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Yes. Problems, concepts, playlists, discussions, personal notes, imports, and exports stay free. Solutions will not sit behind a paywall.

No. Math Woods will not display ads, sponsored problems, paid rankings, affiliate links, or promotional content disguised as editorial content. No ads is a hard rule.

Possible sources are donations, grants, institutional support, and low running costs. Supporters do not buy editorial influence, user data, rankings, or special access.

Yes. Math Woods should not build advertising profiles or sell personal data. Any operational analytics should stay minimal.

Yes. The application code is licensed under GNU AGPL-3.0-or-later. This license is designed for network software and requires operators of modified public versions to make their corresponding source code available to users.

The AGPL says that a public modified version of the site must make its corresponding source available to its users.

Yes. Forks are allowed. They must follow the AGPL terms and keep the required notices.

Yes. Public content and personal work should remain portable through Markdown and other simple formats. Private notes are not public encyclopedia content and should never be included in public exports or datasets.

Original public problems and encyclopedia-style content use CC BY-SA 4.0 by default. Others may share and adapt it if they give credit, mark changes, and use the same license for adaptations.

Math Woods accepts CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0, CC0 1.0, and verified public-domain material.

Creative Commons explains that NC restricts commercial uses and ND forbids sharing adaptations. Those restrictions make content harder to combine, translate, correct, and reformulate. Math Woods is ad-free; its public content should still be reusable.

Keep the author or source, the license, a useful link, and a note when the wording changed.

No. They are reminders. When permission is unclear, do not copy the material.

Usually not. Do not copy a book’s wording unless the material is under a compatible license, genuinely in the public domain, or the rights holder has granted suitable permission. Buying or owning a book does not grant republication rights.

Yes. Prefer an independent, clear reformulation written from your own understanding of the mathematical idea. Record the approximate origin and any known chapter, page, problem number, or historical note. A reformulation should improve clarity and preserve attribution, not disguise copying.

No. Mathematical ideas and facts are different from a source’s particular expression, but a rewrite that remains too close may still be problematic. Some collections also have specific terms of use. When in doubt, link to the source, write a genuinely independent problem, or leave it unpublished until permission is clear.

Treat them like any other published material. Check the organizer’s reuse policy before reproducing the official wording. When allowed, identify the competition, year, round, and problem number. Otherwise, prefer an independently worded variation and keep a transparent origin note.

Use Unknown and explain what is known in the provenance note. Unknown origin is not a license: do not publish recognizable recent wording merely because its first author cannot be identified. The field is an invitation for later research and correction.

Yes, when it is a genuinely new expression or variation and the relationship is documented. Mention the inspiration, describe important changes, and choose a license only for material you are entitled to license.

Often, the best version is a small riddle: does there exist an object with this property? Which examples are possible? "Show that no such function exists" may be equivalent, yet it gives away the destination too early.

Prefer a short, descriptive title. Sentence case usually looks better than capitalizing every word. Avoid putting formulas directly in the title; put the mathematics in the statement instead. The title can stay plain.

No. A clear statement, honest uncertainty, and useful tags are enough.

The 1-100 score is only a rough signal. Difficulty depends heavily on what the reader already knows, how recently they saw the topic, and whether the problem uses a familiar trick. As a loose convention: 1-10 is pre-university or warm-up material; 11-25 is early undergraduate; 26-45 is solid undergraduate; 46-65 is advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate; 66-85 is graduate or contest-level hard; 86-100 is research-flavored, very technical, or unusually demanding. Use the number, not tags like "easy" or "hard".

Check that you can share the wording. Record any known source. If the source is unclear, say so.

Usually, yes. Listed problems can appear in several paths and keep their discussion in one place.

Some steps only make sense inside a particular route: a tiny diagnostic question, a local warm-up, a reference to the previous branch, or an exercise whose wording depends on the playlist. In those cases, make it playlist-specific. It stays accessible from the playlist and stays out of the general index.

Yes. A playlist can mix public problems, concepts, notes, and local exercises.

AI may help with brainstorming, formatting, translation, code, or cleanup. It is not an authority or a substitute for checking the mathematics.

Yes. Math Woods was coded with help from Codex, an AI coding agent by OpenAI, under human direction and review.

No. Public content needs a responsible human contributor.

Yes. If AI substantially shaped a problem, proof, translation, or rewrite, mention it in the edit summary or provenance note.

Personal learning choices are not policed. Public solutions should be understood and checked by the person posting them.

Absolutely not. AI-generated citations and provenance claims must be independently verified against reliable sources. If verification fails, write Unknown rather than guessing.

No. Private notes are private workspace data. They should not be published, sold, or included in public datasets or AI training material by Math Woods.

Not really. Math Woods should allow rough pages to appear. Think of a woodland map: clearings opening, paths branching, notes getting corrected, useful pages slowly becoming better.

Yes, if it is honest and useful. A problem can be marked Needs work; a concept can begin as a stub; an origin can be Unknown; a conjecture can have no proof.

Contributors remain responsible for what they publish. Revisions, sources, reports, and discussion make corrections possible.

Prefer sources, clear reasoning, and discussion. Moderators may mark disputed content, roll back harmful changes, or temporarily restrict pages.

Report it with the suspected original source and a short explanation. The content can be hidden during review.

Trustworthiness. Clear origins and careful rewrites matter more than size.