Universal Documentation

Wikipedia is amazing as it grows it is becoming something of my concept of a set of Universal Documentation.

Did you know there is documentation on building a FTL spaceship? If you dig in you'll see the reason they haven't built it is they need exotic matter, but if you dig further than that you'll see that matter can be shown to be exotic matter. Holy Crap!?! But I digress.

There is a fundamental problem with wikipedia. The problem is people don't know everything. And wikipedia doesn't take them all the way back to something they know so they can hang the information somewhere.

The problem illustrates itself best in mathematics. Regardless of what level of mathematics you are comfortable with, there are certain portions you don't know. It's made even more tricky because of the symbols they use. Did you look at the wikipedia article on exotic matter? Did you notice Forward's Analysis? And the equations used there:

P(sys) = (v x m) + (v x (-m))

Do you know what v and m are for? I happen to know that P(sys) is talking about potential energy (but that's because I remember something from my physics classes).

The trouble is wikipedia doesn't provide links for you to learn. It's a dead end, you can't understand what they're talking about so you quickly lose the knowledge. You might contend here that I could whip out my physics book and learn the requisite knowledge.

Ever tried searching a physics book for a specific type of instruction? It's not easy, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it on a more regular basis than once a week. That combined with the fact that you may not even be able to learn from the textbook, leaves this a dead end.

Imagine wikipedia articles where hovering over the variables in an equation tells you what they are describing and clicking on them takes you to documentation of what that thing is. Imagine being able to dig far enough down to find something you do understand and work your way up until you understand the math and physics they are describing.

That is perfect Universal Documentation.

The troubles I see with this are the same problems I have with physics books. They're not written by people who are good at getting their point across, they are written by people who are good at physics.

I wonder if I could start at the bottom and work up. If I started with mathematics, branching for different types of mathematics, branching further for physics.

What an insane idea, but just imagine if anyone in the world could contribute to scientific discussions.