Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics

Religious stance on Template:Infobox scientist

I've started a discussion on Template talk:Infobox scientist (see here) about the possible removal of the "Religious stance" field from this template. This isn't exactly a mathematical issue, but many mathematician bio's use this template so I thought people here might like the chance to comment. Comments will be appreciated. Cheers, Ben (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

The field should only be used where there is clear evidence the scientist identifies with some set of religious or philosophical beliefs rather than being a nominal catholic or whatever. SO I see no problem with it - religion of a scientist is a question people ask and if a scientist clearly says they are Buddist or an atheist or whatever that seems reasonable to me. Dmcq (talk) 00:13, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm basically opposed to info boxes in general. Paul August ☎ 02:13, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think a religion or religious stance belongs in the infobox. since in most cases the information has no connection or influence on his work plus it smacks a bit like "religion versus science"-settings, which imho we should avoid. In the few cases where religion matters and scientist has a particular prominent position for or against religion and ir matters significantly in his life or work it is sufficient enough to deal with that in the article itself.--Kmhkmh (talk) 06:05, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't in the business of fixing the world by censoring things. People do go in for religion versus science and ask about the religion beliefs of scientists. That said the infobox description does say that field should only be filled in where the person clearly states their beliefs and identifies with them rather than it just being a nominal belief or affiliation. So saying atheism on Richard Dawkins is perfectly reasonable. The 'eclectic' on Einstein is rather a bit more problematic but his religion has been a matter of intense interest. The 'Lutheran' on Gauss is I feel wrong unless someone can produce something saying he identified with it, so a {{cn}} would be justified there. Dmcq (talk) 08:39, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Nobody suggested censorship, the question was about relevant information and the religious affiliation or lack thereof is irrelevant information about most scientists. If you have an infobox, then it should contain/summarize the most important characteristic you can state for most scientists and religious affiliation or stance is not among them.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:44, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I feel that infoboxes, if they exist, should contain information that is relevant to large classes of scientists (if not all), and I don't understand why religious stance is any more relevant, in general, than say, the scientists favourite country. In both the religious stance and favourite country cases there may be exceptional articles where it is relevant. But surely that should be discussed in the article text in those exceptional cases, as opposed to having an infobox that is designed for a large class of people containing a field for information that is not relevant for much of that class of people. Cheers, Ben (talk) 09:01, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

+1 I can live with or without infoboxes, but infoboxes containing largely irrelevant or even private information make no sense to me.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:40, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm with Paul August on the general point. But obviously any information about religious beliefs must be first verifiable (you need to be able to document religious affiliation as accurately as anything else), and a salient point about the person. Otherwise the information has no business in the article, in an infobox or anywhere else. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:16, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Which is basically what the template says and I fully agree with that. I think infoboxes are a reasonable way of putting together structured information about subjects. It may be fairly rudimentary but it is the easiest way for a robot to extract data like famous mathematicians born in Germany between 1800 and 1850. Wikipedia is in the business of making information like that freely available. Dmcq (talk) 11:38, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Btw the main purpose for an infobox is still just a short "summary" for the reader. If the purpose is just to other bots and software access to rudimentary data you can use invisible templates(see Wikipedia:Persondata for instance)

True but I can't say I'm very happy with that. It stops editors seeing the data and correcting it. There's currently a debate going on about making infoboxes more accessible to databases at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/infobox template coherence and that is the better way to go I think. Lots of humans like bits of information to be accessible in a structured fashion too. Dmcq (talk) 12:17, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Let me expand a bit on my general objection expressed above. Infoboxes, If they exist at all, should only exist as an adjunct to the article. It shouldn't contain any content not judged important or relevant enough to be in the article itself, and It should certainly not be used as a place for content instead of the article. Infoboxes are inherently redundant. So for example if religion isn't mentioned in the article (probably true for the vast majority of our articles) it shouldn't be in the infobox. And for those rare occasions where religion will be judged to be relevant enough to be mentioned in the article, something as complex and nuanced as "religious stance" will often not be able to be summarized meaningfully and accurately by being squashed into the narrow confines of a field in an infobox. Cookie cutter, baseball card like infoboxes may have there place, but probably not much of one. Paul August ☎ 17:14, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

+1 well said--Kmhkmh (talk) 18:22, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I also agree entirely. Ozob (talk) 22:21, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for the input. This has now been removed. Now that most articles using the template will have a superfluous 'religion' field, I'm wondering if anyone know of a bot that can clean up the articles using the template? Or should it just be left? Cheers, Ben (talk) 22:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC).

"Variedad Nehari"

I stumbled across this random mathematics page that was posted to the English Wikipedia in Spanish--Variedad Nehari. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know a thing about advanced mathematics and frankly don't have the least clue what the article is talking about. I gave it a quick translation to English, but it definitely needs some attention by a mathematician for accuracy's sake. I'd like to move the article to an English name, but have no idea what the real name of the concept is, much less whether it's valid or original research (one of the infoboxes added by the original editor raised a bit of a flag with that when the "creator" name matched his username, although there are references cited).

I noticed there's been page requests for Nehari theorem and the Nehari extension problem on the "Missing science pages" list, and the original author seems to translate it to the "Nehari manifold" when he posted the image... Admittedly trawling Google and investigating the results still leaves me lost as to where it may belong, or if it belongs at all. If anyone might be able to give this article a better name, or let me know if it should be suggested for deletion or what... I'd appreciate it. :) Thanks! Tehae (talk) 00:52, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

It looks like someone already created a redirect moved the page to Nehari manifold. The original article should have been posted to the Spanish wikipedia since it doesn't exist yet there. My understanding is the Variedad is the correct translation for Manifold.--RDBury (talk) 02:13, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

For manifold, or for variety? (Strangely, we don't seem to have an article on varieties, in the sense of things that are almost manifolds but can have singularities and boundaries. There's algebraic variety and abstract variety, but neither of those is quite the concept I'm talking about. Or maybe the latter one even is; it's hard to tell.`) --Trovatore (talk) 20:52, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Nehari manifold is what English language sources call it. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:44, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, it's good to keep in mind that in romance languages, "manifold" translates to the cognate of "variety". Our "variety" translates to the cognates of "analytic variety" or "algebraic variety". Ozob (talk) 00:25, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I've tagged Variedad Nehari as {{db-g6}} since there is no need for a redirect from a Spanish translation of the title. Sławomir Biały (talk) 23:25, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and untagged it -- as I understand it, redirects don't really need to be "needed". They just need to be plausibly useful, and not harmful. I think this one meets both those criteria. --Trovatore (talk) 23:45, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the logic is in having redirects from foreign language titles. That seems to be what interwiki's are good for, not redirects. Otherwise we should have much more high-profile titles like variedad → manifold, análisis complejo → complex analysis, and so forth. Maybe this is hypothetically useful, but it is clearly absurd. Sławomir Biały (talk) 00:00, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

There are lots of redirects that serve no really compelling purpose. So what? It's obviously not worthwhile to add the redirects you mention, but I see no great advantage in deleting them either. --Trovatore (talk) 00:16, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Possible redirect for Dyadic tensor

The mathworld article [1] says is an obsolete term for Tensor product. If that is the case then the article Dyadic tensor should just redirect there instead of having it's own article. Is there some context where Dyadic is still in current usage or is this something that can be added to another article as an aka?--RDBury (talk) 02:27, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the article should not be merged to tensor product, although perhaps it should be moved to dyadic notation. Firstly, the fact that this term doesn't appear in any modern treatments of tensor products (that I am aware of at least) would rather strongly argue against tensor product as a suitable merge targent. Secondly, the mathworld article, the entry in Arfken and the entry in Jeffreys and Jeffreys establish notability. Moreover, there is even a recent book entitled "Generalized Vector and Dyadic Analysis" published by Oxford University Press. The target audience seems to be engineers rather than mathematicians. Thirdly, there is no rule that an encyclopedia should only cover things that are in contemporary use. It is obviously an important task of an encyclopedia to have many articles on things that would be regarded as obsolete. At any rate, I don't think dyadics are entirely obsolete, so this is more of a counterpoint to your point. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:54, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I disagree with a lot of what you're saying but since you can cite a reference that the term Dyadic is current in engineering math I'm not going to argue the rest. The article popped up on my radar because it had no references, so thanks for locating one and adding it to the article. It's not really my specialty so I can't say if 'dyadic notation' is the best move target, but it seems better than 'dyadic tensor'. From what I'm reading in the article and Mathworld, a dyad is a type of tensor so the article name is like saying 'tensoric tensor'.--RDBury (talk) 14:59, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Actually, this article needs to get merged with dyadics and dyadic product, since they all treat exactly the same object but with slightly different notation. Any suggestions? objections? Sławomir Biały (talk) 18:56, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

A dyad is not just any tensor. It is a rank 2 tensor written in vector rather than tensor notation. So it deserves its own article. JRSpriggs (talk) 02:56, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I assume you are replying to the original post, not my own post. I agree that dyadics deserve their own article. They do not deserve three more or less identical articles, however. Sławomir Biały (talk) 09:00, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I think it should stay a separate article but support the mergers. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:58, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Springerlink

Hey, does anyone have Springerlink access? If so, could they email me the various Springerlink papers linked to on my userpage? Thanks, Nousernamesleft (talk) 23:46, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Please don't solicit copyright violations on Wikipedia. Ozob (talk) 00:27, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Oh; I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was a copyright violation. Never mind then. Nousernamesleft (talk) 02:26, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

In the U.S. at least, the common wisdom is that personal copies of articles may be legally created to further non-profit scholarly research. But since the user above doesn't have an email address on their user page, and the "email this user" link does not accept attachments, it would be very hard to fulfill this request. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Is editing Wikipedia a "non-profit scholarly research"? It's clearly non-profit... -- Taku (talk) 02:57, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd say so. But that doesn't make it ok to put up commercial intellectual property in a way that makes it accessible to anyone. Emailing a copy to the individual user seems more acceptable, and some journal publishers' terms of use seem to explicitly allow it, but Springer's don't seem to. Reading through their terms, and going by analogy from what they say is ok for interlibrary loan requests, it seems the most they will allow is mailing a physical printed copy of the paper. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:14, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

It is not clear to me whether a SpringerLink subscriber is allowed to help with these kinds of requests. There are numerous conditions in the contract ("limited amounts", "incidental and non-systematic manner", "non commercial scientific communication", "not for re-transmission", etc.), and IANAL. However, you can always contact the original authors of the papers! In many cases (including Springer's copyright transfer agreements that I have recently signed), authors retain the permission to post their own versions of the articles on their own web sites. If the authors haven't done this yet, maybe you could email them and ask why this is the case; it would solve your problem and also help everyone else who is interested in those articles. — Miym (talk) 17:28, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

All right, I'll try this. Thanks! And oh, I hadn't realized that the Wikipedia email system doesn't allow for attachments. Whoops. Nousernamesleft (talk) 21:47, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

book-class

Since this is one of the bigger projects, and that a couple of Wikipedia-Books are math-related, could this project adopt the book-class? This would really help WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as the WP Math people can oversee books like Mathematics much better than we could as far as merging, deletion, content, and such are concerned. Eventually there probably will be a "Books for discussion" process, so that would be incorporated in the Article Alerts. I'm placing this here rather than on the template page since several taskforces would be concerned.

There's an article in this week Signpost if you aren't familiar with Wikipedia-Books and classes in general. Thanks. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:06, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Anyone for/against this? Or don't have a shred of a hint of what I'm talking about? Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 23:37, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm only a newbie here, but from what I've just read, it sounds like a good idea! Thudso (talk) 00:09, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I didn't comment as I don't really understand how anyone could be against the proposal... :) Exactly what there is to discuss? Are there some technical issues? Does the proposed change break some bots? — Miym (talk) 00:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

As I read it, Headbomb is asking the WP Math participants to maintain this field/category/whatever it is. I would be surprised if there were any objections to its existence, but I don't know how many people will commit to doing the actual work, if that's what's being asked. --Trovatore (talk) 01:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I think we should treat it like Portals: people who are interested can do it, and people who are not can ignore it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Convolution for Optical Broad-beam Responses in Scattering Media

The new articles Convolution for Optical Broad-beam Responses in Scattering Media and Monte Carlo method for photon transport read like papers in the IEEE transactions rather than encyclopedia articles. I don't know what to do with them, but something is definitely wrong here. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Also similar: Radiative transfer equation and diffusion theory for photon transport in biological tissue. --Robin (talk) 00:09, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

For now you could add the {{technical}} template to flag the issue. Sounds like you should raise this at the Physics project though.--RDBury (talk) 03:45, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Linking to truth value and common conception

To truth value and common conception this time. It looks like we have to have a thread like this once in a while. Pcap ping 02:51, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome.Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 02:54, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Many of the links to truth value seem OK. I think the links to common conception had mostly been reverted before I could look at them. So I don't think there is much to discuss. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:08, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't see why either of them need to be discussed at WP:MATH at all. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 03:11, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

A lot of the truth value ones were on my watchlist, which is strong evidence they are related to mathematics. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:18, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so that still doesn't justify the need for a discussion. Or do we just sound alarms at any old thing around here? People need to cool it. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 03:23, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I think this should have been discussed before this mass edit. The article on truth value seems to be about interpretations of the word in different logics and things like the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov interpretation, which the reader who just wants to understand the satisfiability problem in complexity theory doesn't care about. Although it is the same concept, the link doesn't help the reader. If there's an article on truth values in boolean formulae, or a section of the article on truth values talks about this, that can be linked to. Linking to this concept seems counter-productive. Let me offer an analogy. It's like taking the sentence "the distance between San Fransisco and New York is ..." and linking the word "distance" to metric (mathematics). --Robin (talk) 04:13, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I can't really agree with your example. I find it to be a wild analogy. Truth value is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic, so it is reasonable to expect a link to it. It's a convenient link, so just exactly what is "counterproductive" about it will require substantially more explanation. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 04:26, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

• See WP:OVERLINK and the related pages, including a psychological study that shows that links also have a point of diminishing returns.
• Please stop it - again. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:31, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Suggested changes to Monty Hall problem

You are invited to join the discussion at talk:Monty Hall problem#Changes suggested by JeffJor, Martin Hogbin, and Glkanter. Rick Block (talk) 04:06, 3 December 2009 (UTC) (Using {{Please see}})

Gaussian q-distribution

I don't yet have any opinions on the new article tited Gaussian q-distribution (beyond the formatting cleanups I did) but an obvious problem is that hardly any articles link to it. Could anyone who knows of any articles that should link to it attent to that? Michael Hardy (talk) 20:10, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

To me, another issue is that the article only lists research papers as references, calling notability into question.--RDBury (talk) 02:49, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

List of q-analogs

We have no list of q-analogs.

After it's created, it should be added to the Lists of mathematics topics. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:16, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Current activity page

Does anyone besides me ever look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity? This gets updated daily, except when it doesn't. And when it doesn't, I seem to be the only person who notifies Jitse Niesen that it's not happening. The list of mathematics articles supposedly also gets updated daily, except that now that hasn't happened since December 1st. Every time a math category is added to an article, bots add it to that list at the next daily update. I've added some statistics category tags to articles that formerly had only biology-related tags within the past few days; normally that would cause bots to add it to the math articles list, and that in turn would get it mentioned under "New articles" on the "Current activities" page. That has cease happening for several days now. I've notified Oleg Alexandrov and I await developments.

But I'm wondering, am I really the only person who notices when this happens? Or do others notice and assume someone else will attend to it eventually? Michael Hardy (talk) 19:35, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Put me in the latter class — I noticed but haven't done anything about getting it working again. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:48, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I monitor the page, but not very frequently, so I seldom notice any problem. Sławomir Biały (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I watch the current activity page, but I don't notice when it doesn't run. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:18, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I've just started checking it recently. I suppose I would start to notice if there weren't any changes in a few days but probably not before that. Keep in mind that most of the categories don't have new additions every day anyway.--RDBury (talk) 02:42, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

"Most of the categories don't have new additions ever day."

What should one infer from that? I don't think there's ever a day when none of them has any additions. I look every day.

There are indeed changes on that page, to things other than new articles. But new articles ceased to get added several days ago. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:46, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Now that you mention it, it is kind of odd that the last new article added is from the first, this usually has something new every day. On the other hand some of the other categories have updates from the fourth. So maybe it's just the new articles section that's not working.--RDBury (talk) 02:59, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I already explained that, and I explained why that's what's happening. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:26, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I misread what you wrote, sorry.--RDBury (talk) 11:56, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I have it on my watchlist, and I often look at the updates. But if it isn't updated, I don't notice that it's missing from the watchlist page. —Dominus (talk) 22:37, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Oleg has now intervened and mathbot has done its first update of the list of mathematics articles since six days earlier. Thus when Jitse's bot updates the "current activities" page (in about 10 or 11 hours, I think?) it should show more recent new articles than those from the 1st of December. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:10, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Robert Williams (geometer)

There is a proposal to delete the article on Robert Williams (geometer). Participants here may wish to comment in the deletion discussion.—Finell 02:50, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

PROD nomination of Catalog of articles in probability theory

My dear Catalog of articles in probability theory is proposed for deletion. Do you agree? Boris Tsirelson (talk) 07:01, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm a bit concerned about the deletion tag being used here. Despite the potential issue with WP core policies the article was edited by several mathematicians (including experienced Wikipedians), who seemed to have no objection at the time. From my perspective that usually should warrant a more detailed discussion either here or via a regular AdD listing, but using this "deletion without discussion" seems to be inappropriate to me here.--Kmhkmh (talk) 07:14, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

The reason stated in the prod is not entirely accurate. List of mathematics articles is exclusively maintained by a bot, although the article comes just short of explicitly saying that this is what is going on. So the "nonstandard method of editing" is not unprecedented. Moreover, if there is room on Wikipedia for List of mathematics articles, Index of physics articles, Index of logic articles, etc., then there should also be room for a Catalog of articles in probability theory. I'm going to be bold and remove the prod tag. Sławomir Biały (talk) 08:45, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

As it stands, I think the article would be better off in project space. It would need at least a non-self-referential introduction, and shouldn't tell the non-editing reader how to edit it. — Kusma ^talk 10:40, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Feel free to remove the prod tag, however it will go to AfD if kept in its current form. It might even qualify for speedy. Until the policy issues are resolved it should probably be moved to userspace if you don't want it deleted. This is a proper use of the prod tag, and anyone can remove it (though they should say why). If what is said about the list is true it may also fail our policies. Verbal chat 11:16, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Since all Wikipedia policies are subject to interpretation and exceptions. It might help, if you provided some specifics and why they require a deltion in this case. At least from my perspective i don't quite see at first glance why this overview/index is something that has to be deleted.--Kmhkmh (talk) 12:56, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm obviously opposed to the AfD. See section below for a solution. Pcap ping 11:44, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

• Actually, I'm not convinced this particular index needs a bot; see AfD for more. Pcap ping 13:05, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Switching to (or adding) a warning box when bot-updated articles are edited; add move protection

I think this is the best solution to avoid mishaps, like the above. I suggest we write a template, say Template:Math index edit instructions that displays a warning box like we have for (say) BLP articles in edit mode. It should have a parameter so the link for the editing instructions may vary from one index to another.

To prevent moves that break the bot like we had with the List of mathematics articles sub-articles, I think such articles should be move protected as well. I don't think it's possible to display a warning in that case, but hopefully the sysop trying to move them will hopefully hit edit before moving them... Pcap ping 11:44, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

There is already a method to add an "edit notice" to any particular page. Using that would probably be more robust than using a template. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:42, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't know the syntax... Pcap ping 22:41, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

It turns out all we have to do is edit Template:Editnotices/Page/Catalog of articles in probability theory. But the edit note has been removed from the top of the article, perhaps it is no longer needed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:02, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Double recursion

I just created an article on double recursion based upon Robinson's paper (see ref). However, I was not familiar with the topic until I read Robinson's work. For anyone more familiar, is this how the term is generally understood? Also, the use of the phrase "obtained by substitution" seems a bit out of date or imprecise, can anyone suggest a more modern and/or more precise formulation? Thanks, — sligocki (talk) 01:55, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

There was a shift at some point away from the use of "general recursive functions" in recursion theory, so that nowadays things like double recursion are not really covered. If you asked a recursion theorist how to prove that these functions are computable, they would point at Kleene's recursion theorem, which works for a wide collection of multiple recursive definitions.

Multiple recursion is still important in proof theory, when you want to build terms for non-primitive-recursive functions. The term to look for in the literature is recursor. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:59, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

AWB linking to substitution instance

I'm not convinced automated linking to that article is appropriate because the article as it is now is only about propositional logic, but the links to it are made in more general contexts, e.g. unification. Pcap ping 04:40, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Substitution (logic) might be a better target, but I find it poorly written. Pcap ping 04:46, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

This is getting to be a recurring nuisance. Greg does this sort of thing over and over — elide the difference between a precisely defined formal notion, and the referent of a name of that notion in contexts where it's not appropriate. He does it with these little articles (common conception, recently deleted), he does it with categories, in retrospect it's what he did at theorem. No one seems to have much luck talking to him about it. Maybe we need to escalate to some more formal sort of dispute resolution, such as a user-conduct RfC. --Trovatore (talk) 04:51, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Mediation might have a greater chance of success. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:18, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

How does that work? --Trovatore (talk) 10:15, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

By my reading of WP:DR, we ought to start with a conduct RFC first. All of these forums require a neutral statement of the dispute; I'd suggest something like, "Certain words have both an everyday meaning and a jargon meaning used in mathematical logic. Gregbard believes that articles on these terms should be primarily about their jargon meanings." Ozob (talk) 12:37, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

There is the option of asking in the Mediation Cabal. It is not particularly opaque what has been happening on the pages concerned. The mediation approach - trying to clarify what each side is trying to achieve - is more likely to be effective, than just redescribing the status quo. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:45, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The main problem is that he appears to put little effort in inspecting the context where he (auto) makes such links. He stated on a few different occasions (see his talk page) that his work is just WP:BOLD, and that it's somebody else's job to fix errors he makes. Pcap ping 12:49, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I support the idea of taking some sort of action. This is a great annoyance. --Robin (talk) 13:38, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Concur. Paul August ☎ 16:10, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Let's file a request at the Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal. In order to do this, we need:

1. Disputed articles. It would probably be good to list here some examples of wikilinks he's added that we disagree with, as well as examples of major edits to articles he's made that we disagree with.
2. People involved. Obviously Gregbard, but who here would like to represent us? I think we're allowed as many as we want.
3. What the dispute is about. It seems to me that there are two things we dislike about his actions:
   1. Adding inappropriate wikilinks.
   2. Making undesirable edits (most recently to Theorem).
4. What we would like changed. Clearly we want him to stop doing things we don't like, but does anyone have a better way of phrasing this?
5. How the mediator can help. Whenever Greg comes to WT:WPM, I always get the feeling that neither side is able to get anything through to the other; I feel like I have no idea where he's coming from, and that he has no idea where we're coming from.

OK, that's what we need. Let's fill in the blanks so we can file. Ozob (talk) 23:28, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

My Crystal Ball tells me that he will howl that he's being harassed by "The Math Department" again -- but maybe getting broader input will render that a non-starter. Here's hoping. 71.139.16.41 (talk) 04:05, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Proof "subpages"

Where was consensus reached in favor of creating fake subpages like Cardioid/Proofs for proofs? Maybe it's time to revive the discussion on proof guidelines... Balabiot (talk) 08:15, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

My understanding was it's currently being done on a trial basis. Maybe it's time to evaluate the results of the trial.--RDBury (talk) 12:27, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

PS. there are currently 16 articles which are proofs subpages, namely Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse/Proofs, Möbius transformation/Proofs, Laplace–Beltrami operator/Proofs, Addition of natural numbers/Proofs, Distributive lattice/Proofs, Christoffel symbols/Proofs, Approximation theory/Proofs, Vector Laplacian/Proofs, Boy's surface/Proofs, Parabola/Proofs, Cardioid/Proofs, Ellipse/Proofs, Cone (geometry)/Proofs, Connected space/Proofs, Ordinary least squares/Proofs, Nondeterministic finite state machine/Proofs.--RDBury (talk) 12:44, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

My personal opinion on these is that if the proof itself is of encyclopedic interest, we should include it in the main article, and take care to write it up clearly. On the other hand, most proofs are not of encyclopedic interest (although they are obviously of mathematical interest). For that sort of thing, the reader would be better served by a proper text, and we should simply point them towards one. Our goal here is to present the highlights of a subject in a few thousand words, rather than to write textbooks.

Looking through three of the articles that RDBury listed, I had a few comments:

• Vector_Laplacian/Proofs is just a calculation. Distributive lattice/Proofs is an even simpler calculation.
• Nondeterministic_finite_state_machine/Proofs is not particularly useful or readable in its current state. But the proof is actually the subject of the article powerset construction, which is where it should be covered. I think that latter article shows a better way to handle important proof techniques.

— Carl (CBM · talk) 14:09, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

As far as the proofs with encyclopedic interest are concerned, those would comprise proofs being famous, using a common/wekk known proof technique or similar, they could indeed be handled in the original article. The question however is what to do with average proofs that might be offered as an additional service to readers and how to ensure correctness in such scenarios. I think that if we offer such average proofs, then a proof subpage might be the appropriate place. At least colluding the main article and possibly affecting its structure/readability with such proofs is imho not desirable. A problem that i see with such proofs is maintenance and to assure correctness, which might require more work/effort than checking normal articles. However it is definitely a nice service to readers. In any case this ultimately may need to be addressed or voted by the larger community, because if we formulate a guideline just based on a smaller set of currently involved or active editors (without having necessary a consent in the larger community) then this will be a setup for constant and possibly rather bitter quarrels. I would favour reviving the project mentioned above and making sure, that its outcome is to very least sanctioned with a clear majority by science/math editors at large (not just active portal members).--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:52, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

P.S: It is probably also important in this to context to be aware of various wikibook projects like this one [2]. Because a possible alternative for proof subpages is to use those wikibooks for the proofs and simply provide a link in the wikipedia article.--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:59, 10 December 2009 (UTC)--Kmhkmh (talk) 14:59, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The idea of moving proofs to wikibooks is nice, though there is risk of original research there. Balabiot (talk) 16:29, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Not quite Wikibooks allow original research anyhow and most readers are "just" looking for a proof and not so much whether it was published somewhere else already. At least I see wikibooks as a compromise for still offering free access to proofs even when the community decides that normal proofs or proof subpages are inappropriate for Wikipedia itself.--Kmhkmh (talk) 00:17, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I generally think that Wikipedia is not the place for detailed proofs, unless such proofs are themselves notable. For instance, we currently give two detailed proofs of the Ascoli-Arzela theorem in the article. Only the first of these (the classic diagonalization proof) is worth presenting, in my opinion. However, my own opinions were overridden by two other editors there. As for /proofs subpages, these are almost always detailed proofs of silly/obvious/unimportant facts with very little quality control. Most of these were probably moved out of the main article by someone who felt that they didn't belong there, but was unwilling to delete the material outright. I think it is safe to start taking a harder line on proofs in articles, and especially /proofs subpages. Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:34, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I favor the former but not the latter: proof 'subpages' don't hurt anything and may be useful in the future. (This is especially important for proofs of debatable notability.) But long proofs don't generally (otherwise) belong in articles. CRGreathouse (t | c) 20:44, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I guess I can live with that. I suppose this is part of the reason the subpages have been tolerated thus far. Although they are generally pretty awful, they also aren't seen as being especially harmful. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:35, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

My understanding is the following: As WP:Subpages explains, there is no such thing as a "subpage" in the main namespace. For example, Cardioid/Proofs is simply a Wikipedia article, with a somewhat strange title "Cardioid/Proofs". My immediate reaction would be to propose it for deletion: the topic does not seem to be sufficiently notable to merit a stand-alone article (and even if it did, the title should be changed, as it violates WP:NAME). WP:NOHARM isn't an argument to keep articles, regardless of whether their title happens to contain a slash. What am I missing? — Miym (talk) 21:53, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

One thing to bear in mind is that all of these /proofs pages predate policies prohibiting subpages in the main namespace. In discussions, it was decided that no new /proofs pages should be added, but there was consensus that existing pages would be tolerated. Clearly deleting a page just because it retroactively violated some (rather arbitrary) content guideline is highly questionable. That said, I feel that there is very little of value in these pages, and if you want to discuss the merits of deleting them on a case-by-case basis, I would probably agree with deleting most of them. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:25, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Just treat as a cleanup issue. The slash construction is ugly, anyway: if the page can't stand up as Proof of X, where X is like "divergence of the harmonic series" or "Lagrange's theorem" or something of the same stature, then it should be deleted if there is no reason to merge. There is no real point of principle. Charles Matthews (talk) 22:54, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The following pages may be of some use regarding this topic:

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs/Archive 1
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs/Archive 2
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Proofs

Paul August ☎ 23:00, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Well formalities aside (subpage or its own page, or a side article to main article, etc.) there is still the question, whether we should allow average proofs as a service to readers within WP or not and I still think no matter which way we decide, the decision requires a sanctioning from a larger community nt just a few people discussing that here.--Kmhkmh (talk) 00:11, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Why, exactly? Making this sort of decision on the proper content of pages within a specific subject area is one of the major things WikiProjects are for. Algebraist 00:20, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I think it really should be discussed and decided case by case. In some cases, a proof may be a useful addition to an article, and in some cases a famous proof might warrant an article of its own. It depends not only on the proof itself but also on the context (for example, whether the proof appropriate if we take into account the intended audience of the article). — Miym (talk) 00:44, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I think everybody here agrees anyway that in particular cases proofs are ok. The question is imho just about the rest. And why should we have sanction by a larger audience, because it is potentially a contentious topic. Its is not really convincing to advice somebody to follow a guideline in dispute, when polemically put the only reason behind the rule was/is the taste or personal preference of a few portal members. If on the other hand the decision or informal vote was at least supported by a large number of math or science editors, the advice will be appear much more convincing and legitimate.--Kmhkmh (talk) 00:58, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that the discussion is getting into the weeds a bit. To me the immediate question is what to do with articles named 'X/Proofs', not decide what should be done with proofs in general. My impression of the discussion so far is that, regardless of the original justification for creating these articles, the naming convention being used no longer fits Wikipedia guidelines, and something should be done with these articles to bring them into line. I'm also getting the impression that deciding exactly what should be done needs to be on a case by case basis. This first option would be to rename the article to 'Proof of the Y property of X' or something similar. There are already many article like this (see w:Category:Article proofs) but, from what I've seen, many of the article in the list above do not meet notability criteria independently. So it seems that some sort of merge or delete would be appropriate in most cases. I personally don't think deletion is a good idea unless the article is pure cruft and I'm not seeing that in these articles. The worst article I looked at was Parabola/Proofs but I think that can still be cleaned up and merged into the main article. In some cases, such as Addition of natural numbers/Proofs, a move to Wikibooks might be more appropriate. In any case, it seems to be that the next step is to go through the articles and add appropriate tags (merge, wikibooks, etc.) to them so their fate can be discussed on an individual basis, just as with any other articles with names that do not meet guidelines.--RDBury (talk) 02:54, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Endashes in article titles

User:Good Olfactory has been moving articles like Seifert–van Kampen theorem, with an unspaced endash, to the corresponding title Seifert – van Kampen theorem, with a spaced endash. I assume there is decidedly consensus against moves of this kind. Sławomir Biały (talk) 02:34, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

This is spelled out in WP:ENDASH. In most cases spacing should not be used but in cases such as 'van Kampen' where the name being linked has a space then there should be spaces.--RDBury (talk) 03:21, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

I understand that this is what WP:ENDASH appears to suggest. It is obviously necessary to change the MoS recommendation. "Seifert – van Kampen theorem" looks horrid, and I challenge you to find any good mathematics publication that uses this convention. Sławomir Biały (talk) 03:27, 11 December 2009 (UTC)