One of Wikipedia's less well-known features is its Book: namespace. The things there are called books, and they could be printed on paper and bound into a book if you're one of those rare Wikipedia users who doesn't use a computer to read things, but really they're curated collections of links to Wikipedia articles. I've made two of them before, Book:Graph Algorithms and Book:Fundamental Data Structures, which I have used for the readings in my graduate classes on those topics because I wasn't satisfied with the textbooks on those subjects. This week I put together a third one, Book:Graph Drawing.

It's not complete (what on Wikipedia is?), and the writing quality and depth of coverage are as variable as always, but there are about 100 topics there and I hope that collecting them in this way proves useful. I've listed a few more things that I think should be added but don't yet have their own Wikipedia articles on the talk page, but if you see something else missing then please let me know or, even better, add it.




Comments:

None:
2014-06-30T09:29:43Z

Knuth said in a recent interview that figuring out what to cut was the hardest for him. Don't you think that some of the articles being less important than the others together with ever growing amount of information on Wikipedia together with the misnomer 'Book' (it is so easy to confuse it with an actual textbook! For one thing, an important feature of which is uniformity, i.e. when the whole text is written in the same style and with a certain unifying idea in mind of the author) might invalidate this idea? What do your students think of these collections? Is there a built-in mechanism on Wikipedia to create personalised collections?

11011110:
2014-06-30T15:26:52Z

In the students' case, the alternative is to have only my lecture notes. There is no published book that I consider satisfactory for advanced graph algorithms or data structures. And of course I pick and choose what to cover in lectures rather than covering everything, the same way I would with a textbook. I think the biggest differences in course usage from a textbook are that it covers everything I want to cover and that there are no prepackaged exercises.

As for personalized collections: yes, it's easy. You can use the same formatting codes for content in the User: name space, for instance.

deoxyt2:
2014-07-01T19:23:47Z

Hey, that good data, great, I will do the same in Spanish lol.