Currently, the functions in the Math menu are all discussed on this single page. Seeing that the current preference is to give each command their separate page, all the write-ups on the Math functions should eventually be put into their own pages, and all that should remain on this page are links to those individual pages.
I'm starting to work on it.
So now that the commands all have their own pages, how should this page look?
The easiest thing to do would be to write a paragraph or two explaining what each group of commands is used for, and then simply group the commands together. How do you think the page should look?
Another consideration is that there's nothing that actually groups these commands together beyond their location in a menu. This is actually not as great an idea for a category as it might seem - we'd do better to have a menu map page.
I think that the commands should be indexed in three ways, when we're done:
-from the alphabetical command index (one page)
-possibly from a menu map (also one page)
-by categories and sub-categories, some of which we already have (statistics, variables, homescreen, etc). This way, the math page would be the parent (or grandparent) page for everything already on there, as well as the commands directly on the keyboard, and some other miscellaneous math routines.
What do you think?
That sounds pretty good, and I especially like the menu map idea :D However, we still need to come up with categories for the math commands, as well as the rest of the remaining commands. It's definitely coming together, though.
How's this look? I know there may be a lot of categories here, and I couldn't get out of having a "miscellaneous" category anyway, but it still brings some organization into the mix.
It looks good, although it seems to be kind of long. I just broke the groups up into two columns. Does it look any better?
Better, but it still needs a better grouping, and possibly adding pages for the categories.
Could you maybe do you what you did with the variables page, i.e., instead of displaying the commands, you create a page for each group of commands, and put a link 'for more information, see …'? Would that work better?
That's what I was thinking. But it still requires figuring out how to actually split them up.
Well, how many categories would you like there to be? If I know that, I can spend some time thinking about it and rearranging the commands to see what I can come up with.
Now that I think about it, it's more of finding categories that make sense together enough that I can write a page about them. E.g. the trig commands work together, and so do the logical operators (which I might add a =, <, >, etc. section to). The way some other groups are, the only thing you can say about them is "This is what this command does. This other commmand does that, instead."
Our math page claims that statistics is not math, so it does not list the statistics commands. This separation sort of makes sense since people generally aren't looking for information about how to use trig commands and stats commands at the same time, but it also makes it difficult to find the statistics commands. Since this is the case, can we just add the statistics page to the commands overview page and the commands section of the side bar? I've noticed a lot of forum posts over the years asking where to find stats commands, and I think that this would be a good solution. Thoughts?