1.1.5.2 Why not just use the nLab instead?

    There are a number of reasons why Clowder was built as a separate project, instead of e.g. just editing the nLab:

    1. 1.

      Curation. All content on Clowder is personally curated by the project maintainer. This ensures an even quality to everything in the project.

    2. 2.

      Cohesion. As a consequence of Item 1, the Clowder Project ends up being much more cohesive than the nLab, having a clear and coherent organization, consistent notation and conventions, as well as a consistent style.

  • 3.

    Referenceability. Clowder employs Gerby’s Tag system, meaning that every citable statement in Clowder (e.g. definitions, examples, constructions, propositions, remarks, even individual items in lists, etc.) carries a corresponding tag.

    This makes the project easy to cite and reference, since although the numbering of e.g. a given definition may change, its associated tag will forever be the same. See also Clowder — The Tag System.

  • 4.

    Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding. Clowder is meant to be a crowdfunded project in which the community can help directly finance its development. As a result, the project has a dedicated project maintainer whose role is to continuously take care of the project, coordinating contributions, developing infrastructure, and expanding the content of the project.

  • 5.

    Infrastructure. The Clowder Project makes use of several very specific features which simply wouldn’t be possible to implement in the nLab. This includes:

    1. (a)

      An elaborate fork of gerby-website, implementing a variety of new features and quality-of-life additions.

    2. (b)

      Another elaborate fork, this time of Gerby (which is itself a fork of plasTeX), implement a number of similarly needed features for the website to work as intended.

    See Section 1.2.3.2 for a (slightly) more in-depth description of the features and additions that have been created specifically for Clowder.


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