killer feature: automatic course packet generation

[holtzermann17]

Autolinking continues to be a "killer feature" for PlanetMath. For instance, problems and problem sets can already be automatically linked to definitions drawn from the encyclopedia. We plan to add a feature whereby small "course packets" of relevant material can be assembled out of autolinked material, on the fly. This will have a two-fold effect.

• First, any problems that can't be solved using retrieved reference material (perhaps after further expansion or unfolding) would point to holes in PlanetMath's coverage or in the metadata available to NNexus.
• Symmetrically, we will add a UI element to allow the user to mark any reference material that is retrieved that is not relevant, and will use this feedback to train the linker. This feedback could be sent to NNexus via a simple PUSH API in order to support "just-in-time invalidation'' (see #46).

[holtzermann17]

See also the second point from the PlanetMath FAQ:

2. Is PlanetMath anything like Wikipedia (or wiki software in general)?

Yes. PlanetMath contains a set of interlinked concepts which derive meaning from both their content and their connections. The interlinking is exposed as hyperlinks. The “meaning” of a node is not just its textual content, but also its position in the network.

But PlanetMath is different from wikis in some important regards. First and foremost, the default model of content authorship is that of object “ownership”, where a single person acts as the gatekeeper to the object’s content. However, you can also make your articles world-editable, or editable only by a specific set of co-authors.

[holtzermann17]

Ideally this should be done by the time we start making the 2013 FEM https://github.com/holtzermann17/planetmath-docs/issues/9