Groupprops:Helping with history

This is a small job that will help in cleaning up and improving the wiki. Your cooperation and assistance for this task is sought

Groupprops primarily stands as an information source for the mathematical content of group theory, with historical details being only a secondary concern. However, it is recognized that a clear understnading of the history of terms, proofs and ideas may be useful in learning more about them, for instance, in searching for further references, and in getting a better general idea of the motivation. For this purpose, Groupprops term definition articles have a clear section marked History where the origin of the concept, origin of the term, and any importany milestones in the development of the term, are given.

Apart from that, Groupprops also plans to have separate survey articles on the history and development of important terms, proofs and themes.

Finding the history

If you aer hunting for the meaning of a term, or reading a general survey article, it is unlikely that Groupprops will be the only source you are looking at -- you will probably be trying to mix and match it with other sources. Usually, there may not be a single source from where you can authentically determine the history of the term. However, the following are some good pointers.

Finding the origin

• If a not-too-familiar term is used in a journal article, the article will usually cite a previous article where the term is used. Sometimes, the citation will be right along with the definition (something like following [1], we define ...). Sometimes, an explicit citation is not given but the list of references or bibliography at the end shows some previous articles where the term may have been used.
• By this kind of a backtracing procedure, you may eventually reach the place where the term was originally introduced

Tracing the further history

Obviously a journal article can only link back to earlier articles on the subject, and so starting from the origin article, one cannot directly go to later articles. However, one can try to locate other articles that link back to this original articles or refer to the terms in this article.

If you have any other ideas

If you have any other ideas on helping out with the history of terms in group theory, please give me those ideas!