Difference between revisions of "PEGWiki:PEGWiki is not an encyclopedia"

Revision as of 21:27, 6 November 2009

PEGWiki runs on the very popular MediaWiki software. One site that uses MediaWiki that is particularly well-known is Wikipedia. One might be tempted to think that PEGWiki serves a similar purpose to that of Wikipedia. It does not. PEGWiki is both similar and dissimilar to an encyclopedia.

PEGWiki should contain whatever content is useful, interesting, or beneficial for PEG, and it should be driven by members of PEG. This does not mean that non-members are barred from contributing. If you are not a member of PEG, feel free to contribute to articles that you feel you could improve, such as those describing algorithms and data structures. However, the level and style of the article should be appropriate for PEG. So, for example, if you think an explanation is incomplete, poorly written, or confusing, then by all means improve it, but don't rewrite sections to make them more understandable for the non-computer-literate; also, pages describing algorithms and data structures, such as Computational geometry, should have the primary purpose of educating the reader so that he or she can apply the techniques described, and not the tempting but incorrect purpose of simply collecting all the information about that topic (even if it is presented in the most interesting way possible). In effect, although PEGWiki is not a textbook either, it is much more similar to a textbook than it is to an encyclopedia.