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Light and Matter Wiki
The purpose of this wiki is to make it easier for users of the Light and Matter physics textbooks, by Benjamin Crowell, to make their own modified versions, e.g., translations into other languages.
The purpose of this wiki is not to allow users to make changes that will find their way back into the "official" version maintained by the author, which I'll refer to as the upstream version. So if, for example, you find a typo in one of the books, correcting it here on this wiki will not cause the error to be fixed in the upstream version. If you find an error, please (1) check the upstream version to make sure that it hasn't already been fixed, and then if it hasn't, contact me, and I'll fix it in both places.
This is a publicly editable wiki. In order to edit it, you need to create an account by clicking on the "create account" link at the top right corner of the page.
Contents |
Original versions
The following are copies of the upstream versions, converted into wiki format. The main reason these are here is so that if you want to create a modified version of a book, you can copy the wiki text from them as a starting point. The only reason for you to edit these is if there's something that didn't get converted quite right in the conversion to wiki format.
Light and Matter
- 1. Newtonian Physics
- 2. Conservation Laws
- 3. Vibrations and Waves
- 4. Electricity and Magnetism
- 5. Optics
- 6. The Modern Revolution in Physics
Modified versions
The following are modified versions of the books being worked on by users.
- Physique Newtonienne (ongoing project to produce a French translation of Newtonian Physics)
- Élégante Nature (ongoing project to produce a French translation of Simple Nature)
- Electricidad y Magnetismo (ongoing project to produce a Spanish translation of Electricity and Magnetism)
Getting started
In the following, I'll assume that you're working on a translation, but the idea would be the same if you were creating some other type of modified version of the books (e.g., adapting them to a different style of pedagogy, or a different educational level).
This web site is a wiki, and it runs the same software as Wikipedia. Here is an explanation of what a wiki is. If you've read articles on Wikipedia, but have never edited one, this article on how to edit may be helpful.
Creating an account
Click on the "log in / create account" link at the top right corner of the screen. On the next page, click on the link where it says "Don't have a login? Create an account." You'll need to supply an email address, and verify it, before you can edit.
Editing an existing chapter
Click on the links to navigate to the page of the translated book, then on the link for the chapter you want to edit. Find the section you want to work on, and click the [edit] link on the right-hand side. Edit the text, and click on the "Save page" button.
Starting work on a new chapter of an existing book
Go to the main page of the translated book, which has an (incomplete) table of contents. Click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page. In the table of contents, add a new line for the new chapter, modelling the formatting on that of the chapters that are already done. The title of the chapter should be in the language you're translating into, not English. Click on "Show preview." You should see that the link for the new chapter is red, which indicates that the chapter doesn't actually exist yet. If it's red, go ahead and click on "Save Page."
If the chapter is not red, then a page on the wiki already exists with that name. This may happen because, for example, two different books have both been translated into French, and they both have introductory chapters named "Introduction et généralités." The two chapters are probably not exactly identical, so they can't share the same page on the wiki. However, you may find that you can reuse a large amount of text that has been already been translated by someone else. The newly created chapter for the book you're working on has to have a different name than the one that already exists for the other book. I've been handling this by prefixing the name with a two-letter abbreviation for the book. For an example of how to do this, see Simple Nature, which has a bunch of chapters prefixed with SN. In the table of contents, both the prefixed and unprefixed forms of the name are given, with a | separating them.
Find the original English-language version of the chapter, click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page, and copy the entire text of the chapter to your clipboard. Since you aren't actually going to edit the English-language chapter, just click on "Cancel" to the right of the three buttons at the bottom of the page.
Go back to the table of contents page of the translated book, and click on the red link for the chapter that you're now starting to translate. The wiki software will know that you're creating a new web page, and will give you a box that you can paste the English-language text into. You can now start translating the new chapter by replacing English text with translated text. Note that it's really not a good idea to start from scratch, rather than from the English translation; the English translation, for example, has all the section headings and mathematical equations formatted correctly.
Starting a completely new translation of a book
This is similar to the process described above for creating a new chapter. On this page, create a link under "Modified versions." It will be a red link, because the book doesn't exist yet. Create the new page by clicking on the red link. Model the formatting of the new book on the formatting of an existing book. In addition to the title and table of contents, please write text in the new language that includes the following:
- A link like this with my byline and contact information: Benjamin Crowell
- A brief explanation of what the project is, with links to the wiki's home page and the non-wiki original book's home page on lightandmatter.com.
- Licensing information explaining that the book is under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, except for the photos as explained in the photo credits in the back of the pdf version.
As an example of how to format all this, see Physique Newtonienne.
More about editing
Using templates to avoid duplication of effort
Sometimes large sections of different books will have identical text. For example, the Optics chapter of Simple Nature is identical to the book Optics in the Light and Matter series. The most straightforward way to handle this would be to translate all the text for one of the books, then cut and paste it into the other book. However, this has the disadvantage that there would then be two versions of the text that would have to be maintained. For example, if someone found a typographical error in one, they might not know that there was also another version that needed correcting, and even if they did know, it would be extra work. The wiki software has a graceful method of handling this, using a feature called a template. A template is a page on the wiki whose text can be substituted into another page. Here is some documentation on how to use templates.
In general, it will not be possible to use a single template for an entire chapter. There are two reasons for this. One is that often the text of one book is similar to, but not identical to, the text of the other. For instance, Simple Nature may have calculus-based examples that are not in Light and Matter. The other reason is that the hierarchy of one book's table of contents is shifted relative to the other's. For example, the Optics chapter of Simple Nature corresponds to the entire book Optics; a section in the optics chapter of Simple Nature corresponds to a chapter in the Optics book, subsections correspond to sections, and so on. For this reason, it will generally be necessary to make the templates correspond to the smallest units of text, such as a section or subsection.
Math
Math is entered in LaTeX format. Here is some documentation from Wikipedia on how to enter math; the software used on this wiki is identical. The English-language versions on this wiki were created by software I wrote that conversion the original LaTeX files into wiki format. Since the math was already in LaTeX format, and the wiki uses LaTeX format for math, essentially nothing needed to be done, and in general you won't need to do any math markup from scratch. However, the LaTeX dialect allowed by the wiki is more restricted, so you may find some cases where there is an error message in red showing that the wiki software couldn't handle the math. These will need to be fixed by hand. (If you find a certain problem like this that's occurring over and over in various places, please contact me, and maybe I can fix it globally.)
