Experience in creating a mediabook wiki

This article is a detailed commentary to the topic “Wikipedia, which has been written in six months, starts with 900 articles . ”
In short, he would have sounded like this: “The work has been done tremendously, but if a person is interested, then this is not a problem. But then you just wonder how it was all done. ”
Further expanded - about his experience on the example of a wiki-resolver + Pi . Who cares, please, under the cat. Caution PR :)

I always liked math, and at the university I often made calculations on matan for money. When I got the Internet, the idea immediately came up: “to collect all the tasks I solved and put them on the network”. The idea, as often happens, went into a long box, and 5 years later (in April 2008), after the end of the uni, it was implemented as an “Internet solver + Pi” based on the MediaWiki engine .

The advantages of MediaWiki for me were:
- formulas using Tex-markup ;
- The ability to always easily fix added tasks or roll back erroneous edits.

I decided to stuff each task with a separate article. The main for the solution was selected problem book Kuznetsova L.A. (A collection of tasks in higher mathematics (typical calculations)), according to which we were given calculations at the Kiev Polytechnic. I am sure he is known to many.

Then for some reason it seemed that it was enough to start and immediately a crowd of like-minded people would join, and the site would begin to replenish like an avalanche. But this did not happen.

Tasks and solutions to them were recruited by me. The work went slowly also because the decisions worked out during the studies were either handed out or lost during the move, and we had to decide everything first. But as I wrote above - I like it and this is not a problem :)

To draw attention to the site, I created a VKontakte groupwhere at that time he spent a lot of time. The group aroused interest due to entertaining tasks, and Kuznetsov’s task book remained mainly my interest.
Interesting tasks are still on the site: Interesting tasks and puzzles .

Six months later, the site already had more than 500 tasks with solutions, of which 95% were added by me. Interest in PlusPi among users woke up, as you might guess, before the winter session. Then a few more people appeared who added solutions, and it was damn nice. Unfortunately, the new editors did not last long, but about 300 solutions were nevertheless not added by me, and this is a lot.

Over the year of existence, the problem book already contained about 3,000 problems, of which 2,000 were with solutions. 85% solved and added by me. After a year of the site’s existence, I’ve got less time and for the last 10 months I haven’t added any solutions, but I watched more so that the information would not be overwritten and added correctly.

If I had been told before that I would solve and pick up so many tasks with my hands, I would not believe it. And now this is reality and does not seem complicated.

Some of my conclusions during the existence of the site:

• users do not like to add tasks and especially solutions;
• users like to fix errors in tasks and are even ready for this to understand the markup;
• It’s easier for users to find my soap on the site and send a scan of tasks to me than upload a picture to the site.

Anticipating questions, I immediately answer a couple:
1. Why is this necessary if there is a Wolfram alpha .
Unfortunately, he solves in only one way, does not always detail decisions and forgets about explanations in Russian :)
2. You help lazy people! Let them decide.
Who seeks will always find. And it’s easy to check whether the person himself decided or wrote off. For this, at the university we had the protection of calculations.