Talk:NLab

prod

Sigh.

I had thought we were largely past the stage where people competed to be the first to put a proposed speedy deletion tag on an article in defiance of common sense in order to look stupid to competent people and heroic to their competitors in that venture.

Could we have some common sense here? Look at the nLab web site for a moment. You will see that if this page in its present form somehow fails to touch all the bases in the speedy-deletion-zealots' rule books, that can be remedied by tiny edits. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:16, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

(Declaration: I am a member of the steering committee of the nLab) A slightly more comprehensive view would be to discuss the n-Category Cafe as well, and perhaps it predecessor, the String Coffee Table, as being massive repositories of MathML. The nLab, together with the nForum and the Cafe, form what some of the users of the nLab loosely call the nGroup. It forms a framework of online collaborative research which I believe is novel and very useful. John Baez's recent article(pdf) on mathematical blogging highlights the results as at time of writing, with papers co-authored by people who have never met except in this setting (myself included). I myself am currently cowriting on the nLab what I hope will become a paper, so it is to be compared and contrasted with the Polymath project, a massively cooperative online research project. There is also the sister instiki web, the CatLab, run by Andre Joyal, which is a long-term project to rewrite a lot of mathematics, centered around category theory, from a modern POV. I hope this gives pause to think before deletion. --DavidMRoberts (talk) 00:35, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

template for references

FYI, I just created Template:nlab to simplify citations. So, example usage:

* {{nlab|id=simplex+category|title=Simplex category}}

will create the following text:

• Simplex category at the nLab

linas (talk) 19:40, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Can we maybe think about if we can get a genuine description of the nLab into this wikipedia entry, one that actually gives an idea of what the nLab is? The current version seems to be more about John Baez's activities than about the nLab, which is misleading given that John isn't and never much was involved in the nLab. I suppose I may not be "neutral" enough to edit the entry, is that right? Otherwise I could try to write a paragraph or two that would serve to bring this wikipedia entry in the realm of being informative about its subject. (Urs Schreiber, 29 November 2012) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Urs Schreiber (talk • contribs) 18:16, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Urs, I don't think your involvement in the nLab is a problem. You know enough to put the relevant information, just back it up with (stable) references and maintain NPOV in your language. I think the prohibition would be against you making SEO links to your own material. Not that it doesn't happen anyway. Crasshopper (talk) 19:47, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

No links to other wikis

Interesting. WP:ELNO #12 has been modified to:

Open wikis, except those with a substantial history of stability and a substantial number of editors. Mirrors or forks of Wikipedia should not be linked.

I wonder if the change was to allow for wikis like the nlab.

Crasshopper (talk) 19:42, 10 March 2013 (UTC)