Manifold Atlas:Instructions for writing
From Manifold Atlas
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This page describes the scientific writing style of the Manifold Atlas.
Contents |
1 Scientific goals
- The Manifold Atlas aims to be an reliable scientific reference for researchers and students of manifolds.
- Please write rigorously and clearly for a topologically literate audience.
- Assume that your reader is of advance under-graduate level or higher.
- Give proofs or references to peer-reviewed sources for all non-elementary statements.
- As far as possible define the terms you use:
- a quick way to achieve this is to hyperlink to Wikipedia or other web resource if the term you use is adequately defined there.
- Pages in the Manifolds chapter have a default suggested structure.
2 The editorial process
- The manifold atlas contains two sorts of pages:
- evolving pages or dynamic pages which are continually open to improvment and expansion but which are not quotable,
- static pages which have been approved by the editorial board and are preserved as quotable scientific documents.
- It will take many edits for a page to reach maturity.
- New and young pages bear the Stub template indicating that they are under development.
- After a page reaches maturity, the editorial board will organise for it to be refereed.
- Evolving pages which have been approved by the editorial board have an editorial message which links to the corresponding static version of the page.
3 Open-editing pages
- Open-editing pages can be edited by any registered user.
- Open-editing pages offer the possibility of massively parallel collaboration for recording, organising and developing information about manifolds.
- Open editing-pages require scientific co-operation and team-work a la Wikipedia.
- You should feel free to:
- edit typos,
- fix small mistakes,
- add hyerlinks,
- add new sections and subections,
- improve presentation and organistaion (but think carefully here).
- You should think carefully before making significant changes to existing text.
- When in doubt about a prospective edit use the discussion page or email the other active users on the page.
- If there there is no response after a couple of days, proceed with your planned edit.
- In general questions of style or point of view should be first raised on discussion page before edits are made.
4 Author-based pages
- Author-based pages can be edited only by a single author or team of authors.
- Author-based pages offer the possibility for an expert or team of experts to develop information about manifolds in public and over the web.
- With the obvious exception, author-based pages are open to development, editorial review and discussion just as an open-editing page.
- All users can write on the discussion pages of author-based pages and provide feed-back, questions or suggestions.
- A new author can be added to an author-based page at any time if all the current authors agree to it.
- If all authors agree, an author-based page can be turned into an open-editing page at any time. However this is, in general, an irreversible process.