Talk:Mesoscopic Physics/Mesoscopic Physics Glossary

To user 'Hillgentleman':

Comment: Your edits on study guide: mathematical mesoscopic physics

Thank you 'Hillgentleman', for your efforts. However, you seemed to change the structure by introducing a lot of links to sub-pages. This is not how it was intended to be, so I undid your changes in this regard (sorry for the work you invested into that...). I moved your Lie group definition to the glossary, where the defined terms should go (as explained in the text). I hope you understand. The point is to have a long list of brief definitions, just the way you did it for Lie group, and to list them all alphabetically in the glossary.

Thank you,

Floriam --FlorianMarquardt 16:06, 3 September 2008 (UTC)


 * The links are not to subpages; they are to independent learning resources, to be created in the future. Don't be bothered by the internal links.  In my opinion, the wikilinks would encourage interactions and speed up content creation in many ways, and in the end it would also benefit your project.   So, the more of them the better it is. Hillgentleman|Talk 16:29, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

To link or not to link
I understand. Wouldn't it then, however, be better to try and link to Wikipedia entries most of the time? Otherwise I see the danger of this becoming a kind of parallel Wikipedia. Of course, there may be some more general topics, like Differential geometry, where someone will finally produce a study guide or course etc. on Wikiversity. But if you create many many such links in advance, I don't know whether it will be very useful. And it might be distracting for a user if most of the links are actually dead. (Or if he doesn't realize that and finds himself very often suddenly on a new page in the edit mode).

Of course, we will also maybe add a few subpages, but these will contain more extended definitions geared towards the needs of the specific audience we have in mind (so these wouldn't fit in Wikipedia or as general wikiversity entries and my general arguments don't apply...).

How about attaching all the links you would like to see to a more general page (like mathematics per se), rather than to this rather very specialized topic of mathematical mesoscopic physics? You might even think of setting up a general mathematics glossary?

Best regards, --FlorianMarquardt 17:06, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I see your point. Here are my reasonings/personal opinions:-) A newcomer may not know that a red link point to a page to be created.  But a experienced reader or editor would not be confused.   As to whether the links would become useful, I am following the "incremental" principle in wiki:WikiDesignPrinciples.  A link which you don't find useful may be useful to someone else; and if you don't find it useful you may simply ignore it.  Redlinks are often stimulate content growth; there are wikiversitians and wikipedians who would happily create new resources when they see redlinks.   It is the personal taste/choice of the participants (in particular, You :-) on whether we want to point to wikipedia or wikiversity; the reason I point them to wikiversity was, again, to stimulate creation of learning projects: e.g. the learning project on the concept of a manifold can help wikiversitians understand what a manifold is. Hillgentleman|Talk 17:22, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, OK, as long as it doesn't interfere with the general, easily printable structure and any project-specific subpages we might create, I do not bother. However, in cases where I would think a Wikipedia link to be useful, I'd prefer to insert that one, instead of a redlink (here the usefulness to our end-users would trump the idea of helping to extend wikiversity). --FlorianMarquardt 17:25, 7 September 2008 (UTC)