Building the quantnet wiki and indexing the forum knowledge

[doug reich]

I was encouraged enough by Andy's support in this thread ( DISCUSSION on MFE programs (Formerly "Second-rate (and worse) MFE programs) - Page 6 - QuantNetwork - Financial Engineering Forum) to start a section on the wiki to help organize the knowledge that is repeatedly rehashed on these forums.

The section is located at http://quantnet.com/wiki/Category:Quant_Skillshttp://quantnet.com/wiki/Quant_skills. It needs to somehow be linked from other pages on the wiki so it can be found again.

The purpose, as I described in the original post, is to put some editorial content on skills you should learn as a quant and resources for doing so as well as the difference in utility of different types of degrees. Obviously, since it's a wiki, I encourage anyone to reorganize the setup to better present the material, add new material, and create similar pages on related topics (MFE rankings is one such topic I didn't even want to go near, for example).

As a part of this effort, you can also do the following:
1. Add tags to posts that you think could use them (new topics are especially easy!)
2. Add testimonials and opinions on the individual programs pages that are already there. There are plenty of these, even in the thread I linked to above ( DISCUSSION on MFE programs (Formerly "Second-rate (and worse) MFE programs) - Page 6 - QuantNetwork - Financial Engineering Forum) -- again, you can simply rearrange the information already out there.

There have to be some other people who love organizing as much as I do... I call on thee to help!

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Very good start, Doug.
To put each wiki entry under a certain category, you can add [[Category:Education]] with Education a category.
There are few categories on the first page which we can extend.
As of right now, anyone can create/edit an entry. The only thing they can't edit is the main page which I would love to see if someone can make it look more like
Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just play with the wiki system, learn the syntax. You can always delete, redo any page.

The next thing I'd like to do is to add Testimonials section on each program wiki entry so alum of those program and give feedback directly.

I'll do my part on the Baruch wiki.

 

[doug reich]

I put things in categories instead of making my own indexes (wow, that's really useful!). I added everything to the same "Education" category as well as making subcategories... not sure how great that is in retrospect.

I managed to do a few things I can't seem to undo myself: deleting pages.

However, the original Quant skills page: Quant skills - Quantnet Wiki won't go away from the Categories page; it redirects correctly (assuming you don't pass the redirect=no parameter), but it is listed in the category index since it says "[[Categories:Quant Skills]]". It may make sense to get rid of Categories:Quant Skills altogether since it's redundant with the Education category.

The other problem is the C/C++, Java, C# page: C/C , Java, C - Quantnet Wiki -- this should be deleted. When you go to that page as linked from the Categories:Quant Skills page, the wrong one comes up, so you can't get rid of it.

As for wikipedia... they have a lot of HTML they put into the front page (not sure if they used a WYSIWYG editor there, but the "view source" is all HTML anyway), so that's a lot more effort than just wiki markup.