# Is the editing wikipedia “sand box” the same as MathJax located here?

Or is there a practice somewhere within math stack?

I will soon try for an account here, but want some practice. My Maple 14 LaTeX translator does not seem to be one hundred percent compatable.

## 2 Answers

There's no need for a sandbox feature, because when you type a question or answer the output appears immediately below the text box without any need to click 'preview' or suchlike. See the FAQ for more information on using $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ on MSE.

For future reference, questions about features and functionality should be posted to the meta site, where this question is likely to be moved.

• Meta has a sandbox, tho. – J. M. isn't a mathematician Apr 7 '13 at 3:16
• @J.M. we actually have two sandboxen. The one J.M. linked to is for drafting long answers/posts (mainly useful for people with bad internet connections: this allows them to save their progress every few minutes before doing a final copy/paste, thus avoiding repeated bumps on the main page and avoiding automatic CW); there's also a second one for testing MathJax use. – Willie Wong Apr 8 '13 at 8:39

(Supplementing Clive's answer:)

No, wikipedia does not use MathJax, but a different older TeX simulation of their own design. The two engines both try to approximate what TeX would produce, but have different quirks and don't succeed to the same degree.

Significantly for the editing experience, Wikipedia's implementation doesn't work with ordinary TeX $...$ embedding of formulas, but requires $...$ instead, which works nowhere else.

• After logging into Wikipedia you can choose in Preferences/Appearance one of the following possibilities: 1) Always render PNG; 2) Leave it as TeX (for text browsers); 3) MathJax (experimental; best for most browsers). I've learned about this here. I have not experimented with this option yet. – Martin Sleziak Apr 7 '13 at 7:24
• @MartinSleziak: Interesting; I hadn't noticed that. Unfortunately MathJax doesn't work quite as well there as it does here. The first random page I viewed after changing the setting had a \mathfrak{c} that became a plain undistinguished c after MathJax ran. Probably some font trouble. – hmakholm left over Monica Apr 7 '13 at 13:28