User:Markus Krötzsch

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After finishing my Master's Thesis in Dresden, I am at the intitute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe; see my brief homepage. My main subjects of interest generally are found in the vicinity of mathematics and computer science. My motivation for contribution relates monotonically to my current spare time, and I may take a Wikibreak if its value drops below some threshold.

In spite of my editing inactivity, I am trying to incorporate some of the more practical aspects of my current research into Wikipedia. A paper on the possible semantic future of Wikipedia is to be found in the Proceedings of Wikimania 2005. Comments on this are very welcome: please have a look at the project Semantic MediaWiki and give your comments.

[edit] E-Patents remain an issue

Depending on the actual realization, legalizing software patents may provide useful protection for innovative and new techniques that include (but should not be limited to) software algorithms. However, todays software patents tend expose a degree of generality that does not protect a single concrete idea, but a general purpose. Instead of patenting an "evacuated glass bulb containing a wire filament, that is heated to white-hot by electrical resistance in order to generate light", one would rather patent a "technical device for generating light for use in indoor and outdoor environments". This abstraction from any actual invention seems to be possible in the world of software development and is in fact practiced quite a lot.

Ignoring the concrete implementation and protecting general ideas instead extends far beyond pure software development. The "invention" of sending a product bought in an online shop to a different address than the bill ("gift service") is an example of the kinds of trivial patents that already emerged. Further existing patents cover progress bars and tabbed dialogs in software appplications, mail filters, or the use of a "shopping cart" in online shopping. Legalizing patents means: a) customers pay for all these great "inventions" b) start-up companies are sued by patent holders for every line of software they write, including their websites c) publishing (free) software you wrote yourself or even creating a homepage can be illegal - consult a patent lawyer for some security …

First attempts to introduce softare patents to the EU have finally been halted by the European Parliament, which was widely considered a success of the anti-patent lobby (Should these be called "pro-freedom" along the US tradition?). However, while this prevented the introduction of software patents, it did not lead to a more concrete position of the EU on the whole issue and no explicit limits for (future) patentability were articulated either. Thus the issue remains a hot topic about which one should certainly stay informed.

Unfortunatelly, the political campaigns on the topic have been fierce and information on the topic now is only available in a rather POVed version. However, you still can find out more about (and against) software patents at the homepage of the FFII. The site www.nosoftwarepatents.com contains many reasonable arguments against software patents, though I do not like the good-vs.-evil style of this page (people who have ever talked to any political or religious extremist may share my allergy to extensive uses of the term "truth"; yet the people and its voted representatives seem to respond well to such methods). Have a look and judge yourself.

[edit] More POV

More interesting political non-NPOV that is worth further consideration can usually be found on the homepage of John Baez.

[edit] Editing

Currently, I am most concerned with mathematical topics (very specific, isn't it? ;-). The whole subset of articles in this area evolves very well, but there are still huge amounts of knowledge to be added. The problem is, of course, that one needs to address different levels of background knowledge. So in an ideal world, every math article should have a readable intro (with some intuition) and an easy to find section "Formal defnition", followed by interesting stuff of increasing difficulty. The WikiProject Mathematics compiles some good proposals on how to approximate this goal. Many articles will be happy about any extension, but bigger ones are sometimes rather lacking readability and an easy to follow structure. I also constantly complain about the absence of literature references in articles that state nontrivial results without a proof.

My current TODO (if any) is order theory, which really has increased quite a bit. Domain theory will be extended as soon as the important basic notions of order theory are available.

The following list may be of interest when you are looking for someone to complain about the contents of a particular article -- if its name appears on the list I will be happy to find your comments on my talk page. Some of my more relevant contributions include (in no particular order):

• Proof theory, which still needs quite some improvements to be acceptable. Any volunteers? Sequent calculus* and the related links are probably my main contribution in this area. Note: I am not watching this page, so feel free to drop me a line if the state changes...
• Category theory, where I restructured part of the material and updated some of the related pages like limit (category theory), adjoint functor, equivalence of categories*.
• Order theory**: lattice*, domain theory**, order theory glossary*, Heyting algebra, Galois connection, limit preserving (order theory)*, monotonic function, completeness (order theory)*, specialization order*, complete partial order*, duality (order theory)*, Boolean algebra, distributivity (order theory)*, upper bound, supremum, infimum, partially ordered set*, preorder, complete Heyting algebra*, greatest element*, maximal element*, compact element*, list of order topics, bounded complete*, Scott domain*, order isomorphism, interval (mathematics), semilattice*, order embedding*, Hasse diagram, Boolean prime ideal theorem, distributive lattice*, complete lattice*.
• Stone duality**.
• Other: Ultrametric space*, Stone-Weierstrass theorem, Tesseract.

The number of * indicates the amount of contribution found in each article (usually this means that I completely (re-)wrote the article and that it is not a stub now...). The main purpose of this is to motivate me for extending articles further even when they are already listed ;-)

Other non-mathematical articles I edited are:

• Open access
• Hamster
• Fox squirrel (image:squirrel_on_fence.jpg)
• Cashew
• Cuisine of Brazil (merged with Brazilian cuisine)
• ...

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