21
$\begingroup$

A lot of us (especially professional mathematicians) here, in posting answers and questions, link to one of the four commonly used resources: Wikipedia, the Springer encyclopedia of mathematics, PlanetMath, and Wolfram MathWorld.

What is unthinkable to me just happened: all links to the Springer EOM are, as of this moment, broken. (This is due to their transitioning to a new Wiki-based model, and acquiring a new domain name. You can read my complaint in the link above, but that is not the point of this post.)

I am secretly hoping that Springer would do "the right thing" and insert proper redirects from their old website to the new one (making DOI seems like a good idea now also). But in case that doesn't happen:

Here's a plea to the good samaritans of Math.SE: if you see a broken link to eom.springer.com, hop on over to www.encyclopediaofmath.org and find the correct article (all EOM articles have been imported to that Wiki to seed the database), and replace the link.

Thanks!

$\endgroup$
11
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Personally I linked more to JSTOR/MathSciNet/etc. rather than EOM. $\endgroup$ – Asaf Karagila♦ Dec 1 '11 at 9:45
  • 10
    $\begingroup$ @Asaf: EOM, unlike MathSciNet, is open access. For old and established results, in my opinion it is far better to link to an encyclopaedic entry (such as EOM of PlanetMath) than to the actual article, especially since EOM has a good citation practice for each of its entries. In any case, links to JSTOR and MathSciNet probably will not suffer the same issue, and if you use DOI links to articles, it should even by less of a problem. $\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Dec 1 '11 at 10:07
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ To get people started... $\endgroup$ – J. M. ain't a mathematician Dec 1 '11 at 11:53
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ I went through the list provided by Google using some variations of @J.M. 's search and edited those which I could edit. Unfortunately, most of the hits are in the comments. $\endgroup$ – t.b. Dec 1 '11 at 23:47
  • $\begingroup$ @t.b. I don't think we need worry about stuff in comments. They are not meant to be persistent like answers are. Oh, and thanks! $\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Dec 2 '11 at 9:46
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ OK, this is a really off-topic comment but the math rendering in EOM looks really, really ugly - like a badly scanned text saved to DJVU with the compression too high. I've looked at it in two different browsers (Chrome and IE) and the results are the same. The math displayed in Wikipedia, for example, looks much cleaner. $\endgroup$ – ItsNotObvious Dec 2 '11 at 13:00
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ I went through results of site:math.stackexchange.com "eom.springer". I found only one in a post (hat tip to t.b. and others who converted the links) and those that were in the comments I've collected here. I found only 7 such comments, so this really seems unimportant. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 2 '11 at 13:22
  • $\begingroup$ In case there are still links in posts left and someone is planning to correct them, here are my tips what to do when you are not sure whether you really found the corresponding page: A. Google might still remember the sites, so you can a search like this: a011400 springer. B. If you click on View Source, you will see links like "/legacyimages/a/a011/a011400/a0114006.png" identifying the original id, you can try it here. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 2 '11 at 13:23
  • $\begingroup$ BTW it seems that many wikipedia articles are linking to EOM as well - so they have the same problem, it might be interesting to find out how they're going to deal with it. Some discussion on this is here. $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Dec 2 '11 at 13:28
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @3Sphere that's because they are using legacy image links. EOM had been around for a long time. Long (in the scale of the internet, of course) before modern ways of getting pretty math on webpages have come about. I suspect one of the things they want the "crowd" to do (so they don't have to pay any typists) is to convert those image math to MathJax, which the new site also supports. $\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Dec 2 '11 at 14:06
  • $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak Nice way of using Scribd! I never thought of that. Thank you. $\endgroup$ – Ellie Kesselman Dec 11 '11 at 19:45
4
$\begingroup$

Note: the link redirection appears to have also been fixed on Springer's end. So we can mark this discussion over.

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .