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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 2601:445:437f:fe66:e44e:27d1:2a2e:2ebf (talk) at 19:06, 6 June 2018 (→‎Missing biography of Michael Rathjen). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Category:Jewish mathematicians

Kyuko has recently created Category:Jewish mathematicians and added several hundred articles to it (and going strong; the only interruption has been this edit). I do not have any principled opinion about whether this is good or bad, but possibly other editors might. --JBL (talk) 13:38, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As long every targetted article subject is described as Jewish, with a proper source. The first (and only) example I checked is Georg Cantor. The article says that "Cantor was sometimes called Jewish in his lifetime." (with a source). That is definitely not sufficient to categorize Cantor as a Jewish mathematician. So I have reverted that one. I suspect that there are dozens—if not hundreds—of similar examples, but I have no time to check more articles. I'd support removal of the category. - DVdm (talk) 14:16, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note, I also just checked Hermann Minkowski. The article says that he was of Jewish descent, which i.m.o. is again not sufficient. No time for more at this point. This might need a stop and an administrative mass revert. - DVdm (talk) 14:31, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've dropped a line on Kyuko's talk page in case they didn't get the ping. Reyk YO! 14:36, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Reyk. DVdm, I see someone else has reverted on Deborah Tepper Haimo (twice!), where the article makes no mention of either religion or ethnicity. --JBL (talk) 14:40, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
With respect to Cantor article, it writes that "In a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondence, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306), Cantor states that his paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen" (with a reference). The Minkowski article likewise provides a source. --Kyuko (talk) 14:45, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As for the category itself, there are already a number of categories for mathematicians of various ethnicities / nationalities, I see no reason why this would be any less valuable to Wikipedia. --Kyuko (talk) 14:47, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's also worth mentioning that there's already an extensive Category:Jewish physicists. --Kyuko (talk) 14:50, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There's a Category:Mathematicians by ethnicity with an odd assortment of 'ethnicities' in it which this is a subcategory of. And a larger one of Category:People by ethnicity and occupation. The criterion for them as best I can make out is that be at least a few entries but not too many, they strike me as a bit strange. Dmcq (talk) 14:48, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A category called "Jewish mathematicians" must be reserved for those who have explicitly declared their own adherence to Judaism, while a category called "Mathematicians of Jewish descent" can include all those for whom reliable sources indicate Jewish ancestry. See WP:BLPCAT and WP:CAT/R. XOR'easter (talk) 15:16, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'd certainly be open to changing the name of the category. At the risk of going into a discussion on who is a Jew, though, discounting as Jews all those who have not publicly "declared their own adherence to Judaism" is absurd; "Jewish" is an ethnic designation as much as it is a religious one (see e.g. List of contemporary ethnic groups) and so WP:BLPCAT is not relevant here. There is, moreover, precedent for such categories (see e.g. Category:Jewish physicists, Category:Jewish chess players, Category:Jewish philosophers, Category:Jewish American musicians, etc. etc.). --Kyuko (talk) 16:27, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am in complete agreement with XOR'easter. WP:BLPCAT is very explicit that we can only categorize someone as having a particular religion when that person explicitly and publicly declares it to be their religion. Past violations by others are no excuse for your own massive violations of this rule. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:30, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Again, the category is meant in reference to a particular ethnic group (as indicated by its inclusion in Category:Mathematicians by ethnicity). I am open to changing the name to reflect this, but mass-deleting instances of the category is unhelpful. --Kyuko (talk) 16:34, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Easy way to handle this issue, change the category to Category:Jewish mathematicians and mathematicians of Jewish descent. It would be reasonable to modify the above mentioned categories for physicists and the like in the same way. JoshuaZ (talk) 17:04, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Great idea - done! --Kyuko (talk) 17:32, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Even for the mathematicians of Jewish descent, we cannot include people in that category without published reliable sources about their Jewish ancestry. So this change reduces the size of the problem created by Kyuko's edits but does not eliminate it. By the way, I'm sure many Palestinian Israeli citizens would be surprised to learn that, according to Kyuko, they are all now Jews. This illustrates the danger of uncareful categorization. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:45, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That edit was a mistake - mea culpa. But this is clearly something personal and political for you, seeing as it's not your first time going through Wikipedia deciding who is and isn't a Jew by your criteria. In any case, are you even checking the pages to see if there are sources given before mass-deleting all instances of the category? There's no world in which e.g. Paul Cohen or Alexander Grothendieck aren't of Jewish descent. --Kyuko (talk) 17:56, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I mass-rollbacked the changes I saw because you are clearly being indiscriminate in who you are adding and it is a waste of my time to be the one to check the edits carefully when you are not doing it yourself. Your most recent edits to Tamar Ziegler are very illustrative — edit-warring to violate WP:BLP like this has as its most likely outcome you getting blocked. And your comment here comes perilously close to being a personal attack; please be more careful in that as well. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:08, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
[edit conflict] 1. It is an extremely poor idea to go around accusing others users of bias. 2. It is silly for a person in your position, just having made a huge number of edits without checking whether they are individually supportable, to complain about others reverting your edits without checking each one individually. 3. The criterion here ("supported by reliable sources") is a standard one on WP; if you don't understand it, maybe you shouldn't be editing here. --JBL (talk) 18:11, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going through each article individually now and adding back the category to those which provide support (or adding sources where possible) -- my intention is not to edit-war. Regarding the articles, nearly all were compiled from previously-existing lists on Wikipedia (e.g. List of British Jewish scientists, List of Jewish American mathematicians, List of Jewish mathematicians, List of German Jews, List of Jews born in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, etc.). In retrospect I should have fact-checked each one (I now plan on doing so), but in any case I was not being indiscriminate in who I added. --Kyuko (talk) 18:26, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Is this a re-creation? I'm pretty sure there used to be a "Jewish mathematicians" category, which means that if it was recently created, then at some point it must have been deleted. Paging User:BrownHairedGirl, who should know how to look this up.
If it was previously deleted, that's not necessarily an absolute bar to re-creation, but at least the previous decision should be understood and the points addressed. --Trovatore (talk) 18:31, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I removed the last 15 stray entries. - DVdm (talk) 19:19, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The renamed category is not the same category, and so shouldn't be subject to speedy deletion by itself. JoshuaZ (talk) 23:45, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am inclined to agree with JoshuaZ. Also, the previous discussion was a decade ago, it is totally possible consensus would be different now. --JBL (talk) 12:08, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think the second point is the key one. Clearly if the new category had been created on May 21, 2007, it would have been seen as a threadbare attempt to get around the deletion decision and speedily deleted.
According to current theory and practice, I think the remedy for deletions you don't agree with is supposed to be DRV, but this seems not quite adequate, because DRV is supposed to overturn decisions that were procedurally flawed in some way, or where the closer misjudged consensus. But I don't think we really want to say that a procedurally impeccable deletion is final for all time. This seems like an issue that needs a more general solution; I don't know what it is.
As to this category, I do kind of hope that it stays deleted, because if I never have to read another argument about whether Cantor was Jewish, it will be too soon. --Trovatore (talk) 18:00, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Merging proposal

A proposal has been submitted to merge Category:Probability journals into Category:Statistics journals. Please add relevant arguments to the discussion. Marcocapelle (talk) 06:29, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Probability and statistics are often taught in different departments; the first always in the mathematics area and the other either as a standalone field or part of applied math or sciences, sometimes even in economics. That should give us an idea of the demarcation. Limit-theorem (talk) 08:34, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Should John von Neumann be categorized as a combustion scientist?

See Talk:John von Neumann#Should_von_Neumann_be_categorized_as_a_combustion_scientist? Paul August ☎ 10:31, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No more than Einstein as a nuclear scientist. Boris Tsirelson (talk) 10:55, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Boris, would you please add your remark to the discussion at Talk:John von Neumann? Paul August ☎ 11:21, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please add further discussion to the discussion at Talk:John von Neumann. Thanks. Paul August ☎ 11:23, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Join (sigma algebra)

Could someone with five minutes of free time and nothing better to do take a look at the history of Join (sigma algebra) and see if the massive trimming down was legitimate? – Uanfala (talk) 21:10, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The trim seems not unreasonable given the talk page discussion, as a WP:TNT approach to a flawed discussion. Bringing the prose back and fixing it would an improvement. --Mark viking (talk) 21:18, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
So the question is, how much is there to say about joins of sigma-algebras? Right now the article is a DICDEF. If there's nothing more to say than the definition, then the article should probably be merged into a glossary somewhere. --Trovatore (talk) 22:53, 29 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note that Join is actually explained in the Sigma-algebra page. Therefore, I went bold, and used a redirect from the join page to the section in which this notion is introduced — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arthur MILCHIOR (talk • contribs) 14:12, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:47, 30 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Good Article" nomination of Cantor's first set theory article. Review is needed.

This review page is for review of the nomination of Cantor's first set theory article for the status of a Good article. For instructions for reviewing the article, follow this link.

At this page one sees that this is currently one of four mathematics articles currently nominated for "Good article" status. Writing a review of any of them would be a contribution. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:03, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Langley’s Adventitious Angles

Langley’s Adventitious Angles could use some more eyes. There's a new editor edit-warring to insert what looks like original research to me, but I'd welcome the opinion of other experienced editors. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:55, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing that out. The first line of their argument is obviously wrong — the logic doesn't follow, and just looking at the figure, it can't even be close to right. It's like they're trying to apply the converse of the isosceles triangle theorem to a trapezoid. XOR'easter (talk) 01:53, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

WikiJournal of Sciences

A somewhat better version of our article "Space (mathematics)" is now refereed and published in WikiJournal of Sciences (and probably will be copied hereto). A precedent? Boris Tsirelson (talk) 17:35, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations on getting this accepted in the inaugural issue of the WikiJournal. Its good to see a math article among the science articles there. I could see this as a useful alternative or adjunct to a GA run, with a little academic credit for your effort. How did you find the peer review process? --Mark viking (talk) 00:44, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. The peer review process was excellent. Surely it was difficult to get refereed such article. Mathematicians are experienced to referee articles intended for mathematicians, not like this. However, Gaëtan Borot did it very good. His referee report is publicly available: v:Talk:WikiJournal of Science/Spaces in mathematics#Third review (and some more reports are also there). The three advanced sections by Ozob are written in response to reports of referees and the editor Sylvain Ribault. Boris Tsirelson (talk) 04:08, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Draft:Truncated Normal Hurdle Model

Should this be moved to mainspace? (or deleted?) Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:16, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

At first glance, the topic looks notable, appearing the different econometric and economic textbooks over the years. The draft is fairly rough with no lede or much context. But with sources already in the article and some technical content already in place, this could be a stub that others build on. I recommend it better to be put it in mainspace than outright deletion. --Mark viking (talk) 00:33, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Okay. I moved this to mainspace. It needs categories, which I am wholly unqualified to supply. Calliopejen1 (talk) 05:29, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I added cats and the start of a lede. --Mark viking (talk) 06:10, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

M22 graph

M22 graph, currently a redirect to Mathieu group M22, has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2018 June 2#M22 graph because it cause Draft:M22 graph to be declined. Editors who understand these topics are invited to contribute to the linked discussion where their input is likely to be significantly helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 23:51, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I went ahead and moved the draft to M22 graph, over the redirect. I think this episode is a good illustration of the uselessness of Wikipedia drafts — most regular editors of draft space view the whole idea of drafts as a trap to keep the spammers busy and away from actual articles, rather than a useful pathway for new content to be included in the encyclopedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:01, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Do we have an opinion about using the first person?

I find that mathematics is often written in first person in a way that other subjects are not. It's something I like / have gotten used to (or at least is professional in a mathematical context), but I sometimes get told that it creates an inappropriate tone or violates neutral point of view policies.

Do we have a consensus on what I would assume is something that's been discussed here before? I would like to nominate Group testing for featured article (eventually), so I want to clear up any potential issues. –♫CheChe♫ talk 11:07, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia has an opinion about it: MOS:FIRSTPERSON: "Often rephrasing using the passive voice is preferable." That article clearly needs some work . - DVdm (talk) 11:22, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There have been many discussion here, arguing against the editorial or noble "we". Paul August ☎ 12:02, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Expert advice on notability of a journal requested

Draft:Journal_of_Commutative_Algebra describes a real, but niche journal, it's difficult for me outside of JCS access etc. to assess notability. Ping me if anyone has any thoughts about notability here. Thanks in advance, --joe deckertalk 21:34, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You might also ask at the academic journals wikiproject: WT:AJ. --JBL (talk) 23:40, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Missing biography of Michael Rathjen

We do not appear to have a biography of Micheal Rathjen who appears to be an important person in mathematical logic. Please see [1]. JRSpriggs (talk) 12:47, 6 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You spelled his first name one way in the section heading above and another way in the link. Putting the "e" before the "a" is rare. 2601:445:437F:FE66:E44E:27D1:2A2E:2EBF (talk) 19:06, 6 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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