best first stop to see how things are done (next to reading proofs, of course!). Please feel free to contribute to whichever area of mathematics interests you, either by adding new proofs, or fixing up existing ones. If you have any questions please feel free to contact one of the administrators, or post your question on the questions page.

Here are some useful pages to help get you started:

• Community Portal - To see what needs to be done, and keep up to date with the community.
• Recent Changes - To keep up with what's new, and what's being added.
• Check out our house style if you are keen on contributing.
• Main Page talk - This is where most of the main discussions regarding the direction of the site take place. If you have any ideas, please share them!

Cheers!

--Your friendly ProofWiki WelcomeBot 09:50, 21 January 2012 (EST)

Bretschneider

Good job on Bretschneider, but we need to establish the legal requirements before we can link to drmath.

a) Is it significantly a "copy" of the drmath page? If so we require permission to even present this page, and when we have done so we need to write an acknowledgement message. I suspect this page does not count as a copy of the drmath page (although we may need to disguise the argument) so that tedious legality should not arise.

b) Alternatively, if we do want to provide a link to drmath to acknowledge its existence and influence, then we need to word it in a way which is dictated by the requirements of that site.

In either case we should probably do this in a template which we can craft quite easily, and I'll probably get on with that tomorrow (by which time there will be several inches of snow on the ground and I won't be going anywhere in that).

However, my gut instinct is that any site with legal restrictions on copyright is something we need to steer clear of, as this may clash with the copyright restrictions (or complete lack of them) on ProofWiki. For now I have commented out the reference to drmath and I would counsel against using it.

I invite other contributors to comment on this point. --prime mover 18:23, 4 February 2012 (EST)

I looked around at what Dr. Math has on permission to use their material, and they have:

Writers of term papers, theses, dissertations, and other scholarly papers are permitted the fair use of limited excerpts from The Math Forum web site and publications, with appropriate citations.

Is PW is included under "other scholarly papers"? I'd say yes, but if you feel it's arguable you can ask them for permission directly. They have a thing for asking under "How to Request Copyright Permission" here. --GFauxPas 19:01, 4 February 2012 (EST)

Thank you for your responses. I it is not a copy—in addition, for me it looks as it would be commonly known (when I was at secoondary school, we did the same proof). For example, Wikipedias (en, hu, sr) use a proof equivalent to this and do not originate it to drmath. I put the link only because I thought it would be good if there was an indication that this proof is OK, but in this case I think it's better not to do that. – Wooden Goat 05:09, 5 February 2012 (EST)

Good call. For the record, I'm okay with citing books, but less happy about on-line resources because of the possibly ephemeral nature of websites. There are a few "reliable" sources which I am happy about trusting, e.g. MathWorld, PlanetMath and (GFauxPas's favourite) Khan Academy, but most others (including thrice-damned Wikipedia) which I am wary of citing as authoritative links. --prime mover 05:27, 5 February 2012 (EST)

I just want to add that, in regards to "I thought it would be good if there was an indication that this proof is OK", feel free to submit proofs to PW that are completely your own construction that you haven't seen anywhere, as long as you justify your steps. --GFauxPas 13:03, 5 February 2012 (EST)

Seconded. New stuff is welcome, as long as you don't mind it being amended a lot. --prime mover 17:19, 5 February 2012 (EST)