Analysis

I've been working on and off since February towards changing the Wikipedia article on analysis from a list article -- a roster of Wiki articles that include the word "analysis" -- to an article that actually describes analysis in a variety of fields of study. It seemed to me that a list format in this case was pretty lame and ultimately didn't provide sufficient description of the concept.

I posted my idea on the discussion page back in February 2008 and received a favorable response. As of today there have been over a hundred edits to the article by an assortment of editors. Amazingly, we've had to revert some vandalism from time to time. Hard to figure why anyone would target an article on analysis, but some people have time on their hands.

You can compare the status of the article today (right) versus before I proposed the project (left). The comparison, which is called a diff, isn't always easy to understand, so I'll offer my grim attempt at an explanation. The gray boxes on the right indicate text blocks that haven't been altered from the earlier version. The green boxes on the right are text boxes that have been added/changed, while yellow on the left are ones that have been removed/changed. If a box is new or removed, it will have white space on its left or right. If a box is changed, red text in a green box indicates added text, while red text in a yellow box indicates removed text. Wiki shows a simple example with explanations, but it isn't a very thorough exemplar. For a broader discussion of diffs, see Jonathan D Nolen's blog. (I also came across this interesting what-if piece on the merits of the BBC using diffs to track news editing.)

There's plenty more work to be done on the analysis article if you're interested.