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Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wikibooks/Project specific maths commands/macros

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Project specific maths commands/macros

  • Problem: When writing maths content, frequently used constructions and expressions can be quite long. This makes typing conventions which are used throughout the entire project cumbersome to use. Moreover, changing a notation turns into a correction nightmare, as one has to find all occurrences of the old notation, especially ones containing small deviations. The usual solution in LaTeX would be to define your own macros to abstract these constructions.
  • Who would benefit:
  1. The authors of a project on wikibooks can write more consistent, concise and readable <math> content inside articles.
  2. The readership sees more consistent notation in articles.
  • Proposed solution: Allow project maintainers to add custom entries to the maths configuration which is used in their project. A first solution would be that project administrators can add new LaTeX commands to Extension:Math. A site like b:MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition might be used to add custom LaTeX commands.

A better solution would be that certain LaTeX commands get activated when the current site title match a certain prefix (e.g. the project name). This allows Wikibook projects to add their own LaTeX commands for math formulas. On en.wikibooks.org the LaTeX commands can get activated when the title starts with Social Statistics. Thus on each page like b:Social Statistics/Chapter 2 of the book b:Social Statistics the project specific commands are activated.

Discussion

  • Might be also useful for other Wikimedia projects. For example Wikipedia community can handle the same mathematical notation better and a Wikisource book can better define the same notation for a certain mathematical concept (which might not be in use today). -- Stephan Kulla (talk) 22:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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