Honestly, I think the Summary at the top could be revamped, rather than creating an entire other database… that would be ridiculous. IMHO

This page seems a great example (the descriptions of the problems) well the P=NP example, Poincare and Riemann are still pretty dense

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_problem

P = NP wouldnt be that difficult to explain in a paragraph or two, for something that specific you could makea a resonable assumption that the person is from a programming, math or similar field. With P=NP, I would assume its fine to put things along the lines of sets P is the set…

But would avoid Non-determistic polynomial time like the plauge

This is reminding me, of a quote by a haskell programmer (cant remember who, and is paraphrased). Monads are not difficutl they sound difficult, we should have called them fluffy bunnies. Another example being Generics doesnt sound to scary, but parametric polymorphisim does.

At any rate, sounds like a good idea.

Rats, ido beat me to it. Simple.wikipedia is actually pretty good, e.g. p versus np. Unfortunately, a lot of these simple articles have been getting longer & more detailed. In fact, many articles are tagged “This short article about mathematics or a similar topic can be made longer. You can help Wikipedia by adding to it.” – so the two may have some convergence.

actually, there is also http://simple.wikipedia.org/, which is “wikipedia in simple words”, which kinda does what you want.

(I wanted to post links to “Poincaré Conjecture”, “Riemann hypothesis” and “P versus NP”, but your system called me a spammer :( )

While I like the idea, it would be very hard to do. Explaining the three topics in your post without using any technical words that’d need lookups or requiring previous knowledge in the field would take… a lot more than 2 paragraphs. Especially if you want to explain why they matter. I think wikipedia is doing a fine job as it is, after all if you don’t know enough about math to understand the poincaré conjecture article, it’s highly unlikely you need the information for other purposes than showing off/passing time.

Also, people say math is an international language… they’re wrong! I can barely understand a thing on the english pages you mention, but when I switch to french it’s much clearer. Maybe the french pages are just better :).

I love this idea. Just a quick ‘tell me what it is, nothing else’ in 1-2 paragraphs would be absolutely perfect for a lot of the searches I do every day, and it could then just link to Wikipedia and such FMI. As you say though, getting it started would be the trick.

This is indeed an awesome idea. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve had a discussion on IRC and turned to Wikipedia to look smart, only to get stuck there and entirely miss the discussion. I’d love to make something like that happen, but just like you I hardly have the marketing skills to pull it off. I could totally figure out hosting and domain name though (I quite like tldrwiki.com).

I agree that Ten Word Wiki isn’t quite serious enough for this, maybe because of lack of moderation. Exactly ten words is a pretty silly rule though if you ask me. It’s just asking for spam. One paragraph would be a better guideline.

@ Chris:

Nope, I have not, up until now. I should have known better than to assume that I had an original idea for a wiki type service. :P

Actually, I suspected something like this might exist, I just didn’t google hard enough.

On the other hand the ten word wiki seems to be more of a joke site even if it was probably not intended to. It is overrun by memes and urban dictionary type random joke definitions.

My idea was to make this a serious resource.

Have you seen the Ten Word Wiki?