Knowl Edit Guidelines (awaiting review)

Editing inside a knowl works as per usual in a wiki. However, please keep in mind that a knowl is context-free. By convention, knowls in the LMFDB should be written in complete English sentences.

Use latex macros where applicable. Then if we change the definition of the macro, it will be changed for all instances in the LMFDB. Current definitions can be found in base.html, and can be seen in the HTML source of all rendered pages.

If you were to put the code

... the {{ KNOWL("lfunction.rh.proof", "proof")}} of the {{KNOWL("lfunction.rh", "Riemann hypothesis")}} was found in ...

the result would look like

... the proof of the Riemann hypothesis was found in ...

As you can see the knowl proof is currently missing, but would be implicitly created once someone edits it.

Definitions

When using a mathematical term for the first time in a knowl, if there exists a knowl defining that term, please link to it. The "Link suggestions" button can help you to find cases of this and insert the relevant links.

Please follow our naming conventions and naming suggestions for the description and identifier fields of knowls.

For a knowl that gives a definition of a mathematical term, use the DEFINES macro to correctly typeset the term and give keyword arguments connecting to other definitions, e.g.

... is {{DEFINES("abelian", groupprops="Abelian_group", nlab="abelian group", wikipedia="Abelian_group", mathworld="AbelianGroup", wikidata="Q181296")}} if...

This will automatically create a knowl with links to these other definitions (e.g. abelian). You can instead use an arbitrary knowl with more context about how definitions in different sources differ from those in the LMFDB by using the clarification_kid keyword argument:

... is {{DEFINES("abelian", clarification_kid="group.abelian.clarification")}} if...

For emphasis that is not the definition of a term, use italics.

Citations

You can include inline citations using the "\cite" command, for example removing the quotes from the code

...average rank of elliptic curves is bounded as shown by Bhargava and Shankar "\cite"{doi:10.4007/annals.2015.181.1.3,MR:3272925,arXiv:1006.1002}.

yields citations by Document Object Identifer (DOI), MathSciNet MR number, and arXiv identifier:

...average rank of elliptic curves is bounded as shown by Bhargava and Shankar [10.4007/annals.2015.181.1.3, MR:3272925, arXiv:1006.1002].

You can also cite by giving an explicit hyperlink (but this should be done only when none of the other options is available). For example removing the quotes from

...average rank of elliptic curves is bounded as shown by Bhargava and Shankar "\cite"{href{http://cds.cern.ch/record/1270231}{cds.cern.ch/record/1270231}}.

yields

...average rank of elliptic curves is bounded as shown by Bhargava and Shankar [cds.cern.ch/record/1270231].

Please check for and include an arXiv citation when available for the benefit of users who may not be able to access MathSciNet or journal article that requires a subscription (when available, citing by both MR number and arXiv identifier is preferable). The following keys are suppored by both the DEFINES macro and the cite command:

• arxiv
• doi
• groupprops
• href
• mathlib
• mathworld
• mr
• nlab
• stacks
• wikidata
• wikipedia
• zbl

Katex

Since switching to \(\KaTeX\) some common commands are unsupported: the following replacements can be used

• \varprojlim_{blah} : \lim_{\xleftarrow[blah]{}}
• \substack{a}{b} : { {a} \atop {b} }
• \begin{smallmatrix} \end{smallmatrix} or \smallmatrix{...} : \begin{pmatrix} \end{pmatrix} (and bmatrix, matrix, vmatrix variants)
• \mbox : use \text or \operatorname or \mathrm
• \begin{equation} : just use \[
• eqnarray, split and align and variants : \begin{aligned}