GCI - Updating the Sympy Wikipedia Article Question

[Eric Thoma]

Hello,

I am current tasked with updating the Wikipedia article page on Sympy (see http://www.google-melange.com/gci/task/view/google/gci2011/7125290). I have a working install on my computer and as part of the Wikipedia page, I thought it would be helpful to include multiple working examples of the product (see https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/examples/advanced/hydrogen.py). I can generate some examples myself, but the extent of those examples would stop at basic calculus. I noticed that in the GitHub repository there were many fine examples of the product at work, and I would like to ask permission to use some of those same examples to show the capabilities of the product in the Wikipedia article. If this is permissible, please notify me if any special citations (to people or sites) would be needed.

Thank you!

-- Eric Thoma --

[Aaron Meurer]

You are free to use any example that you find in the docs or in the
source. SymPy is open source, and licensed under the BSD license,
which basically means you can do anything you want with it.

See the README for how to cite SymPy. If you take it from a specific
place (e.g., from the docs, or from an example file), I would note
that somehow in the Wikipedia article (e.g., "Adapted from an example
included with SymPy from the examples/advanced/hydrogen.py directory",
or "Adapted from docs.sympy.org/...).

By the way, can you make all the output of the examples use the
unicode pretty printing (just add "init_printing()" to the top of the
example to make it reproducible)? This is one feature of SymPy that
is superior over most other systems, and I think it would be good to
show it off there.

Aaron Meurer

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[Eric Thoma]

Thanks for the reply. I will add the init_printing() to the top of the files for the examples. I plan to include a section detailing the pretty printing capabilities.

[Ronan Lamy]

I'm not sure that expanding the article in that way is such a good idea,
I think it would count as "original
research" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:OR]. The one thing the
article is obviously missing is "reliable
sources" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS]: as it is, it's not
unlikely that it would get deleted should the issue be raised.

[Aaron Meurer]

I see what you mean. Actually, if you look at the history, most of
the article was written by Ondřej some time ago.

On the other hand, I think that as long as the docs, source code, etc.
are cited, it should be OK. This is easily verifiable research. It's
not like making some claim about median household income. In that
case, someone can't just go and try to verify it manually, because
they don't have access to that data. But for SymPy, someone can
easily check that, e.g., the syntax for integrate is integrate(expr,
(var, lower_limit, upper_limit)). It's kind of like the WIkipedia
articles for mathematical concepts. If you write a proof, you should
cite it if you take it from somewhere, but it's OK also to write your
own proof. It's easily verifiable without any sources.

Also, we could add sources from
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/SymPy-Papers (if that page had
anything ;).

But suppose that there were no scholarly papers on SymPy. How else
could you have a Wikipedia article for it, other than by citing the
docs and source code?

Aaron Meurer