User talk:Whiteknight/Algebra

Support or Decline.
[Support]I am in favour of this proposition.

[Support]I feel the order of chapters you have propsed is slightly odd in places but the combining of these materials is a good move--SuperJ587 12:20, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[Support] This sounds like a great idea... the algebra books say that the change was going to be made approx. September 2006... is that no longer the plan?


 * Yeah, i had alot more time in september for starting this sort of project then I have now. However, there seems to still be plenty of support for the project, so I might need to take some time out to actually complete it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:59, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[Support] I agree with most of your restructuring ideas. Indented is a post I made on the Algebra talk page;


 * It's a good idea for anything beyond a highschool level to be broken down by subject. A number of these subjects can be treated independently of each other, though they require a lot of internal cohesion. However, I'd like to think that the elementary algebra and highschool algebra follow a natural linear progression and would be well suited to fit in the same book. However, there is a question of reading level; early work on arithmetic should be done in a basic english tone while I think it's too tedious to keep such a tone for teaching highschool math. For that reason, perhaps there should be a difference between elementary algebra and intermediate algebra. I think the basic english introduction to algebra --- which is a part of the one laptop for every child program --- should be sufficient for the elementary algebra. I think the rest should be reworked into a single algebra book as Whiteknight proposes: that means role intermediate algebra and the verbose algebra into one algebra book. Also, I'm of the impression that all wikibooks should be verbose to distinguish them from wikipedia articles; they should be linear, provide motivation and assume background. Thus, any articles that don't meet this standard should be assumed broken, as opposed to being the model (this is my argument against the verbose book as a separate book).

It's good to have some detailed outlines and I think its best to keep the main book page, for such a large project, very heirarchical. I've written a little on module theory, but it would be an eyesore if everything continued to appear in the same page. So, subsections from the main would be better than the course TOC. Also, as I've said above, I think the books have suffered from bad precedents on verbosity --- we need to establish a clear voice. Hopefully a reorganization will remove some of the staleness of these projects --- it's intimidating to start writing when there are too many places to put things and no structure to fall into. We should also try and drum up some support for the elementary algebra pages --- poke your local highschool teacher to make some contributions. Let know what you think and how the module theory pages sound. Thanks for your work. Ahhoefel 02:26, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Oh, btw, I think some of the theoretical linear algebra should be a part of the core material. It's really hard to explain spans, bases, dimension without saying what a vector space actually is. Ahhoefel 02:32, 13 March 2007 (UTC)