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Editing mathematics is too difficult

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Description

Hi, relatively new Wikipedia editor here. I've mostly worked on some CS-related articles.

By far the most off-putting part of editing for me was typesetting mathematical formulas, for which there are three different syntaxes as described in en:Wikipedia:Rendering math.

Problems in no particular order:

  • Existing articles use a mix of the three, so you have to learn them all…
  • Writing <math>x</math> quickly gets cumbersome for simple variables that you need to mention multiple times per sentence, so articles tend to use ''x'' instead. But on the other hand, as soon as you have formulas nearby that need <math>, you have to switch to <math> because the two give different-looking renderings and it's ugly to have the same variable in different styles within the same sentence.
  • The template syntax is very verbose. Using Wikitext ''x'' is less verbose, but for formula like ''f''(''g''(''x'')), it does get tiresome. (Thus, you start using <math> for those, increasing the mess.)
  • Copy-pasting <math>f(x)</math> content gives TeX code, which is even longer than the original TeX code. For example, copy-pasting this: will give you h : N \u2192 N {\displaystyle h:\mathbb {N} \rightarrow \mathbb {N} }, which should be h : ℕ → ℕ.
  • Section headings cannot use <math></math> per MOS:FORMULA.

Since TeX rendering is the only one that scales to all formulas including the most complex, I think the best investment of effort would be to make it more usable, thus some wishes:

  • Add shorter syntax than <math>x</math>, for example the familiar TeX syntax $x$ (also used by MathJax, in Typst, on math.stackexchange.com, etc). Since this will of course conflict with existing uses of the $ sign on many pages, it would have to be enabled on a per-page basis. Encourage the conversion of ''x'' and other syntaxes to $x$ when revising an article. (It cannot be done in bulk, since italics also gets used for non-math.)
  • Make the LaTeX renderer output MathML if the browser supports it, and only fall back to images if needed. (NB: Recent versions of Chrome now support MathML.)

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Feature request

Wikipedia

Affected users

Math article editors

Other details

  • Created: 13:28, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 13:29, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Jean Abou Samra (talk)
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