Tips for writing math and science articles

This page is intended to contain useful information for authors of math and science articles, to make the presentation more uniform and of high quality. Discussion of the general vision for such articles should be on the Talk:Mathematics page.

Notices of level of difficulty

Math and science articles at Conservapedia cover a fairly wide span of difficulty within the range of junior-high-school-age, high-school-age, and college-age students. (We are not really trying to target an audience outside of that range.) There is usually no way to write an article that engages the reader throughout all these levels, and some topics are simply not appropriate for some students. Therefore, we have created four templates that can be placed at the top of each article. They are:

{{Math-e}} (elementary school)

{{Math-m}} (middle school)

{{Math-h}} (high school / early college)

{{Math-a}} (advanced)

We recommend placing one of these at the top of each article, to offer guidance to the reader. In some cases, it may be appropriate to use additional templates on individual sections of an article.

Math markup

Articles often require the presentation of mathematical formulae. These are entered in a markup language that is a slightly restricted version of the LaTeX typesetting system (with some AMSLaTeX packages). See the Wikimedia help page for a brief introduction. There are many excellent tutorials on LaTeX available online, including The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.

Any such formula must be in a "math markup" section, indicated by these html indicators:

<math>place the formula here</math>

The simplest way to create such a section is to click on the "square root sign" icon at the top of the screen, and then type the formula.

A few typesetting tips:

• If you need to write vertically aligned stuff in braces, using the "\begin{cases}" mechanism, do not use \textrm inside the cases. It's legal LaTeX, but it doesn't work in Wikimedia. Use \mbox instead. See Fundamental group for examples.

• The "\substack" command of LaTeX does not work in Wikimedia. Use "\stackrel" instead, as in

<math>\stackrel{a}{\widehat{B}}</math>

or

<math>\stackrel{\textstyle{\rightarrow}}{V}</math>

which produce

<math>\stackrel{a}{\widehat{B}}</math>

or

<math>\stackrel{\textstyle{\rightarrow}}{V}</math>

• You can force the wikimedia software to use the full-blown "PNG" rendering of equations by putting the command "\," (backslash comma) at the end, just before the </math>. Normally, the software tries not to use PNG display if it thinks it can get away with it, because it believes (rightly) that PNG is computationally more taxing. So if the equation just has simple things like Greek letters, the software will try to use the Greek font that it has access to. That font is nowhere near as nice as the true PNG display. The LaTeX command backslash comma introduces an extremely tiny space at the end of the equation, which the display software can't handle except by going to PNG. Of course, if your equations has hairy integrals and such, you won't need to do this.

Pictures

Articles often need diagrams and graphs. A few available graphics software packages that might be useful are:

• Winplot, from [1] (free, but not open source)
• Inkscape, from [2] (free, open source)

There is a helpful page on using Inkscape to make technical diagrams here.

We do not have much experience with these packages, and would appreciate feedback on them (perhaps with examples of uploaded diagrams), or suggestions for other packages.