Groupprops:What we are not

This is a first-person article written by: Vipul
First-person articles give opinions of their authors, as long as these opinions are broadly endorsed by the wiki

This article is an indication of the things Groupprops does not aspire to be. It's somewhat along the lines of the what Wikipedia is not page, though of course what we're not differs from what Wikipedia is not.

THE group theory wiki

Nowadays, there's this great tendency to be the meta thing — the wiki of wikis, the encyclopedia of encyclopedias, the search engine of search engines, or whatever. Classicaly examples of this meta tendency are Wikipedia and Google, with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stating about Wikipedia: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

That is not what we at Groupprops are doing. For us there's no such thing as the sum total of human knowledge in group theory, let alone the sum total of all human knowledge. Groupprops is an effort to organize information and knowledge in group theory in a certain fashion, for a particular kind of audience (or rather, a range of audiences). There may be many other ways of organizing material and ideas, that may be better in some ways. There may be all sorts of information we don't consider suitable for Groupprops. Please start your own effort if you are sufficiently keen for the material to be put up! You can copy freely from Groupprops whatever content we have.

An encyclopedia that anybody can edit

Yes, it's good to have diversity and to have multiple perspective and everything, but we'd rather not have all the multiple perspectives all here. It'll be great to have different perspectives indicated in different places.

In particular, the group thoery wiki does not seek to have a global perspective and is completely indifferent to issues of race, religion, gender, university affiliation, and economic background. The people we want as editors are people who have a reasonable understanding of group theory and who are in agreement with the basic principles of the wiki. That may or may not be you — go around, see around, and judge for yourself whether you feel you can or want to contribute.

A dummy-friendly encyclopedia

The group theory wiki is based on the principle of reciprocity: you put in the effort to read, understand, and you are rewarded. This is not intended as a place for mindlessly following blue links and expanding one's knowledge. Random exploration is encouraged and rewarded. But we aren't going to make every article friendly to the person who randomly comes across the site.