François G. Dorais

Selected Papers Network

I just made my first contribution to the Selected Papers Network. It was fun and easy and I strongly recommend you use it too!

It’s too early for serious commentary on the experience but there are a few things I noted right away:

• The front page selectedpapers.net does not yet support MathJax. (Neither does Google+ but that’s another problem.) Hopefully that will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, you can use the MathJax bookmarklet.
• The hashtag syntax is fairly simple and intuitive but there is room for improvement. The main improvement would be to relax the ID rules to allow full urls which are easier to cut and paste. For example, http://arxiv.org/abs/1234.6789 for arXiv:1234.6789, http://dx.doi.org/10.1234/0987654321 for doi:10.1234/0987654321.
• Comments do not seem to generate arXiv trackbacks. (Or they have not yet made it through the arXiv editorial process.)
• I wish topic (hash)tags were allowed to have natural syntax. I can’t think of a good reason why this has to follow the Twitter standard. Should it be #cstarAlgebras or #CstarAlgebras or #CStarAlgebras… why not C*-algebras? It’s better to allow natural syntax and implement a tag synonym system. You can track these and other issues here.

Originally posted on June 17, 2013, by François G. Dorais. To the extent possible under law, François G. Dorais has waived all copyright and neigboring rights to this work.

Comments

• François G. Dorais wrote on June 17, 2013, at 16:59

  Edit: Added arXiv trackback issue.

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• Asaf Karagila wrote on June 17, 2013, at 17:30

  It seems to require Google+ to work with this platform… shame.

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• François G. Dorais wrote on June 17, 2013, at 18:01

  Edit: Added topic tag issue.

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• François G. Dorais replied to Asaf Karagila on June 17, 2013, at 18:04

  Temporarily… This is the alpha version and the plan is to expand to other platforms after sufficient testing.

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• Asaf Karagila replied to François G. Dorais on June 17, 2013, at 18:07

  I am not using any of the networks Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.

  Hopefully there’s going to be a way to use it without having any actual account on social networks.

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• John Baez replied to François G. Dorais on June 17, 2013, at 18:41

  We started with Google+, and next we’ll probably do Twitter, and perhaps some blogs. The point of using existing social networks is that they already put some work into making sure users have verified identities. We don’t want the system to be flooded with anonymous comments, since that tends to lead to flame wars and other problems. If we get enough programmers and other people on board, we could do things that require more work. But the first step is to get a growing number of users.

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• Asaf Karagila replied to John Baez on June 17, 2013, at 22:27

  Well, Google does provide an OID service, so that should be enough to verify my identity. I don’t think that the fact that I am using G+ or FB or anything else could sufficiently prove my identity more or less than any other OID service, at least one which is familiar “enough”.

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