Groupprops:The story till 2007

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 is an informal account of the story of the development of the Group Properties Wiki, till 2007.

The beginning

The Group Properties Wiki, called groupprops first began life at

http://editthis.info/groupprops

At the time I started it, I was hopingto put together some definitions in group theory, for my own reference; I had no precedents to guide me, except my past experience of writing group theory articles on Wikipedia. However, I did have in mind certain organizational principles that I planned to adhere to: the principle of organizing according to themes, streams, and according to what is rather than the looser is related to stuff.

In hindsight, there is no particular reason why the first math wiki of this type should have been on group theory. The only reason was that group theory was, and continues to be, my prime area of interest within mathematics. As a student keen to learn group theory, I had scoured resources on the Internet and in libraries in search of new and more fascinating subgroup properties, in search of ways groups and subgroups could be related, and in search of trivia on groups. I now wanted it to be in a form that was immediately and readily accessible, where i could see the pattern.

The wiki was initially only for my benefit, although I did mention it to some others, and it also made a mention to my websites and blogs and other documentation I had about myself. As I proceeded, I found that there was an addictive quality to it; past efforts at documentation would usually fizzle out as the number and complexity of ideas I wanted to document exceeded some threshold, but with the wiki, the more I documented, the sturdier it seemed to be.

For various reasons, I soon shifted from editthis.info to it's current wiki-site.com address, where the wiki still resides. It was around this time that I started having serious ambitions of going public, or at least sharing the wiki actively as a resource with others; however, given all the other things I had to do, and given the fact that I was operating largely alone, I was unable to achieve this step. I am still far from achieving this step, though I do believe that the wiki is accessed and used by some outsiders; it largely remains an individual effort.