From Eureka

archives of 'Dumb Questions' can now be found at the Help Desk.

Contents 1 Statement of Principles 2 Polls 3 What You (i.e. the wiki user) Can Do content 4 Naming conventions 5 Bots? 6 Data 7 Question about Mediawiki:Common.js 8 About the name of this wiki 9 Full Names of Journals 10 Inline queries problem 11 What You Can Do 12 Comments on What You Can Do 13 New Comments= 13.1 Proposed way forward for this site 13.2 To do: 13.3 What Should This Wiki Be Called?

Statement of Principles

A "Statement of Principles", drawn up by some experienced campaigners (I have John Baez in mind here). A glorified "What this Wiki is about", but written in an inspirational way, and making it clear that we follow sound ethical principles. --Brucebartlett 18:56, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

I'll create a Statemnent of Principles pretty soon. I have a bunch of work to attend to, which I've been putting off... this wiki is addictive, at least for me. --John Baez 09:10, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

John has kindly offered to draw up some kind of "Statement of Principles". That's going to be tough, and I'm glad I'm not doing it :-) As John rightly pointed out at the Talk:Ingenta page, this wiki is not like wikipedia, we don't operate a neutral point of view. Thus the Statement of Principles (or whatever it will be called) is going to have to take some kind of a stand. We might disagree on some of the finer details about exactly who's not playing fair in the publishing game, or indeed what 'fair' means, but some kind of consensus will need to be reached, as it will inform the approach taken to editing pages. Mmm... tough job.--Brucebartlett 15:25, 19 August 2007 (EDT)

Polls

Regular polls. (Can you code these somehow in MediaWiki?) What I like about polls is that (a) it is reassuring for the regulars, since it gives us positive feedback, and (b) it is something easy which any random visitor can do. For example, "Would you prefer if Google hits for subscription content from academic publishers is only shown in Google Scholar and not on the main page?" A check button (Yes/No). Clicking on one of these then shows the percentage of people who've voted either way. At least it gives your Joe Soap a feeling that he has somehow got involved. That's the way to lure people in. We can even use the results of these polls as leverage to influence the big companies. --Brucebartlett 18:56, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

Quick note about the poll idea: yes, it's possible to have online votes in MediaWiki. I know some people who've been developing some pretty sophisticated extensions for that specific purpose (with options for approval voting and other such flavors). They should be rolling these features out (as part of a larger system) in the next couple weeks; I'll see if I can get the extension code, since it's all Open Source. Blake Stacey 11:30, 6 August 2007 (EDT)

Suggestion for first poll. "What should the name of this site be? (a) MathSciJournalWiki, (b) MathSciJournalWatch, (c) Math journals : The good, the bad and the ugly, (d) Those don't sound right. Something else." --Brucebartlett 12:58, 7 August 2007 (EDT)

What You (i.e. the wiki user) Can Do content

• Definite "What You Can Do" content : "Find out how much your library pays for these journals, and enter the data here (link)." This has two effects : (1) it forces us academics to have more contact with the libraries, which is a good thing, since that's where the weak link lies, and (2) this information will keep us up-to-date. I'm thinking especially of African countries, etc. which might be forced to buy journals in foreign currency; there should be a place for that.

• More "What You Can Do" content : "Have you tried to submit to a journal recently, and been asked to sign away your rights to placing your paper on the archive?" (I know there is some kind of yellow form which does this.) "Report this here. (link)". There should be a page where some legal experts have discussed the legal side of this stuff. Divided we fall, united we stand. This last question (about signing away your rights) is also a poll question.

--Brucebartlett 18:56, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

Naming conventions

We should establish a policy on what the right category is. I vote for Category:A. Einstein rather than Category:Journals edited by A. Einstein. --Ben Webster 19:54, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

I agree on this, since it's easier, and the same person may figure in different contexts.

However, the Semantic Wiki feature may allow even better ways of collating information on who does what!

Under the current Talk:Data Storage "pragmatic vision" for data storage, the categories will work as follows (comments are vital!).

• All publishers, eg. Springer, gets their own page and their own category [[Category:Published by Springer]] .
• Editors get their own page but they don't get their own category [[Category:Edited by A. Einstein]] . Rather this is handled semantically; i.e. clicking on the (+) next to A.Einstein's name in the Journal Info box will take you to a search page listing all journals A. Einstein is the editor for (or managing editor, or editor-in-chief.... we can customize this behaviour, that's the beauty of it).
• Subject area (another property of a journal which lists eg. "Topology, Geometry") gets its own explanatory page and its own category. So on a journal page it will be categorized as [[Category:Mathematics Journals]] and also [[Category:Topology journals]] and [[Category:Geometry journals]].
• Of course, all the data above is also stored semantically, so it is always possible to go to the Ask page, or do an inline query, to find all the journals published by Springer or all the Topology journals. I'm just proposing a mix of the use of categories and the use of search boxes for the functionality for the (+) buttons.--Brucebartlett 07:19, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Bots?

So, in an attempt to be a good wiki contributor, I attempted to start the pywikipediabot on my computer, mostly in hopes of doing category and template adding quickly. I failed, I think because I had the family configuration file wrong. Does anybody have advice for mass editing of wiki pages? There is a program called AutoWikiBrowser which would help with some of this stuff, but it is Windows only (thanks guys) and thus useless to me. Any thoughts on how those of us with mediocre programming skills can help automate some stuff? Ben Webster 19:31, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

My own programming skills are way below mediocre, so let's hope someone else helps you. I'm glad you're trying to help out! John Baez 06:06, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

My configuration files are here and here. Hopefully, that'll get you up and running. Blake Stacey 12:42, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

That doesn't work. It just chokes on the line usernames["Eureka"]["en"] = u"BenBot". The full error is

panda 104-> python login.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "login.py", line 49, in ?
    import config
  File "/home/u2/grad/bwebste/Eureka/pywikipedia/config.py", line 364, in ?
    execfile(_filename)
  File "./user-config.py", line 3, in ?
    usernames["Eureka"]["en"] = u"BenBot"
KeyError: 'Eureka'

This is something specific to Eureka (I tried a couple of other wikis and didn't get this error). I also tried it on both my computer at home and at school, so i don't think it's a quirk of my python installation. Any thoughts? --Ben Webster 19:21, 14 August 2007 (EDT)

Hmmm. I got error messages like this when the pywikipedia code couldn't find the family file. This is a long shot, but is this file saved as "Eureka_family.py" or "Eureka family.py"? I didn't realize that MediaWiki's convention of turning underscores to spaces would mangle the filename. Blake Stacey 22:52, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

I'm pretty sure it's saved with the underscore. I'll give it another try some time when I'm not moving across the country --Ben Webster 02:42, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

I have a Mediawiki bot written in Java, called WikiLink. It's available at [1]. You can either write Java programs which use it as a library, or just use the wikiget and wikiset command line programs. Contact me for help, if you need it. --Scott 19:16, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Data

Discussion around the way data is stored in Eureka now takes place at the discussion page Talk:Data Storage. Also read the main page Data Storage.

Question about Mediawiki:Common.js

Hi Blake - can you explain what the page MediaWiki:Common.js does? I'm intrigued!

I was trying to make the "Main Page" text not appear on the Main Page (see above). Unfortunately, the tricks I found which supposedly work for this version of MediaWiki, didn't. More effort on this and other nits-to-pick will follow tomorrow or Sunday, when I next have a chance to devote a nice, long block of time to Eureka. Blake Stacey 11:48, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

I indented the code in Common.js. Something happened up by the logo. I don't know what :-) --Brucebartlett 17:23, 18 August 2007 (EDT)

About the name of this wiki

Maybe it's too late to say it, but some people may find the name boring, unnecessarily arrogant and wrong. If only to comply with Asimov's quote that The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...' , I propose to change every occurrence of "Eureka" with "That's funny".

s/eureka/that's funny/gi

That's funny. --John Baez 13:07, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Full Names of Journals

Full names of journals should be added. There are various reasons for this. One is that effective searching is probably impossible otherwise: e.g. I just searched for "Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra" and got no results, because it's down as "J. Pure Appl. Algebra". Ideally the process could be automated, but for now I'll add the full name to the JPAA page just to see how it looks. --Tom Leinster, 16 August 2007.

This is an unhappy artifact of the AMS journal-prices survey listing them by abbreviated title. . . Maybe it would be worth it to import from a whole new dataset which has the full names? Blake Stacey 22:55, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

eigenfactor.org and journalprices.com see to have the full names. Since we were intending to incorporate their data anyways, maybe we should just have a clean upload. --Ben Webster 02:41, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

If it comes to it, I'm willing to add the names by hand. But before I do it, I'd like to know (a) whether it's necessary (given Blake's and Ben's comments) and (b) if so, where to put the data that I enter. --Tleinster 09:13, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

Lol! That's commitment :-) Hopefully it shouldn't come down to that, or at least there'll only be a smallish number that we'll have to correct by hand. Watch this space. --Brucebartlett 09:16, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

Inline queries problem

So, I'm having some issues with inline queries. I'm trying to get a list of editors for a journal (for example Antarct. J. Math.) using an inline query. SemanticWiki says all we have to do is type

 <ask>[[Category:Editors]][Edits::Antarct. J. Math.]]</ask>

but when I do this, the result I get is

That is, diddly-squat.

What's particularly frustrating is that other queries work fine. We type

<ask>[[Category:Editors]][[Edits::*]]</ask>

we get

	Edits
Archimedes
M.K.R.S. Veera Kumar	Antarct. J. Math.

so, the wiki knows that the relation is there. What gives? --Ben Webster 14:37, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

The relation should "Edited by". I'm busy trying to get an example going, but you may be faster than me. --Brucebartlett 14:52, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

Message to Ben : I think I solved your basic inline query problem at the Antarct._J._Math.. I've been learning some new tricks from the discussion pages at the Semantic Mediawiki documentation. An issue which your question brought up was : "How do we deal with inverse relations?". For instance, if a user enters "G. Segal" as an editor in the page for the Journal of K Theory, i.e. the annotation [[Edited by::G. Segal]] , then it might be beneficial to also automatically generate the inverse relation on G. Segal 's page, i.e. the annotation [[Edits::Journal of K-Theory]] . This can be done with a sneaky trick described at the bottom of this page. Do we want to do that?

What You Can Do

Unfortunately, the main suggestions I have at the moment are things that should be automated:

• As a first step, we need to start a page on as many active mathematics journals as possible. This list would be a good start. Hopefully, someone is talented enough to write a bot which will strip said information from MathSciNet (another possibility is asking MathSciNet for the info in a format more loadable into the wiki. Scott Morrison suggests that Drew Burton would be a good contact person).
• Another good project would be writing a bot to compute and keep up-to-date citation information from MathSciNet, which would be probably more helpful than the Science Citation Index.
• It would also be good to have listings of journal editors, and a page for each editor with some information about their interests, and which journals they edit for (perhaps if we get a respectable site going we can convince editors to do this themselves?).
• Another really helpful step, but a much more demanding one, would be attempting to calculate the average time between submission and acceptance for various journals. Journal editors might not agree, but I think this would be great info to have easily accessible.

Also, think of a new name. I'll admit I have personal issues with the name EigenPedia, but more importantly the name is taken by a site that kicks our butt on Google and for whom the name makes more sense.

Comments on What You Can Do

• I think you've made some great suggestions. The automated tasks you list seem like good concrete tasks to start off with.

• It's debatable whether we want to include submission/acceptance times. It might blur the core vision of the site (fighting back against the big publishing houses), and it might erode goodwill which we will need from editors. Nevertheless, I think it's an important point which needs to be discussed.

• As far as the name goes, I would be in favour of something like "MathJournalWatch". John Baez's interesting suggestion of "Math Journals : The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is nice and witty but to me, it doesn't have a "wiki" flavour to it. It sounds like content which is done and dusted and made by the website owner, not content that is alive and ongoing and owned by the mathematical community, if you get what I mean.

• You'll notice that I've stopped talking about physics journals. I guess I'm a little discouraged by the apparent lack of interest, so I've downscaled my hopes and dreams a bit.

• We should discuss a bit more about who will host the site.

• Let me outline a bit more the kind of things I would love to see one day for this site:

• Buy-in. I would like everybody in the mathematical community who has ever had a beef with the Publishing Houses to get on board. Especially the Banff Protocol guys. This is easy : we email them. And we put a section in the "Things that You Can Do" list, "Do you know of fellow academics who are upset about overpriced journals? Tell them about this site!"

• Regular polls. (Can you code these somehow in MediaWiki?) What I like about polls is that (a) it is reassuring for the regulars, since it gives us positive feedback, and (b) it is something easy which any random visitor can do. For example, "Would you prefer if Google hits for subscription content from academic publishers is only shown in Google Scholar and not on the main page?" A check button (Yes/No). Clicking on one of these then shows the percentage of people who've voted either way. At least it gives your Joe Soap a feeling that he has somehow got involved. That's the way to lure people in. We can even use the results of these polls as leverage to influence the big companies.

• Statements of Support obtained from prominent and respected mathematicians. Imagine what a drawcard it would be if Michael Atiyah, say, would write a blurb, "Why we resigned from the editorial board of Topology". Or if another promient mathematician could write one entitled, "Why overpriced math journals are evil." This ties in with the Statement of Principles too. Anyhow, this is easy to do. We just email them.

• The tables which display the prices and so on of each journal, should be such that clicking on a journal name "Topology" takes you to a page dedicated to that journal. There basic information will be displayed, like its editorial board, the number of times it comes out, maybe a photo of how it looks, how much it costs, prominent libraries who have unsubscribed, and so on. Also information like "Forces submitters of articles to sign forms not allowing their articles to be placed on the archive : yes/no". All these things should be clickable; you should be able to click on an editor and see which journals he/she is an editor for. Also, there could be a question on the "Journal of X" page which asks "Is your university subscribed to the Journal of X?". This way, we could build up data, percentages which show how many institutions are subscribed to various journals. On the other hand, perhaps this data could be obtained by simply asking the publishing houses.

• Clicking on "Springer" should put up a page showing the profits it made in the last financial year, outlying how much of this came from publishing, etc., together with the photos and names of directors, etc. (ok maybe that's going a bit overboard!)

• Some experts could trace the history and Rise of the huge publishing houses for us. This will be similar to Wikipedia content.

• We need to explore the third-world aspect of overpriced journals. Find out if journals offer reduced rates for third-world countries; things like that.

• As far as the main page goes, I would like it to look as follows : Title, etc. Poll somewhere (changed every week or so). Blurb about what it's all about. Then the "What you can do" section - clickable, so that clicking on something takes you to a page which describes in more detail what that thing involves. E.g. "write bots to extract stuff from MathSciNet"; clicking on it describes this more clearly, and the progress made by various users so far. Things like this.

--Brucebartlett 18:56, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

How are you generating the HTML content on the main page? Manually, or do you have some tricks?

--Brucebartlett 18:12, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

I've been poking around Wikipedia long enough to know how to do markup syntax to make things like colored boxes, which I figured would make the front page a little nicer. It's probably overkill for basic discussions. See here for a rundown on wikitext syntax. Blake Stacey 12:56, 7 August 2007 (EDT)

Hello, your project is very nice. I'm not an able programmer sadly (I'm not even sure how to contribute properly to a wiki) so won't be able to provide the automated stuff you suggest, but I'd like to mention some things which might be relevant: the Directory of Open Access journals, the Emani website, the Numdam project and Jim Pitman's Mathematics Survey project. Thomas1111 15:39, 7 August 2007 (GMT)

Thanks Thomas1111 for your encouragement. I don't know how to contribute to a wiki either :-) Hoping for the best. Those are great links; the wiki users should consider them carefully, to see where they could be fit in. --Brucebartlett 12:23, 7 August 2007 (EDT)

New Comments=

The system is begging us to break this page into smaller bits - could someone smarter than me please do it? With luck we'll eventually need a better-organized system of pages for policy discussions.

I've removed the whimsical technical tests from Journal of K-Theory. I've also removed a comment that purports to be from Mike Hopkins but is not.

Like it or not, this site already has dozens of readers, some of them humorless, and we need to make a good impression on them if we want this site to thrive! So: a better place for fiddling around with technical tests is the entry Antarct. J. Math.

John Baez 04:39, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

Proposed way forward for this site

• Wikiworkers settle on a name for this site, and how it is to be hosted.
• A suitably technically competent wikiworker obtains the basic data of math and/or physics journals, as outlined in Extracting Data on Journals.
• Wikiworkers agree on a data storage model. For instance, if you click on the editor A. Einstein who is listed in the editorial board in the page for Journal X, you should be taken to a page displaying all the journals Mr. Einstein is an editor for.
• A week or two is spent preparing for the Go Public Step. This includes (a) drawing up a "charter" or at least an "about this site" section, (b) getting wikiworkers to add a bit of basic data to a couple of their favourite journals, things like editorial boards and other stub facts, (c) wikiworkers make the page look more attractive.
• Go Public. Wikiworkers email their local mathematics and/or physics discussion lists and blogs, advertising the site.

To do:

• Big thanks to Blake Stacey for getting the tables of math journal data.
• Now we need to add to this data and improve its look-and-feel.
• This includes editorial boards, impact factors, and so on.
  • An interesting looking site with citation information is EigenFactor. Presumably this would also be good info to include (hopefully with bots) Ben Webster 18:13, 7 August 2007 (EDT)
  • Agreed, EigenFactor is a great resource. Here is a new section on Extracting Data on Journals. --Brucebartlett 20:10, 7 August 2007 (EDT)
• One easy thing to do would be to have different ways of arranging the math journals. There should be at least "alphabetical", "by subject" (e.g. algebraic geometry, functional analysis, and so on), and "by publisher".
• We should celebrate the editorial board of K-Theory resigning by making the K-Theory page into our first example of a journal page.
• Someone should add in 'Journal of K-Theory' and 'Journal of Topology'. Guess who the editors are?
• The excellent information and links inside these posts to sci.maths.research should be added to the site. In particular, there are the "Open Access Journals", and the self-archiving policies, especially this great (but old) link.

OK, see what you think of K-Theory, Journal of K-Theory, Topology and Journal of Topology. Blake Stacey 13:24, 7 August 2007 (ED

What Should This Wiki Be Called?

A few options have been mentioned:

(a) MathSciJournalWiki,

(b) MathSciJournalWatch,

(c) Math journals: the good, the bad and the ugly

(d) Eureka

I think we should decide on this soon, since the site will grow by word of mouth, and the word of mouth will involve a name.

We may be able to settle this by consensus, but a vote is fine with me too. I just want to decide soon. So, let's have some discussion!

I think it will be cool to use this naming decision to test out the poll-functionality. After some discussion, of course! By the way, I think one shouldn't have to log in to click on polls - any casual visitor should be able to do it in one click. Is this possible? --Brucebartlett 10:27, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

I argued for "Eureka" at the n-Category Cafe, and I'll repeat that argument here:

I had a bit of inspiration last night while watching the movie Zorro. Until the end, when it degenerates into a nasty all-out brawl punctuated by massive explosions, this movie is pretty inspirational. You get the feeling that the downtrodden poor can indeed triumph over the corrupt scheming rich --- and do it with panache and a sense of humor, while doing backflips and dodging bullets.

Yeah, it's a bit hokey, but I decided the MathSciJournalWiki needs some of this idealistic flair to attract young mathematicians, awaken their sense of fair play, and incite them to rebel against the existing journal system, where the fat cats earn all the money while we do all the work.

For this, a name like 'MathSciJournalWiki' just won't do! It's too bland.

Neither will 'Math Journal Watch', which I'd modeled after 'Human Rights Watch'. Keeping an eye on the bad guys is a worthwhile endeavor, but it's fundamentally pessimistic - it suggests we'll be doing this forever.

Also, including the word 'Wiki' should be unnecessary. We can have a descriptive subtitle saying something like 'A wiki for open-access scholarly communication in math and physics' - or something like that. The name of the site should inspire! It should be quick and catchy. Someday putting 'Wiki' in the title of a wiki will seem like putting 'Book' in the title of a book.

So: we need a name that's inspiring and instantly recognizable by mathematicians and physicists (at least).

I asked my wife about this, because she's good at coming up with titles, and after some discussion she suggested: Eureka!

Archimedes is an inspiring figure for mathematicians and physicists, and scientists generally. He helped the city of Syracuse battle an encroaching empire. The word 'eureka', meaning 'I found it', suggests victory and triumph - but of a pure and noble sort.

The one catch, of course, is that Syracuse didn't win against the Roman Empire, and Archimedes was killed despite orders that he be spared. But even this works to our advantage, in a way. We can adorn our website with a picture of Archimedes drawing mathematical figures while a Roman soldier stands over him, breastplate adorned by the Elsevier logo.

Here's a bit of the story, as told by Plutarch. To set the stage: the Roman consul Marcellus decided to take Syracuse by siege...

When, therefore, the Romans assaulted the walls in two places at once, fear and consternation stupefied the Syracusans, believing that nothing was able to resist that violence and those forces. But when Archimedes began to ply his engines, he at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missile weapons, and immense masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence; against which no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all their ranks and files. In the meantime huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane's beak and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them. A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air (a dreadful thing to behold), and was rolled to and fro, and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashed against the rocks, or let fall. At the engine that Marcellus brought upon the bridge of ships, which was called Sambuca, from some resemblance it had to an instrument of music, while it was as yet approaching the wall, there was discharged a piece of rock of ten talents weight, then a second and a third, which, striking upon it with immense force and a noise like thunder, broke all its foundation to pieces, shook out all its fastenings, and completely dislodged it from the bridge.

So Marcellus, doubtful what counsel to pursue, drew off his ships to a safer distance, and sounded a retreat to his forces on land. They then took a resolution of coming up under the walls, if it were possible, in the night; thinking that as Archimedes used ropes stretched at length in playing his engines, the soldiers would now be under the shot, and the darts would, for want of sufficient distance to throw them, fly over their heads without effect. But he, it appeared, had long before framed for such occasions engines accommodated to any distance, and shorter weapons; and had made numerous small openings in the walls, through which, with engines of a shorter range, unexpected blows were inflicted on the assailants. Thus, when they who thought to deceive the defenders came close up to the walls, instantly a shower of darts and other missile weapons was again cast upon them. And when stones came tumbling down perpendicularly upon their heads, and, as it were, the whole wall shot out arrows at them, they retired. And now, again, as they were going off, arrows and darts of a longer range inflicted a great slaughter among them, and their ships were driven one against another; while they themselves were not able to retaliate in any way. For Archimedes had provided and fixed most of his engines immediately under the wall; whence the Romans, seeing that indefinite mischief overwhelmed them from no visible means, began to think they were fighting with the gods.

Yet Marcellus escaped unhurt, and deriding his own artificers and engineers, "What," said he, "must we give up fighting with this geometrical Briareus, who plays pitch-and-toss with our ships, and, with the multitude of darts which he showers at a single moment upon us, really outdoes the hundred-handed giants of mythology?"

And, doubtless, the rest of the Syracusans were but the body of Archimedes' designs, one soul moving and governing all; for, laying aside all other arms, with this alone they infested the Romans and protected themselves. In fine, when such terror had seized upon the Romans that, if they did but see a little rope or a piece of wood from the wall, instantly crying out, that there it was again, Archimedes was about to let fly some engine at them, they turned their backs and fled, Marcellus desisted from conflicts and assaults, putting all his hope in a long siege.

Yet Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life; studies, the superiority of which to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, of the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our admiration. It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations. Some ascribe this to his natural genius; while others think that incredible effort and toil produced these, to all appearances, easy and unlabored results. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the proof, and yet, once seen, you immediately believe you would have discovered it; by so smooth and so rapid a path he leads you to the conclusion required.

By the way, I think the name should be Eureka instead of Eureka!. The latter is a bit too coy --- besides if any word has an implicit exclamation mark built into it, it's 'eureka'.

--John Baez 09:53, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

I think this Wiki is a great idea! Congratulations on a fine start.

Eureka seems like a catchy enough name, and certainly it is very easy to say in conversation. The fact that the name doesn't reveal anything about the actual purpose of the site can probably be remedied by a good choice of domain name. I did a quick check and it appears that, for example, the name 'eurekajournalwatch.org' is not taken yet, and something like that would allow sneaking in its purpose without beating anyone over the head with it in the site name.

Just a thought ...

--Marty Tysanner 16:43, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

Thanks for the kind words! If nobody objects in the interim, I'll change over the site name tomorrow. Blake Stacey 17:16, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

Yay!!! John Baez 06:23, 14 August 2007 (EDT)