Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Dear nLab steering committee,
I’m requesting a personal web. At first I would like it to be password edit-protected, but readable publicly if possible. My initial intention is to use this personal web to compile constructions and theorems related to my current research on categorical gluing, normalization and coherence theorems, internal languages, initiality, etc. Much of the material that starts out here would eventually reach the general nLab at the point when it becomes sufficiently polished.
Thank you, Jon Sterling
The policy is that personal webs can be created for people who have some record of consistent activity editing the main Lab web. See the previous such request here, it looks like the replies there apply here.
nlab source is on GitHub, if you want you can host your own private nlab and use it to make your personal web. If it’s for collecting notes and such. Otherwise you should consider contributing to the nlab.
Hi Jon,
I hope these replies aren’t too discouraging. I think one thing that could be added to the replies to the previous request (which should probably be placed on some FAQ or other) is that you don’t need to worry about notes not being sufficiently polished before writing them on the main nLab. To take a recent example, Tim created category of interest by just copying in some very unpolished notes; he then got some feedback and the entry is already beginning to become more polished. nLab pages aren’t expected to be polished; some have become fairly polished over time, but others have languished in a very unpolished state for a long time, and yet we would still rather have them than have nothing; they provide a stub or starting place for some future editor who wants to polish them some more. (This is another way in which the nLab is unlike Wikipedia.) In addition, there’s no need to have any compunctions about writing original in-progress research on the main nLab, especially if you clearly mark it as such.
In addition, there’s no need to have any compunctions about writing original in-progress research on the main nLab, especially if you clearly mark it as such.
There are limits to that, though. Various people have come through and have written about stuff that doesn’t jibe with the rest of the nLab, or that winds up being a drain on our time dealing with it, etc. For example, work of incompetents, work of inexperienced teenagers, people who want to plunk down their philosophical meanderings, people who are resistant to assimilating our responses to it – stuff where something about it is off.
I don’t have any worries about Jon, but some people could get a wrong idea.
Good point.
Dear Mike, Urs, Todd,
Thanks for the feedback. I guess I’ll wait until my work is a bit more polished before I start unleashing it into the nlab. My reason for not doing so directly is a combination of two things:
I’m currently collecting stamps, and I haven’t yet combined them into a coherent story; Mike’s points are well taken, but I think I can judge that in their current state, it’s not even clear where to put these stamps, if I were going to put them into the nlab directly. My goal is to develop and sharpen them to the point where they will have natural homes in here.
This is perhaps a less noble reason (but a reason nonetheless, given the scientific climate)—while some of the stamps I am collecting are folklore (and should therefore go directly into the nlab as soon as their right place is determined), other parts are not. While I have no problem with these things being public, I feel they should first appear in a context that is personally attached to myself and my immediate collaborators.
Anyway, thanks for the comments. I’ve been struggling to find a suitable tool for a research notebook besides a gigantic .tex file, but maybe in the meanwhile, hosting a personal “copy” of the nlab myself is a reasonable approach.
Best, Jon
Jon, usually when you have some work in mind that you want to record on the Lab, it first takes typing up some infrastructure of well known definitions and results on which your work will be based. These would likely be welcome additions to the Lab. So if you start typing up your work into the Lab by beginning with that infrastructure, then by the time you reach the point of typing out your original research you may easily have become already the regular coherent contributor who easily qualifies for a private web (if you then still think that’s where your original contributions should go hiding).
Also, FWIW, stuff can always be moved around, including cut-and-paste from one page to another and also renaming whole pages. Not knowing exactly where something should go can be just part of unpolished-ness.
You don’t need one gigantic texfile either. You can split them into chunks. I keep some of my notes this way and when I want to put them together I know how to find them.
1 to 10 of 10