We view our website as serving a role complementary to that of Wikipedia and to the websites designed to distribute research papers (MathSciNet, the Archive, and scholarly search tools such as Google Search). Whereas these tools provide an excellent service in giving researchers access to established knowledge, we hope to provide a forum for discussion and exploration of the frontier.

As such, we have no desire to recreate these other services. We hope our users post their preprints on the archive - where we will link to them, and we hope our users utilize the already impressive collection of mathematical definitions in Wikipedia (both by learning from them, and improving them). Instead of providing our own bibliography pages, we link to online copies of papers and to MathSciNet, and instead of forming our own definitions pages, we prefer that our users build Wikipedia - our \Def command provides a Wikipedia link (see guidelines for details).

Wikipedia has quickly built an incredibly vast and impressive library of knowledge, and we hope that our website will help our community to build an equally impressive online mapping of the frontier of our knowledge.