Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2012/Oct

relationships between numbers in the fibonacci series

sorry if not appropriate to this page but noticed the other day that

(F_n - F_n-6) / F_n-3 = 4

and given that when defining entropy for Loop Quantum Gravity

S = a/4 ,just wondered if

S_2Fn = (a (F_n-3)) / (F_n - F_n-6)

was anything more than a coincidence?

Spike0ekips (talk) 06:04, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

If you assign weights 2 and 1 to the different branches of a tree and build a minimum cost one you get a fibonacci tree. You could I guess assign an entropy to that construction and I believe loop quantum gravity is something to do with a branching tree of growing interactions - hmm I better read our article on that as I am totally ignorant about what is in loop quantum gravity ;-) So where the differing weights would come from is definitely beyond me! Dmcq (talk) 08:35, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Sticking in 'entropy fibonacci' into google I found http://www.fq.math.ca/Scanned/20-2/horibe.pdf which you might find interesting. I got interested in something related a while ago through looking at the fibonacci search technique. Dmcq (talk) 09:48, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

thanx for that - helped in as much that it forced me to review the nature of (F_n - F_n-6) / F_n-3 = 4, - I now realise this is 'just' φ^3 - (1/φ^3) and as such one of many whole number 'solutions' connecting different equally spaced points on the fibonacci series Spike0ekips (talk) 12:34, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Fundamental theorem of cyclic groups at AfD

Fundamental theorem of cyclic groups is up for deletion.  --Lambiam 05:02, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

It was closed as consensus to keep in some form, but merger to cyclic group has some support. See Talk:Fundamental theorem of cyclic groups#Merger proposal. Deltahedron (talk) 18:07, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Hilbert's second problem

We have an editor repeatedly adding what looks from the user name like his own research (published, but in obscure venues not covered by MathSciNet) to Hilbert's second problem. More eyes would be welcome. I'd take it to the conflict of interest noticeboard but I think the members of this group are likely to be better at distinguishing worthwhile additions from the other kind. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:29, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It may be WP:FRINGE, it seems WP:UNDUE, there may be WP:COI and/or WP:OR issues. Mention in independent reliable sources is needed. Deltahedron (talk) 06:43, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I think it's now solidly past 3RR, right? --JBL (talk) 16:16, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Probably, but he was only warned about 3RR after the latest round. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:36, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Rule of Average Conditional Expectations

A new article is called Rule of Average Conditional Expectations.

The rule as stated in the article is just a discrete case of the law of total probability law of total expectation, and it is not clear why it should have a separate article.

It is strange to see "the discrete case" referred to when, according to the statement, there is no other case.

Should we just redirect this page? Michael Hardy (talk) 15:42, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes (probably with a polite note to the creator about it) -- odd that the creator is aware of the other articles but hasn't noticed (or doesn't mind) that his article discusses exactly the same result under a different name. --JBL (talk) 16:20, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

It is slightly different but I must admit it reminds me of teachers drilling classes in triangles being scalene, right-angled, acute-angled, isosceles, equilateral, and degenerate. I notice thankfully we don't have an article on scalene triangles. Surely all these could have been combined better into a single article and those names be redirects?, Wikipedia is supposed to be comprised of articles about topics not be a dictionary or glossary of all possible terms. Dmcq (talk) 16:33, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

The only difference appears to be that it's a special case: it's the case in which the random variable on which one conditions has finite support. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:35, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

It seems to me that there is a difference: the Rule of Average Conditional Expectations gives a formula for an expectation and the law of total probability gives a formula for a probability. I agree that they are closely connected, since the probability is the expectation of an indicator function, but it is not correct to say that the only difference is that the random variable in one case has finite support. Both rules are special cases of the Law of total expectation of course. I would suggest a merger. Deltahedron (talk) 21:33, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry --- typo. I should have said law of total expectation. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:45, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

An editor adds parameters to the Projects banner for self-use

Some days ago CBM started adding |nested= and |math-nested= to the banner using a script. Examples: [1], [2]. There was a discussion about this here User_talk:CBM#Your_script_needs_update. If the project thinks this is a good idea I could run my bot to add the parameter to all banners. In my opinion invisible comments inside the code, especially in the form of parameters have no real gain and have some (minor) drawbacks. Still I can understand that some editors may need to keep personal notes on some pages. I just don't think this is the best practice. Any opinions? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:25, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

As context: I have some plans to see if I can make the math banner more informative. To do that, I may need to have another parameter that tells whether the banner is nested inside a banner shell. To help get ready for that, when I was manually filling in missing parameters in some math banners, I started adding this extra parameter. I don't think there is any reason to have a bot add it to all banners unless my ideas end up working, but at the same time I may as well go ahead and add the parameter now instead of making a separate edit later. The parameter at the moment has no effect, but also does not harm anything in any way. I have no idea why Magioladitis is interested in it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:04, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

My interest is more on making more and more tasks in Wikipedia automated to help editors run on larger lists. Wikipedia expands and we have to find ways to perform large scale changes without spending more and more time of our real life time. So if these edits are to affect many pages I can help doing them automatically. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:19, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Variants on normality

I'm dubious about the concepts Abnormal subgroup, Paranormal subgroup, Pronormal subgroup, Polynormal subgroup which seem to be unsourced and very obscure, possibly even original research. Can anyone provide references that show them as notable? Lichfielder (talk) 08:57, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Zentralblatt MATH found Kurdachenko, Leonid A.; Otal, Javier; Subbotin, Igor Ya (2011). "Pronormal subgroups and transitivity of some subgroup properties". In Campbell, C.M. (ed.). Groups St. Andrews 2009. Vol. II. Selected papers of the conference, University of Bath, Bath, UK, August 1--15, 2009. London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series. Vol. 388. Cambridge University Press. pp. 448–460. ISBN 978-0-521-27904-8. Zbl 1238.20044. Deltahedron (talk) 17:28, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Lichfielder (talk) 09:10, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

ArXiv references

Hi, I need a brief lesson on our policy for arXiv references. I'm well aware that it is reputable itself, and has high quality content. However, I am also aware of at least one instance of a pseudoscientist propping himself up with his own arXiv papers. The extent of that sort of problem is unknown to me. While you're answering, if you can suggest a good way to search WP policies, I would be grateful. I generally don't know where the search function is for meta-WP topics. Rschwieb (talk) 13:17, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Did you find this pseudoscientist in one of the papers at black hole topology? I just realized that everything on ArXiv is preprint (according to Christopher Thomas here on WP Physics), which is bad news now that I have been inserting papers from there into WP... Maschen (talk) 13:59, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Arxiv papers may be (1) copies of something reliably published elsewhere (in which case they are fine as a convenience link but the real publication should be cited), (2) papers in peer-reviewed venues whose proceedings as a whole are published by arxiv (same as 1), or (3) prreprints. Preprints fall under WP:SPS: we can use them as sources only if their authors are established experts in that subject. —David Eppstein (talk) 14:45, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

No M, not those specific papers, but looking at black hole topology did bring the question to mind. The person I am thinking of is Joy Christian. And thank you for the crash course, David Eppstein :) Rschwieb (talk) 15:39, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks also David Eppstein, I know a proportion would be published by peer-reviewed journals, though started to panic all the same... Joy Christian was some time ago, though of course an incident like at Bell's theorem could occur again so this is a worthwhile thread to raise. Maschen (talk) 15:52, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

My explanation would match the one by David Eppstein. But I want to point out one more issue with the arxiv, which is that the papers on it are subject to change or withdrawal. It is risky to rely on the preprints for detailed citations, because the text could change completely at any time. Some authors (like me) upload a new version after they hear back from referees, before signing the copyright release for a journal; this may significantly change the paper a year or more after it is first posted. On the other hand, we can indeed treat the papers as self-published sources, particularly if we are just trying to cite the general thrust of the paper rather than a specific sentence. In that case it would be no different if the author had simply posted the preprint on her personal webpage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:47, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

This is not an issue at all: the arXiv keeps all previous versions around. Look for example at http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3920 -- there are permanent links to v1, v2, v3. It is possible (actually very easy) to link a specific earlier version (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3920v1 ). They even include guidance on how to write the citation to make it clear. --JBL (talk) 17:01, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Arxiv refs are just fine for non-controversial topics; the (vast?) majority of the work there is just fine. Its a lot shakier to use arxiv as a reference for controversial topics: for these, one should apply some appropriate WP policy about dispute resolution. Yes, arxiv can contain pseudo-science and crank articles; I've seen a few. These should be treated appropriately. linas (talk) 14:50, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

• Boodlepounce notes that this question is addressed at Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#arXiv_preprints_and_conference_abstracts and has been discussed multiple times at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. See for example Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_93#Arxiv_in_general where consensus appears to Boodlepounce to be that it is the status of the author of an Arxiv preprint that renders the source reliable. Boodlepounce (talk) 12:00, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

In the same vein, would a blog post by Terry Tao count as a Wikipedia:Reliable source? I'm thinking of Some notes on amenability as a reference for Amenable group. Lichfielder (talk) 09:09, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Blogs are not reliable sources because they are not checked by anyone other than the author himself. To be reliable, a work needs to be checked over carefully by (at least one, preferably more) independent experts in the field.

People are notoriously bad at catching their own mistakes. They are liable to commit the same error when checking which they made when writing it originally. And they lack the motivation to find an error which would expose their own fallibility. Whereas an independent expert wants to find any errors to protect his own reputation, which would be damaged if he endorsed the work and then it was found to be mistaken. JRSpriggs (talk) 20:26, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Blogs are usually self-published sources. Which means that they may sometimes be used as reliable sources, if the author is a recognized expert on the subject (as Tao is for many of the things he posts about), but that published sources are preferable. It is also important to distinguish personal (self-published) blogs, such as Tao's, from blogs that are associated with reliable publications (e.g. major newspapers) and that are subject to the editorial control of those publications. The latter type of blog is generally acceptable as a reliable source: it is not being a blog per se that is a problem with reliability, it is the lack of editorial oversight.

complete, completeness, completion

I found Dedekind complete redirecting to a section of an article on completeness of the real numbers, and likewise Dedekind completeness redirected to the same target, but Dedekind completion redirected to Dedekind cut, but there was an article on Dedekind completions titled Dedekind–MacNeille completion.

At first I thought it was absurd that Dedekind complete and Dedekind completion should redirect to different targets. But for now, I've left Dedekind completion redirecting, not to Dedekind cut (as it did), but to Dedekind–MacNeille completion. Now I'm pondering sending the other two to a disambiguation page. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:11, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

God help us---Dedekind-completeness (with a hyphen) redirects to least-upper-bound property. We need a better way to deal with this kind of situation. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:20, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Within Dedekind–MacNeille completion (on completions of partial orders) there was a wikilink (now a self-link) to Dedekind completion, referring to completions of total orders. Where do you propose that wikilink go instead? —David Eppstein (talk) 16:04, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

OK, here's what I've done:

• I created a new multiple-cross-reference page titled Dedekind completeness. Among the pages redirecting to it are Dedekind complete, Dedekind-complete, and Dedekind completeness. It has links to Completeness of the real numbers#Dedekind completeness, Least-upper-bound property, Dedekind cut, and Dedekind–MacNeille completion.
• I've linked to the multiple-cross-reference page in a hatnote in Dedekind–MacNeille completion, mentioning that Dedekind completion redirects to Dedekind–MacNeille completion, and I've put a section-hatnote (or whatever they're called) in Completeness of the real numbers#Dedekind completeness, linking to the multiple-cross-reference page.

Michael Hardy (talk) 16:06, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Named after Dedekind

What brought to my attention the mess that I hope I've cleaned up, concerning Dedekind completeness, mentioned in the section immediately above this one, is the fact that we have a new page titled List of things named after Richard Dedekind. Someone proposed its deletion. I've deleted the "prod" tag. Whether it will go to AfD, we'll see. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:11, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a thing named after Dedekind, not listed in List of things named after Richard Dedekind and that I am unable to find in WP. That is Dedekind's trick. There are two versions of this trick, and I believe that Dedekind has used both to factor polynomials. The first one is that a univariate polynomial with integer coefficients can be recovered from its value at an integer n if n is larger than twice the magnitude of the coefficients. The second one is that a multivariate polynomial $f(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{k})$ of total degree not greater than n can be recovered from $f(x_{1},x_{1}^{n},x_{1}^{n^{2}},\ldots ,x_{1}^{n^{j}})$ where j=k-1. The second trick allows to reduce (inefficiently) the factorization of a multivariate polynomial to that of a univariate one. The first allows to reduce the factorization of a univariate polynomial to that of an integer, as soon as one know a bound on the coefficients of the factors. Lacking of an access to Dedekind's paper, I cannot verify if Dedekind has introduced both tricks or only the second one (for this one, I am pretty sure). Presently, these tricks are not used to factorize polynomials (too inefficient) but they give the best known asymptotically fast algorithms for the arithmetic of polynomials (I guess that this is a result of Schönhage). They are systematically used in Magma (software) for polynomial multiplication. D.Lazard (talk) 17:20, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

It's on AfD. Comment here. Ozob (talk) 00:54, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Math article nominated for speedy deletion

This seems very strange, but it's true. I wrote a new stub article on the All-Russian Mathematical Portal, and within an hour it was nominated for Speedy Deletion. It seems that in the eyes of one non-mathematical editor, this large project of the Russian Academy of Science is not "notable". Personally, I think it is obvious on its face that it is notable. I am also rather offended that an editor with no background whatsoever in mathematics should render so drastic an opinion as to nominate the article for Speedy Deletion.

Am I way off base? Is this web portal really not deserving of an entry in Wikipedia? Please let me know if I have somehow misjudged this matter — or, if you agree with me, then please go to the Talk page of the article and offer some urgently-needed backup ( Talk:All-Russian Mathematical Portal ). Also, here is a link to the portal itself: ARMP. Don't delay, Wikipedia may delete the article at any moment. — Prof. Loren Cobb, Dept. of Mathematics, University of Colorado Denver, also known hereabouts as: Aetheling (talk) 20:05, 7 October 2012 (UTC).

It seems clear that the article makes a claim of notability and so I have removed the Speedy Deletion nomination. The claim may or may not be substantiated but that can and should be discussed in the usual way. Deltahedron (talk) 20:21, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your timely intervention. As the author, I was unable to take such a step. I did leave a sharp comment on the perp's Talk page, but that had no perceptible impact. —Aetheling (talk) 22:20, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

I am getting somewhat concerned about possible over-enthusiastic use of Speedy Deletion tags. Mathematics articles seem particularly vulnerable to tagging on CSD grounds A1 (Lacking sufficient context) or A7 (No indication of importance) by editors who simply do not understand them. Deltahedron (talk) 20:50, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

In February and March of 2007, there was a period of about six weeks when several math articles were tagged for speedy deletion every day, merely on the grounds (as far as I could tell) that they were mathematics articles. It's nowhere near so bad now. But of course that sort of thing can happen. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:16, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

9223372036854775808

9223372036854775808 (2⁶³) is presently a redirect to Power of 2. The redirect has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2012 October 9#9223372036854775808 where your comments would be welcome. Thryduulf (talk) 11:07, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Is the Beta distribution article too long?

At talk:Beta distribution, there is a discussion of whether the article titled Beta distribution is too long. If an apparition of the archangel Gabriel or one of the Olympian gods wakes you up in the night and commands you to comment on that talk page, then I would urge you to obey. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Aperiodic semigroup

Does anyone know if an aperiodic semigroup is group-free (i.e. it has no non-trivial subgroups) in general? Most sources on aperiodic semigroups are compsci-related and they only deal with the finite case. Tijfo098 (talk) 03:41, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Suppose the aperiodic semigroup has a subgroup G. Let e be the identity in G. Let x be an arbitrary element of G. Since x is an element of an aperiodic semigroup, there is a positive integer n such that xⁿ=xⁿ⁺¹. Since x⁻ⁿ exists in G, we get e=x⁻ⁿxⁿ=x⁻ⁿxⁿ⁺¹=x. Thus G is the trivial group {e}. This shows that all subgroups of aperiodic semigroups are trivial without any assumption that the aperiodic semigroup is finite. JRSpriggs (talk) 05:58, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

This picks up a discussion at Talk:Special classes of semigroups where I noted that the concepts are different for infinite semigroups -- consider the free semigroup on one generator, otherwise known as positive integers under addition, which is group-free but not aperiodic. It is known that for finite semigroups, group-free does imply aperiodic. Sketch of proof. Consider the sequence of powers of an element x. It must ultimately repeat, since the set is finite. So there is a cycle of powers of x. This cycle is a subgroup, hence has order 1. This is aperiodicity. Deltahedron (talk) 06:33, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to you both. Time to fix the article now... Tijfo098 (talk) 07:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/John Anthony's Wager

Could someone please have a look at the AFC John Anthony's Wager which is about a mathematical proof. I wrongly reviewed it (now amended) but I would like to provide some additional guidance to the submitter. I am not familiar even slightly with the subject matter so any suggestions in regards to what the minimum notability/referencing requirements might be for something like this would be helpful. Thoughts much appreciated, France3470 (talk) 22:29, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, there's virtually no math there. Try WP:PHILO. Tijfo098 (talk) 02:48, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. I've dropped a message there. France3470 (talk) 03:59, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Semisimple ring

The redirect semisimple ring looks like another terminology issue. Some authors define it as Jacobson semisimple (as do we) others as semisimple Artinian ring. Perhaps it should be turned into a WP:DAB or WP:CONCEPTDAB? Tijfo098 (talk) 04:07, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Discussion is now occurring at Talk:Artin–Wedderburn theorem. Tijfo098 (talk) 18:01, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

At first I was puzzled by the "as do we" comment above because semisimple ring does not define it that way. However now I see that semisimple algebra does define it that way. It's clear then that a few clarifying edits could be helpful. I don't have anything more than my anecdotal experience, but it's my belief that a majority of modern usage is the version given in semisimple ring. Rschwieb (talk) 13:21, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Pythagorean theorem

Can someone else please take a look at the recent edits to Pythagorean theorem? I don't want to keep reverting the editor but he's unwilling to discuss his changes on the talk page or address any of the concerns there.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 15:23, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Shapley–Folkman lemma: FA copy-editing

Today mathematician Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel Prize in Economics (finally), and so Nobel Week would be a good time for a related featured-article.

The featured-article nomination for Shapley–Folkman lemma was stalled because of concerns about the professional-prose criterion. Help with copy-editing would be great.

In my dreams, I could imagine an animated illustration ... :)

Kiefer.Wolfowitz 17:26, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

GAR note

Henri Brocard, an article that your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the good article reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status will be removed from the article. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:26, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Continuity (mathematics)

I've changed Continuity (mathematics) into a multiple-cross-reference page. The term can mean continuity of functions, or it can have to do with any of various sorts of spaces each of which is sometimes called a "continuum". There's also the concept of continuous probability distributions. Comments? Michael Hardy (talk) 23:25, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

looks good. Can something similar also be done with positive definiteness, that I feel has long been a similar bugbear of this project. Sławomir Biały (talk) 23:28, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I am wondering the same about Resolvent. Is this really an ambiguous term, or is it a term with a consistent meaning but different applications? bd2412 T 00:19, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Also kernel (mathematics). Here the situation is slightly more complicated, as there are two completely different meanings, each of them deserving a multiple-cross-reference page.

About Resolvent, the meaning in Galois theory has nothing to do with those in operator theory. Thus it is a disambiguation. For the two meanings in operator theory, I do not know. --D.Lazard (talk) 02:09, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

I have now changed kernel (mathematics) into a short disambiguation page listing only two items. Each of those two items is now a multiple-cross-reference page linking to several articles. Probably most or all of the articles that link to the disambiguation page should link to one or the other of those multiple-cross-reference pages or to one of the articles that they link to. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:32, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Need Attention

Hi There, Infinite_strings under Infinite_monkey_theorem shows math error for a formula. I was reading this Article and I came across this. I am not aware of this theorem so I couldn't edit it. Somebody please ... --RAT -- catch the Rat's tail 01:27, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

I looked and found no error messages in my display. That particular error sometimes pops up due to a timing problem when the servers are getting a good workout. Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 02:51, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

data point

Someone proposed deletion of the article titled data point for lack of references. It gives a better and clearer definition that I can recall having seen in any textbook. Is there an elementary textbook that can be cited that says the same thing? Michael Hardy (talk) 22:56, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

maths rating template and "importance"

I just happened to come across a talk page using {{maths rating}}, and noted that the banner said "importance" rather than "priority". I looked at the source for the template and see that it has both.

I think, when the "importance" field is used, it should automatically be interpreted by the template as "priority", meaning the banner should display using the word "priority" and the talk page should be put in the category of appropriate priority. I have never done any serious WikiMedia template programming so I don't know how hard that is, but I assume it's possible. Can someone take care of that?

(I assume most people here can intuit my rationale, but just for any newcomers: The reason for this is that articles on specialist topics tend to be ranked as low-priority for editing, because relatively few readers are looking for them, but the specialists themselves are likely to rankle at the suggestion that the topics have low importance.) --Trovatore (talk) 19:54, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Rather than being synonyms, perhaps "importance" has to do with why it matters while "priority" has to do with how much it matters. JRSpriggs (talk) 06:08, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

No, that's not it. "Importance" is the term used in most WikiProjects (unfortunately IMO, but that's their lookout) for exactly what we call "priority". Our terminology is better. No one is classifying math articles by "importance" as distinct from "priority". --Trovatore (talk) 06:11, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and also, "priority" is really not "how much it matters". It's "how much attention we suggest to editors to give it". --Trovatore (talk) 06:13, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Although, I do not care much either way, I competely disagree with your rationale. The problem is that this parameter is not expressing the priority for editing. The priority for editing/improving an FA/Top rated article is much low than for editing/improving a Stub/High rated article. The parameter is more accurately described as the "importance of having this article to the WikiProject". However, I agree that it is more important to use a consistent term within the project. Since the catagories use priority in their name, this is what the template should display. (And I dont see it as worth the effort to rename the catagories.)TR 10:45, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, if it's what you say, then I disagree with rating specialized topics as "low". I think it is of high importance to have specialized topics in the WikiProject. It doesn't really take mathematicians to do a good job on calculus (in fact, it might be better if mathematicians stayed away). But mathematicians are very much needed to get obscure things right. --Trovatore (talk) 10:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I can not agree with any of Trovatore assertions:

"But mathematicians are very much needed to get obscure things right". I think that it is absolutely not important for WP to have articles that may be understood only by a small part of people having a PhD in Math, like many articles about extensions of scheme theory or specialized results in this theory (although a large part of my career is devote to algebraic geometry, I can not understand many of these articles).

"In fact, it might be better if mathematicians stayed away [from calculus]": On the contrary, mathematicians are highly needed to correct mistakes and add recent and less recent important results that are ignored by most high school teachers. For example, until recently WP did not know the words "Euclidean division". Until my recent edits, nothing was said about the methods for polynomial factorization and polynomial greatest common divisor, which have been developed during the last 50 years. Also algebraic plane curve does not contains anything about the methods to compute the remarkable points (singularities, asymptotes, inflection points, critical points in one direction, ...) that are need to get a correct drawing in the Euclidean space. Reading that article, and also twisted cubic and cubic curve, one get easily the impression that algebraic curves in the real Euclidean space have no interest!

IMO, what is important for WP is to have articles readable for people with a low mathematical level and give them insight on the important notions than do not appear in most textbooks, like that I have cited above. --D.Lazard (talk) 12:46, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, that's a value judgment and you're entitled to it. I obviously don't agree — I think one of the truly remarkable things about WP is as a resource for research-level mathematics, and I object to this being labeled "unimportant". --Trovatore (talk) 19:03, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

You are basically arguing that that project members should prioritize editing specialized articles over general ones. I don't see how that helps your case. (I also disagree). The point is that articles that are important to this project such as group (mathematics) can become a low editing priority because they are more or less "finished". As such, the term "priority" is a misnomer for this parameter, since it is only one factor that goes into edit prioritizing.TR 16:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

It may be that priority is not the perfect word either. Can we think of another? I still like it (much much much) better than importance, because it is more value-neutral. --Trovatore (talk) 19:11, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The template accepts both "priority" and "importance" but it treats them as synonyms. E.g. "high" goes into Category:High-Priority mathematics articles, which is inside Category:Mathematics articles by priority, while there is no Category:Mathematics articles by importance. So from the point of view of categorization and the WP 1.0 bot, everything acts as "priority". The only other issue is with display - the template will show the word "priority" if the priority parameter is used, and show "importance" if the importance parameter is used. I generally agree "priority" is better than "importance"; I guess the latter is supported just for compatibility with other templates that use that name for the parameter. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Can you make it display "priority" regardless of which field is used? --Trovatore (talk) 23:39, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Sure, as long as nobody objects it's easy to fix that in the template (the hardest part is finding the right point in the complicated source code). — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:48, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Based on the fact that the that the template was placed on TfD was due to inconsistency with other templates, it might be better to leave either option available. I think the nomination had more to do with the non-standard name, syntax, and layout than this issue, but it has come up there. Personally, while 'priority' does seem more accurate, I don't think it is really that big of an issue. Making it only display 'priority' would simplify parts of the code, though. Nat2 (talk) 01:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This has now been listed on TfD Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 October 22 with a proposal to rename and reconfigure as a standard wiki-project banner.--Salix (talk): 08:35, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

TfD is clearly premature. I don't even understand what the current difference is between "priority" and "importance". Can one of the illuminati please enlighten the rest of us? Why is this an issue worth caring about (and starting a TfD, of all things)? Sławomir Biały (talk) 03:23, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The TfD is not about the importance–priority difference. And there isn't s difference, per se; they're used the same way. I object to referring to advanced topics as "low-importance", and it seems that enough agree with me that we use "priority" on our banners instead. I objected to the TfD largely because it would eliminate that, in my view, improvement.

The TfD also apparently would eliminate the "field" parameter, which would also be a bad thing, separately from importance-v-priority. --Trovatore (talk) 04:13, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Special functions, User:A. Pichler, and Austrian IP addresses

Hi folks, there's a sockmaster making edits to our special functions articles from IPs in Austria. The sockmaster is User:A. Pichler. Please look in to it. Sławomir Biały (talk) 00:55, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm a little puzzled by this. The user in question seems to be in good standing, and there is no current sockpuppet investigation filed against them: it is not improper to edit under an IP address. Are you saying that there is a problem with these edits? Could you give some examples, please? Deltahedron (talk) 08:05, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

The editor and his sockpuppets add unreferenced content to articles on special functions. When references are demanded, typically they do not support the added content. This has been going on for years. Despite my earlier attempts to warn this project, no one ever seemed all that interested. And unfortunately, now that he is editing under anonymous IP addresses in Austria, it's nearly impossible to track this user's dubious edits. So, please keep special watch our articles on special functions. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:38, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

The issue seems to be about the edits, not the editor. So, could you give some examples of the edits you are concerned about please? (Oh, and they are not really "our" articles on special functions) Deltahedron (talk) 10:41, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Agree re: some examples would be nice, disagree re: the parenthetical. "Our articles" is an appropriate and very common way for editors to refer to Wikipedia articles generally. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&search="our+articles"&fulltext=Search&ns1=1&ns3=1&ns5=1&redirs=1&profile=advanced --JBL (talk) 12:20, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

User:Stevenj and I have tried to engage this user on his talk page regarding unreferenced material and other original research in special functions articles; here are some diffs, although it's simpler just to visit User talk:A. Pichler: [3], [4], [5], [6], and (another editor) [7]. This project has been notified a total of four times about the same issue: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive 59#Special functions, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2011/Sep#Laguerre polynomials, Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics/Archive/2011/Aug#Original research at confluent hypergeometric function, and now this notice. Examples of problematic edits that this user made (mostly historical, since now seems to be editting anonymously, all of which well after the user was warned to give references for this kind of content and asked to give edit summaries): [8], [9], [10]. [11]. Many more examples are available upon demand. The following diff shows User:A. Pichler and an Austrian IP User:131.130.96.187 simultaneously editing a section of Bessel function, to add unreferenced content with the same MO: [12]. The same Austrian IP here adds an unreferenced Hermite polynomial expansion to Confluent hypergeometric function: [13].

Then there's Borel summation. First, User:A. Pichler adds content there with a reference: [14]. However, the reference fails to support anything that was added, so I delete it. Next the same Austrian IP User:131.130.96.187 adds more dubious and unreferenced content to Borel summation: [15]. Then a different Austrian IP User:178.190.65.151 restores all of this bad content that I had removed over a year ago, with the same bad citation: [16].

Now, quite recently, there is this edit to Gegenbauer polynomials.

I have no idea how widespread this problem is with our special functions articles. I don't watch them very assiduously, and I'm more or less retired from regular editing. It would be extremely helpful if someone else from the project would also be willing to be vigilant about this. Sławomir Biały (talk) 15:09, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Apparently this edit was wrong (also unreferenced). I suggest that everyone warn their students that Wikipedia's articles on special functions are dangerously unreliable. I know I plan to, since no one else here seems to give a hoot about them, and seems implicitly willing to give the edits of User:A. Pichler their imprimatur despite repeated alerts to this page. Whatever. Consider my retirement permanent. Bye. Sławomir Biały (talk) 04:00, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Template:Maths rating at TfD

Template:Maths rating is being considered for deletion at TfD. Johnuniq (talk) 09:40, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I just noticed that this has been noted at #maths rating template and "importance" above. Johnuniq (talk) 09:42, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

On the contrary, the proposal is rather to rename it and its fields for consistency with other project templates. Kiefer.Wolfowitz 09:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Fixed title to template under discussion {{maths}} is something quite different.--Salix (talk): 11:08, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Article with missing files

Cantellated 7-cube and Cantellated 7-orthoplex have at least one redlinked file. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 11:00, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you mean. Probably no one has made those drawings yet. Unless someone here knows how to do it, I'd suggest just leaving the redlinks there as placeholders; maybe eventually they'll catch the attention of someone who does know how to make them. --Trovatore (talk) 11:04, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

unduloids and constant-mean-curvature surfaces

We have an article titled unduloid, and for a long time, constant-mean-curvature surface redirected to that. Then an article appeared on our new articles list titled constant mean curvature surface, with no hyphens. I tried to correct the punctuation in the title and was told that constant-mean-curvature surface is an already existing article. It had only existed as a redirect until then. So I deleted it and changed the title. Should these articles get merged, or is there some difference in their subject matter that matters? Michael Hardy (talk) 16:19, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

No opinion on merging, but unduloids seem to be a special case of CMC surfaces, specifically those obtained as surfaces of revolution. The article doesn't make this sufficiently clear. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:27, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I see: unduloid began with a misleading sentence. I took it to be a definition, but it was not intended as one. Very bad writing. So I've revised the initial sentence and deleted the "merge" tags. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:25, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Purpose of tagging articles

A lot of members of this project seem to think that tagging articles without rating them is somehow worse than not tagging them. Why is that? Why is it better to add an article to a list that is so long that it needs to be split into 53 subpages? How would someone use such a page?

Tagging an article for a wikiproject has other purposes besides keeping track of which articles are relevant to the project. Below I reproduce the points from WP:WikiProject coordination:

• The tags place articles into categories that project members use to find articles that they want to work on.
• The tags are used to check recent changes (a sort of watchlist for the articles the group cares about).
• They are used to produce statistical reports about the quality of articles, which allow the group to monitor their progress.
• The tags allow the WP:1.0 team's assessment process to measure the size/scope of projects and to rank articles for inclusion in offline releases of Wikipedia articles.
• Article Alerts uses information in the tags to produce an automatically updated list of WP:Articles for deletion, WP:Proposed deletions, and other time-sensitive news about tagged articles.
• Cleanup listings uses tags to produce a comprehensive list of all clean-up tags in a project's articles.
• Walls of Recognized Content uses tags to create lists of high-quality articles.
• and several other automated processes.

Probably the same criteria that are used by the Mathbot to add articles to the List of mathematics articles can be used to automatically add wikiproject banners to pages. Or a subset of those criteria could be used to the number of unassessed articles isn't ridiculously large. RockMagnetist (talk) 00:51, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Responding to the bullets:

1. The articles are already categorized, for example in Category:Mathematics and its subcategories. The field ratings on the talk page tags do group articles by broad subject - only if the data is filled in.
2. The list of mathematics articles is automatically maintained by a bot, with no need to tag talk pages, using the article categories. This can be used to follow recent changes, if anyone wanted to follow all the changes for math articles. Similarly, I have a sublist at User:VeblenBot/List of mathematical logic articles that has all mathematical logic articles, for recent changes - which also requires no talk page tagging at all. The same could easily be done for any other subarea if anyone wants it.
3. To monitor quality of articles, the assessment data has to be filled in.
4. The same is true for WP 1.0 - with no quality or importance info, the wikiproject tag is of no value to the WP 1.0 project. (I was a member of the team that produced the 0.7 release and I currently run the WP 1.0 bot. The previous, original WP 1.0 bot maintainer was also an active member of this project.)
5. Instead of article alerts, we use Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity which is maintained by a bot using the list of math articles - no talk page tagging necessary
6. The same goes for cleanup tags; if anyone wants a list, we can generate it from the list of math articles, although nobody has raised the issue recently
7. We list our "recognized content" at WP:WPM

In general, any automated process that just needs a list of all articles in our scope can use the list of math articles. So the only additional benefits of talk page tags beyond a mere list of pages have to rely on having the data filled in. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:12, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

O.k., I'm convinced! Actually, in two other projects I had to create a list of articles by hand so recent changes could be followed - this is better. RockMagnetist (talk) 03:48, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The recent changes tracking doesn't work. On Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity, there are a series of links to searches on changes related to pages like List of mathematics articles (0-9) that no longer exist. If someone wanted to keep track of vandalism, how would they do it? RockMagnetist (talk) 16:02, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Apparently the links there have not been updated. The lists do exist, at locations like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/List_of_mathematics_articles_(0-9), and are updated by MathBot automatically. At some point, someone decided that the lists, despite having been in main namespace for years, should be moved to the Wikipedia namespace. So they got moved, and then someone deleted the redirects from the old locations, and now there are broken links in various places. But in any case, although I can follow the recent changes for the ~1,700 mathematical logic articles, I don't think many people are interested in following all the changes of ~25,000 mathematics articles, which may be why nobody complained about those links being broken. The main benefit of the lists is to help other processes look for things like cleanup tags; browsing them manually would be a burden. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:49, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the sheer size of this project presents some unusual problems. I wonder how well vandalism is countered. Scaling up from smaller projects, I would guess that there are a couple of hundred acts of vandalism on math pages every day. In many projects a lot of those are caught by project members who frequently troll the recent changes. This project would mostly rely on watchlists and ClueBot. RockMagnetist (talk) 17:22, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree that it is a real concern (although the Biography project would have it even worse). I mostly rely on my watchlist. I suspect (or hope) that other people do the same for articles in their areas of interest. But I am sure that some pages are not watched - I think the wiki philosophy is that we have to accept that, and just deal with problems when we become aware of them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:09, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

One benefit of trying for 100% tagging would be ensuring that more people are watching articles, if folks have the Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist preference on, then by adding the project banner they automatically watch the article. Hence we could ensure a better percentage of articles are actually watched.--Salix (talk): 21:01, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree. I have tools on my home page (User:CBM) to help editors navigate the category tree looking for pages that do not have math ratings or that have incomplete math ratings. Of course the watchlist effect only benefits the person who adds the tag, which is nobody if a bot does it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:53, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree that with respect to automated tasks there is no real benefit of tagging talk pages over the list based approach of WPM (In fact, the approach of WPM may have some additional benefits in this regard) However, there are some benefits with respect to none automated tasks. The main benefit is that a WikiProject banner informs editors not affiliated to this project that the article falls within the scope of this project. This tells them were to go if they need help with something regarding the article.

For example, an editor is tracking some questionable edits made by a user. He lands on a very technical mathematics stub (there are plenty of those), where he is unable to judge whether the edits made there Ok or not (because the article was pure gibberish to him in the first place). Without a WikiProject banner, this editor may not be able to tell that this project exists and may be able to help with the situation.TR 13:27, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

A suggested redirect

I propose making {{WikiProject Mathematics}} a redirect to {{Maths rating}}. Since the latter template treats importance and priority as synonyms, it isn't really any different from a typical WikiProject X template. As far as I can tell from the discussion and the documentation, the main purpose of having a different name is to press editors into always providing values for the class and priority fields. However, that's like trying to herd cats. You only have to glance at the Mathematics assessment table to see that many editors don't provide those values. Other projects such as Physics and Geology manage to maintain a near-100% assessment rating with the usual template. Their system works because some dedicated members look at all the unrated articles and rate them. RockMagnetist (talk) 17:50, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I must be missing something: a glance at the table tells me that only about 300 articles out of 10,000 are unassessed (and that the table is buggy, as the link in the bottom row of the second column from the right should presumably have &quality=Unassessed-Class rather than &importance=Unassessed-Class). Am I misreading it?—Emil J. 18:26, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Not, you're not misreading it. 300 unassessed articles is good - but the figures for Physics and Geology, with their standard template, are 4 each. Apparently there is no need to confuse outsiders with a different template name. RockMagnetist (talk) 20:57, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The actual number of articles under the scope of the project is much bigger. In the info box on the project page it says there are 28320 in List of mathematics articles, there are very many which don't have the project banner. The shear size of the project was one reason we haven't tried to tag every article, we have other mechanisms of getting a comprehensive list.--Salix (talk): 21:58, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The robotic updating of the list of articles is a nice feature. I wish the equivalent were available for all projects. Note, however, that creating a redirect won't change any of that. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:21, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The difficulty is entirely in getting people to spend the time manually filling in the data. I don't see how the name of the template would affect it at all, since the issue with unassessed articles is that they already have the project tag on them, but the parameters are not filled in. If anything, making the name "WikiProject Mathematics" only encourages people to add the template without filling in the parameters - I can't see how it could encourage people to fill in the parameters to apges that are already tagged. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:04, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

You can encourage people to add the parameters in the template documentation, and on the wikiproject page, and on the assessment page - but why would having a different name for the template make any difference? RockMagnetist (talk) 21:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I think that's what I'm saying - giving the template the name "WikiProject Mathematics" would not encourage anyone to fill in the data more than the current name does. But having a different name may help indicate to people that "something is different" about this project - which it is. For example we also assess the subfield of every article, and we don't use the template just to track which articles are related to mathematics. So having a different name may indicate that more attention is required when using this remplate. But changing the name to "WikiProject Mathematics" would seem to require some benefit of making that change, and I can't see any such benefit. Making the name similar would only make it easier for people to blindly tag pages without thinking - which is what we want to discourage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not advocating a change in the name - just a redirect for the alternative name. If anyone tried to look at the documentation for {{WikiProject Mathematics}}, they would get the docs for {{maths rating}}. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:08, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, any redirect to {{Maths rating}} will have the same behavior, including the capacity to assess subfields. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:18, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Right - but what would the benefit be to this project? It seems like changing the name would just encourage people to add the tag without filling in the data; people who know enough to fill in the data will already know the current name. The principle of least surprise would suggest that, since we have different goals for our template, and an additional parameter to fill in, it will just confuse the matter to name it the same as other templates that have a different purpose and have different parameters.

A key point is that we already have an automatic list of all math articles at list of mathematics articles, so we don't need anyone to add a tag just to say that a page is related to mathematics. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:17, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps a little confession would clarify the issues. I have edited (and tagged) several math articles, yet until this discussion started I was not aware of this project's policy on tagging. I don't know exactly how I managed not to notice, but the root cause is obvious: like most people, I only read documentation if I see an immediate need for it. I value my time. I don't expect a wikiproject to have subtle differences in policy from other wikiprojects, so I don't look for them.

Most of the contributions to math articles are not made by hard core WikiProject Mathematics members. Instead of thinking of the benefit to this project, you should be thinking of the benefit to the articles. How can you make it easier for that silent majority to contribute? RockMagnetist (talk) 18:14, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The tags have no benefit to articles, and aren't meant to. At least, not directly. The indirect benefit is that they are tracked and summarized by bots, and the results are published on a WPM page, where editors can look for high-priority low-quality articles to work on, broken down by field. --Trovatore (talk) 19:04, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Carl, what is the benefit to this project of discouraging people from adding the ratings template with no/partial parameters? As far as I can see there is none. (And there certainly is the disadvantage of annoying people.)TR 19:01, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can see, it is the difference between having an assessment table in which it appears that most of the math articles have been rated, and one that reflects the actual statistics – about 28,000 articles of which 18,000 haven't been rated yet. The effectiveness of the project is overestimated while its importance is underestimated. RockMagnetist (talk) 20:14, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a difference in scope, though. The list of mathematics articles is intentionally very broad in scope, because the category tree is not perfect; the articles that are tagged are a narrower scope of things that are "really" mathematics in some sense. I have removed quite a few math rating tags from articles that I didn't think were in-scope enough to be tagged, even though they might be on the list of math articles. This is one reason that we have not just had a bot tag all the articles on the list of math articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:05, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Re TimothyRias: one issue is that people adding the tags blindly are more likely to add them to anything that contains mathematics rather than things that are actually in the scope of the project. For example, much of chemistry, physics, and economics has complicated mathematics but is not in our scope. Another issue is that, as others have pointed out, it takes effort for us to go through and "fix" the tags that are put on with incomplete data, which is an annoyance to people within the project. Since this template is designed for the specific use of this wikiproject, annoying members of the project is a bigger problem than annoying non-members, who can just ignore the tag anyway. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:05, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I thought it might be interesting to estimate how much extra work there might be for members if tagging by non-members wasn't discouraged. In the Wikipedia 1.0 articles by quality logs, articles listed under Assessments are newly tagged (as far as I know). Over the last 13 days, a total of 30 math articles were assessed over the last 13 days, compared to 35 geology articles. Scaling up from 8,000 to 28,000 gives an estimate of about 120, or 9 new tags per day (compared to the current 2-3 tags). RockMagnetist (talk) 22:41, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

On the other hand, Physics has less than two articles tagged per day. So it's not obvious that the load would increase. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:47, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

To your first issue. That may not be as big of a problem as you think. The same problem exists for WP Physics with people adding it to astronomy, geology, meteorology, medicine, and engineering topics where it does not belong. But these are not that many and easily managed (may be a couple per month). This is easily outweighed by the number of times an article shows up that is on the scope of the project, but was not properly categorized.

To the second issue. That only appears to be the case, because you are not counting the work that needs to be done to assess the article in the first place. It typically is less work to complete a partial assessment, than it is to do the complete assessment yourself.TR 13:34, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

For me it takes about the same amount of work, because I can use the same javascript (on my user page) for either purpose. But when I am assessing articles I can work in a single category, and I know what to expect, while if I am fixing incomplete assessments I have to jump around between articles in many areas, which is more mentally taxing. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:23, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

You have a nice set of tools. Have you considered adding them to the Assessment section? RockMagnetist (talk) 15:43, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

In the TfD, a few people have mentioned {{Maths banner}}, which is intended for the project pages. They propose creating a redirect that would go to either {{Maths rating}} or {{Maths banner}}, as appropriate. I don't know how that would be implemented. The only effect of {{Maths rating}} seems to be categorization in Category:WikiProject Mathematics. RockMagnetist (talk) 21:38, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

WP:NOR and WP:SYN in math/logic/philosophy articles

I want to raise the point that WP:NOR and WP:SYN may not be 100% aligned with some articles such as NBG set theory (see note [1]). When discussing math/logic/philosophy in an encyclopedia, WP:SYN and WP:NOR could, I think, be modified slightly to allow for increased flexibility in editing. Please see the draft proposal, section (2) below for concrete details.

Motivation

The published sources for the article may form a cohesive body of knowledge that expresses an idea that cannot be derived from a single source. For example, Alice publishes Paper 1 which contains a complete description of a qualifying structure, for example New Foundations set theory. Bob reads Paper 1 and publishes Paper 2 which suggests some changes. Carl reads both papers and publishes Paper 3, a different variation on paper 1. Dan comes along, reads everything, and substantially revises the ideas in Papers 1, 2, and 3, publishes Paper 4 which is a synthesis of all of these. Neither Paper 2 nor 3 nor 4 contains a complete description of the structure, so even though the IDEA of a synthesis is published in Paper 4, even if professionals consider the synthesis mechanical, even obvious, no Wikipedia editor can point to a paper and say, "this paragraph of this article is based on this published source" because it is the intent of the authors that the reader engage in synthetic reasoning / original research.

Draft proposal

if a paragraph or section includes the statement "the following is a synthesis", then the paragraph/section to which the disclaimer applies is partially exempt from the WP:NOR pursuant to the following rule of qualified, minimal synthesis: the synthesis or original research may only be included in a Wikipedia article if it A) qualifies and B) is minimal.

A) Qualified: it is the intent of the authors of the published sources that the reader engage in synthetic reading and/or original research as a necessary process for understanding the content of the published work.

B) Minimal: synthesis and original research necessary for understanding and communicating ideas appearing in published sources.

Author intent and customs of a discipline

In general we can't ask authors about the expectations they put on their readers, but we can make judgements. For example we expect a reader of a scientific textbook to use logic and reasoning to understand it. A reader of a scientific paper may be expected to perform substantial synthesis and original research in order to understand it.

Basis for this proposal

The idea (if you prefer, the ideological position) behind this proposal is to allow article content to evolve in a natural way that strikes a balance between respecting the customs of communication within a discipline and clear, faithful exposition of the subject matter for Wikipedia readers.

[1] The relevant portion of the original article is """An appealing but somewhat mysterious feature of NBG is that its axiom schema of Class Comprehension is equivalent to the conjunction of a finite number of its instances. The axioms of this section may replace the Axiom Schema of Class Comprehension in the preceding section. The finite axiomatization presented below does not necessarily resemble exactly any NBG axiomatization in print."""

173.239.78.54 (talk) 00:18, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Edited for formatting 173.239.78.54 (talk) 00:21, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Comments

I think you are just seeing difficulties where there aren't any and proposing complex and not easily understood changes which would allow rubbish to be inserted into articles. Besides this is the wrong place to propose changes to those policies, the talk pages of the policies of the village pump on proposals is the right place to discuss stuff like this in the first place. I can't see anything specific to maths in this. Dmcq (talk) 15:55, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I agree that this does not sound like a good idea. If the synthesis in question is worth mentioning in an encyclopaedia then it will be published in an independent reliable source in due course, and we can use it then. Allowing editors to write their own private essays opens the door to all sorts of non-mainstream stuff. I note that this proposal seems to be in the context of a desire to write an article aboiut some new sort of set theory. Deltahedron (talk) 20:48, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

• Such flexibility exists in practice already. It was even recognized in the ArbCom case on the Monty Hall problem. See discussion starting about here. Tijfo098 (talk) 04:17, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• That's a really good link. I find myself agreeing with Hans Adler.—S Marshall T/C 13:11, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• I think Carl (CBM) best expressed the actual intent of WP:OR at 12:57, 19 March 2011 (UTC) [17] in that ArbCom page discussion. Tijfo098 (talk) 14:58, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks!. The principle 11.4 that I was referring to is this:

11.4) If editors disagree on how to express a problem and/or solution in mathematics, citations to reliable published sources that are both directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the material as presented must be supplied by the editor(s) who wishes to included the material. Novel derivations, applications or conclusions that cannot be supported by sources are likely to constitute original research within the definition used by the English Wikipedia.

I think that that language does a good job of stating the principle. Of course there is a lot of room to discuss individual issues on an article-by-article basis. The point of the OR policy is to give us some quasi-objective way to handle disagreements. There is no strict requirement that everything in every sentence has to directly appear in a source; we also have the goal of making our articles readable, which means they have to have a clear thesis and present their points in an organized way.

Separately, I seem to remember that some of the articles on New Foundations are very old and were written back when "original research" was less of a concern. So these articles may indeed have some issues; I am not sure they represent our current best practices. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:29, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Topograph

An ambiguous term. There is a MathOverflow question about a mathematical meaning up today ([18]). Scope for a pleasant article. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:05, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Eye of Horus

If anyone can address the issue raised at Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Eye_of_Horus_numbers, help would be appreciated. This concerns Ancient Egyptian methods of calulation. Paul B (talk) 15:57, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Mean-periodic function

I just created a stub article titled Mean-periodic function. It could use further expansion including examples, theorems, and references. And possibly links to it from other articles. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:21, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Are the subfields useful?

How useful is the classification of articles into subfields in the {{maths rating}} template? If you know where to look, you can find subpages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Geometry where each subfield has its own assessment table. But no one seems to discuss these subfields separately (the entire contents of the talk page for the Geometry table is "pnoh kng ang nwwla ay b2?????"). Other wikiprojects create task forces and then add a field to the wikiproject template that assigns articles to the task forces. It's more haphazard, but it does ensure that a group of people wants to work on that subject. RockMagnetist (talk) 23:34, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

The lists are not updated onwiki any more; the WP 1.0 web tool is able to generate them dynamically. But the tables at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mathematics/Wikipedia_1.0/Table are still updated. I don't see how switching to "task forces" would help very much, since there is not so much discussion on this page to necessitate splitting it into pieces. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:13, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The field subpages (or rather, the bot that generates them) could use some updating - they still provide tables with links to Comments subpages, which no one has used for years. RockMagnetist (talk) 22:44, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

They are mainly historical at this point; for current lists you would want to use the WP 1.0 web tool and the categories that are on the talk pages of articles that are assessed into the subfields. The bot does not copy lists of articles to the wiki any more. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:57, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I am really struggling to understand why the members of this project value the fields parameter so highly. The only advantage it has over article-space categories is that the articles are also sorted by quality and importance. However, that information is hard to use unless you can display the results in a table. Editors attempting to find the field-specific tables are most likely to end up at pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Geometry that have not been updated since 2010. If they are not told that the active tables are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Table, how would they ever find out? All the project links to this table are through the WP MATH 1.0 navbox.

If the field classification is to be useful to any but a few insiders, its use must be explained much more clearly. Here are a few suggestions:

• Create Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Assessment as a redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Assessment. That is the most common naming scheme for assessment pages. Y
• Make this the main page for Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics#Assessment of mathematics articles. Y
• Modify Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Field page format so it points to tables like User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Mathematics-Geometry instead of the obsolete tables.
• Provide more obvious links to Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Table in the main project page and the assessment page.
• All of the obsolete pages should be deleted - or at least tagged with {{Historical}} so users aren't confused.
• A clearer explanation of the benefits of using the field parameter should be added to the main project page and the assessment page. If some editors are using this parameter in ways I haven't mentioned, I'd like to hear about it.

RockMagnetist (talk) 16:31, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

The old pages shouldn't be deleted - their page history would be very hard to recreate now. But marking them historical would be a good idea. Someone could certainly go through and clean up the various WikiProject pages.

The thing that I am struggling with is why it is necessary to write long documentation to explain to non-members of the project why some members of the project find the fields useful. The main benefits of assessing the fields are that if someone within the project wants to see how the articles in a certain broad area of math are doing, they can look at the table (e.g. my user page) and if someone wants to have a pre-created list of articles in that area, they can use the list provided by the field parameter. The best way to think of the fields is like lightweight task forces. Presumably we could change the name from "field" to "task force"; would that really be any different than what other projects do? — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:52, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I'm talking about helping new members of this project now. Surely I am not the only one who has had great difficulty in finding those tables you mentioned. And how does it benefit anyone to find obsolete tables when they look at the field-specific pages? RockMagnetist (talk) 16:58, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, how do you access those field-specific lists? RockMagnetist (talk) 17:39, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I have a simpler suggestion for updating the table links:

• On Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Field page format linked, change {{User:VeblenBot/Math/table:{{{field}}}}} to {{User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Mathematics-{{{field}}}}} so it points to tables like User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Mathematics-Geometry instead of the obsolete tables. Get rid of the rest of that page.

Representation theory of the Lorentz group

Hi guys!

I have tried to beef up Representation theory of the Lorentz group from the perspective of finite representation theory, and also from the perspective of QFT.

Unfortunately, I never really landed it, and it definitely grew too big: User:YohanN7/Representation theory of the Lorentz group. Should I pursuit it at all, and if so how (except for cutting down on the size)?

YohanN7 (talk) 13:07, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The finite dimensional irreducible complex representations of SL(2,C) are pretty trivial: they are just symmetric tensor powers of the fundamental representation (this is a spin-1/2 representation). The associated real representations are just the tensor products of a complex rep and complex conjugate rep. The article needs to state this clearly, as it stands it is needlessly obscure. There's also a ton of stuff that, while maybe appropriate for a textbook on the topic, shouldn't be in an encyclopedia article: sections consisting entirely of generalities on direct sums, complexification, tensor products, dual representations, quotient representations, induced representations, etc. All of this is covered elsewhere in the encyclopedia. What's left, then, is a protracted discussion of Lorentz invariance as applied to physics. I think that such material can be succinctly summarized in an article on representation theory, but it should not be a main focus of the article. A better target for this content is perhaps something like the article Lorentz invariance. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:45, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I agree with you to a large extent. The reason I wrote the stuff on generalities is that it is not covered elsewhere, not coherently at least. It was not possible to reduce that part to relevant links without becoming totally obscure. I wrote it all out (it's all definitions) mostly to see if it could be done relatively concisely (which, of course, failed completely). The alternative would be to edit several other current articles to be able to have good links. This presents a dilemma.

I agree too that the physics part should reside elsewhere, that is the intention.

You are right when you say that finite dimensional representations of SL(2,C) are pretty trivial. They are certainly not an area of current research in mathematics. This stand in sharp contrast to their paramount importance in physics. It surprises me that the article is not in the scope of the physics project. As the article stands now, there is a large nice, pretty advanced section on infinite dimensional representations, but hardly anything on the finite dimensional ones. I imagine that this is what most physics/engineering students would look for. (The physics part b t w, I suspect, is in line with the original author's (finite rep part, current article) intention. There is a comment indicating this.)

Thanks again. I'll, in due time, try to come up with something plausible in size and content. (Regardless of size, the textbook style have to go. I know that. But there are many, many articles that are way worse in that respect, e.g. Lorentz group.) I'll also drop a note in the physics project and see if they are interested. YohanN7 (talk) 13:38, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Wow, you've put quite a lot of work into this article. As you say, there's lots of generalities. You say that the alternative is to edit several other articles; have you considered doing that? Your work would be much more helpful to others if it were put where they could find it more easily. Ozob (talk) 23:10, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Featured pic maybe

Someone has created a pretty version of an older pic by adding labels. Maybe you could feature it on the portal or something like that. Tijfo098 (talk) 22:14, 31 October 2012 (UTC)