OEIS in WiKi, is it a good idea?

[Alonso Del Arte]

I don't like that idea either, and I say that as someone who has found
Wikipedia very useful.

When someone edits a Wikipedia article to add a reference to Sloane's
OEIS, no one questions the validity of the source. On the other hand,
if I write an essay for school with my only reference being from
Wikipedia, I can probably forget about getting an A.

Another reason a Wiki engine is not a good idea for the OEIS is that
the OEIS consists of a lot of numbers. Mistakes, like typos, are
harder for a human to detect in a long stream of numbers. Try
switching a couple of digits in an 20-digit palindromic prime. It
could stand that way for a long time. Even worse, imagine a mistake in
a 10-digit number where the only means of double-checking might be
running a month-long calculation. On the other hand, if I write i
before e after c in Wikipedia, you bet someone will correct it the
next minute.

The Wiki paradigm is excellent for many applications. The OEIS is not
one of them.

Alonso


On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:15:03 -0500 (EST), N. J. A. Sloane
<njas at research.att.com> wrote:
> "Max" said:
> 
> > Wouldn't it be a good idea to power up OEIS with a WiKi-like engine?
> > That would allow everybody edit details of any sequence,
> > and let the community take care of the OEIS and constantly improve it.
> 
> Me: I don't like that idea at all. There are many objections.
> 
> Imagine if your local hospital maintained its records
> with a WiKi-like engine.
> 
> And the OEIS is more important than that.
> 
> NJAS
>