Brushing up on Computer Science Part 1, Big O

Re:Brushing up on Computer Science Part 1, Big O by _delirium on Monday March 14, 2011 @02:01PM (#2323609)

One problem with these kinds of articles on Wikipedia is that there's something of a deadlock between pedagogy-oriented and mathematical-precision-oriented editors. There's been a lot of discussion in WikiProject Mathematics over how to balance those concerns, in some cases producing multiple articles for the "introductory treatment" versus the "formal treatment", and in other cases just being better about organization, inclusion of visual aids and examples, etc. I think there's been an improvement in a lot of the math articles over the past 2-3 years in that regard, but the focus has been on more of the "core math" articles, and the CS articles have lagged (one reason is that mathematicians, including some very prolific professors, seem more numerous and active in the Wikipedia community than computer scientists are).

In theory, Wikiversity and WikiBooks are supposed to do even more on the pedagogy/introduction/tutorials side, but those projects have never gotten the same level of participation as Wikipedia has.

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Re:Brushing up on Computer Science Part 1, Big O by bane on Monday March 14, 2011 @03:27PM (#2324002)

One thing that I'd argue about is that with many many topics on Wikipedia, you can start at the top, and via hyperlinks, more or less piece together a pretty good understanding of the topic. With the CS and mathematics ones? Not so much. It's just dense layer upon dense layer of very raw mathematics.

There's an ongoing argument over why certain editors seem to want to constrain and duplicate the constraints of physical encyclopedias in a near infinite digital medium. But I do have to agree that tutorials and step-by-step instructions probably don't belong there.

But I'll be honest, when I have to look something like this up, I usually just go back to my old textbooks vs. wikipedia since the explanations are usually better presented. The section on big-O in WP is one of the better ones, but I'll be damned if I can figure out the walls of equations in some of the other articles. Most of the material doesn't appear in any textbook I've ever seen (perhaps that's saying something about the quality of the textbooks I used way back in College?)

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