Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
|
|
Editors are editing away the actual content of this essay. That means that instead of having people discuss and think about this proposal, it is being reworded to mean the exact opposite of what it is saying. In order to prevent this, I will put a copy down here in the talk page. This is what was being discussed above (more or less, there is also the original Count Iblis version, which he might want to put here too)
This page in a nutshell: Be very careful when editing or creating articles of a scientific nature. Check and double check everything you write. When you quote from sources, make sure that the context is preserved. If you are an expert with a working knowledge of the subject, make sure you are as rigorous when writing for Wikipedia as you are when you write for scientific journals |
Wikipedia's content policies are often unambiguous when working with sources which use ordinary language and everyday concepts. But scientific terms are much more precise, and require much more care. When writing about science and mathematics, accuracy is paramount, and the policies must be followed carefully to avoid introducing technical errors.
For scientific articles, following the letter of Wikipedia policies often is not enough to guarantee that an article won't contain serious factual mistakes or misleading statements. When editing scientific articles, try to follow these suggestions:
I recieved a comment on my talk page that Jayjg thinks I am being tendentious. This editor would like to take administrative action. Likebox ( talk) 04:51, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
One may well ask whether Admins are following WP:Block. In my opinion, they are not. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
Count Iblis: Thanks for your vote of confidence. I don't know anything about mentorship, but unless it involves a shield from ridiculous blocks and motions that are simply time sinks over complete trivia, I don't think my participation on WP is likely. Statements by TenOfAllTrades, MBisanz, Jehochman and others indicate no tolerance for any activity I might attempt. Brews ohare ( talk) 17:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, but misreading is from all sides. If you find all this tiresome, try experiencing harassment over trivia for months. Nothing I have been doing is related to Case/Speed of light apart from the fact that that case underlined some major problems on WP. Those problems are endemic and transcend any particular case. They can be found all over WP and occupy WP:AN/I and administrators for weeks and months. It's hard for me to understand why my actions to mitigate this situation should be continuously distorted and misinterpreted. This strange campaign extends the sanctions to include a remark like Superman travels at the " vitesse de la lumière". (Pardon my French.) And even to objections to composing an essay on my user page and a block for answering a question about this essay!!! Brews ohare ( talk) 18:33, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
My attempt to keep Jayjg to stick to politics has failed Count Iblis ( talk) 21:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The poor quality of this section speaks for itself. The editor who inserted allows no correction, with the comment " if you npov my section, I'll npov yours.". Fine, have your way. I'm sure the section won't survive in the long run but if, in the meantime, it prevents disruption to the evolution of the main text, then I'm okay with it. -- Michael C. Price talk 13:04, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I removed it, we already know that the essay gives the view of a minority. Now if that section is not going to discuss in detail what the problems are, then it is a useless section. It would be similar to Woit coming to the string theory article and writing in that article a one line sentence that Woit, Professor of mathematics disagrees with string theory, without even discussing why. Count Iblis ( talk) 14:39, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
Are you going to make it clear this essay is the point of view of the minority in any way, or are you both just going to tag-team revert to your preferred version? Would you prefer this essay be userified? Hipocrite ( talk) 15:05, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
My take is that this essay has wandered from its original purpose and has become less effective. It seems to me that the main area of dispute concerns OR, and that has infected the entire article development. Perhaps it would be clearer for the article to have a separate section dealing directly with the OR issue. Then the rest of the article could be returned to more like its original form, and dispute would be more focused. That division also would be clearer for the reader. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The OR issue has arisen already on WP:NOR in discussion of syllogism. There is a great fear on the part of some that they cannot tell when a technical derivation is accurate, so it's best to require it to be verbatim from a source. This is the nub of the problem: how can a non-expert tell whether a section is correct or not. If that cannot be done, how can a non-expert determine that another editor is more qualified than they? Or, can non-experts be relied upon to admit to incompetence that they know themselves to be so? Brews ohare ( talk)
A different solution, based upon sourced premises and conclusions, would seem to limit the possible damage of an incorrect deduction, but even that fails to reassure the non-expert. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:19, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Yet another solution, the argument from first principles, also is resisted by the non-expert because (i) they don't understand the principles, and (ii) they don't have any confidence in their ability to track an argument. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:21, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
I never thought the original essay [1] was about OR in the first place. Of course you are right that we simply do not require all deductions to appear verbatim in sources, and people who believe we do are overreading the actual NOR policy. But I don't think it is practical to try to clarify that sort of thing in a guideline, because there is little one can say in general; the actual policy is to make decisions on an article-by-article basis.
It is pretty common for editors who follow some policy page closely to read that policy as being more strict than it is, and this is visible at least among people who follow WP:V, people who follow WP:NOR, people who follow WP:NFCC, and people who follow WP:CSD. I am sure that if I proposed a guideline that clarified what the CSD policy actually is (versus what the page WP:CSD claims the policy is), that proposal would get opposition for the same underlying reasons that this essay did when it was proposed as a guideline. The same would be true for WP:NFCC, and it is clearly true here for WP:NOR.
So I think that we should just make sure any attempted explanation here is clearly marked as an essay. It might be better, actually, to just put it in userspace. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) On expertise and noOR: There is a legitimate fear among editors that with nontrivial content, which includes derivations of mathematical statements, and detailed exposition, then verification will become a circus of diverging ignorant opinions. This is a reasonable worry, but I think it is overblown. The question is do we need a big boss to step in and say "this is correct" and "this is incorrect"? Or can we rely on non-expert editors to acquire this knowledge through editing, reading, and talk-page discussions.
The notion of expertise was important in the print era, when access to information was slow, and acquiring expertise took years and years of patient study in a university with a mentor. We are living through a transformation in the availability of technical knowledge, and we are now at a point where even the most detailed stuff is widely accessible to anyone with a search engine. This means that it is not absolutely necessary to defer to expert opinions, because anyone can know all there is to know, with patience and help.
This does not mean that every editor will have an easy time verifying technical information in articles--- far from it. They will have to study the subject, read the literature, read the sources, and learn about the topic in an in-depth way. But I think Wikipedia can ask this of its contributors, and in many cases, non-expert contributors have taken the time to do this, and have written wonderful expositions. For historical material, possibly non-expert contributors were able to present technical material in a lucid way that went far beyond standard textbook expositions (although not beyond the literature).
For example, the historical information about Moseley's law on Bohr model is not usually found in textbooks, but it is found in the literature. Same with the discussions of Laplace's argument about the speed of gravity. These contributions are known, but not included as part of the standard curriculum. If we treat out contributors as capable readers, we can expect them to understand the literature that they are reviewing at the highest level. If there is a problem of understanding, we can hope that experts will step in to correct the errors. If the discussions with the experts goes along the way suggested by these guidelines, everyone will get up to speed. Verifying material is a time consuming task, but there is no reason to suppose that it cannot be done. Likebox ( talk) 23:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) To quale: all the arguments I have included are obvious to experts, anyone who disputed them is, almost by definition, not an expert. I did not meet any actual experts who disputed the correctness of the content of any additions I have made, at least not after patient explanation and a rewrite or two. If you think you have an example of such a case, please bring it up, and I will explain what was going on.
Following this guideline does not weaken OR, it removes a bad interpretation of OR which allows sourced misinformation to propagate, because of misinterpretation. For example, the equation "dU < TdS - PdV" is correctly intepreted in the following form: "dS > 1/T dU + P/T dV", which is correct in a certain sense, it says that the entropy can go up even if there is no energy flowing into a system nor any volume change. But it is incorrect when applied to a system like a gas which is already in equilibrium, which is the automatic interpretation found in the article. For such a system, the inequality is an equality. While this statement is easy to source, it is also obvious to all knowledgable editors, and should not be disputed. When a mistake such as this creeps into an article, the only way to fix it is for discussions to go from first principles.
An example of a simplification for thermodynamics articles which is a trivial rewrite is to replace all "dU = ..." forms of thermodynamic identities with the equivalent "dS = ...." forms, as above. While you can find sources that use "dU = ..." and sources that use "dS =....", most often appearing as "d(F/T) = ...." where (F/T) is the entropy-like quantity which is the free-energy divided by the temperature, or the logarithm of the canonical partition function. To put the entropy-like quantity on the left is the better representation, as understood from statistical mechanics, because this way makes the Maxwell relations obvious. But for historical reasons, we are saddled with historical forms. In this case, there is no reason for us to use the most transparent form. We now know that energy is more microscopically fundamental than entropy.
In order to determine which form is clearest, sources are of absolutely no help. Although there are a few sources that make the argument that entropy-like terms should be put on the left, these sources are useless, because we aren't writing a page called "how to write thermodynamic identities". The thing to do it to verify the material from the sources, then put the sources aside and think hard about how to present the material, and think hard about whether to follow the advice about presentation in the other sources. Likebox ( talk) 03:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
Brews, on his talk page, mentioned the audience we're writing for, when arguing in favor of different presentations. This is a very important point to consider. I think Likebox has made this point also.
The readers of a Wikipedia article are not the same students who are following a university course on that topic. But textbooks are written for these university students. This can mean that you have emphasize certain points in a Wiki article that textbooks pay little attention to. You may have to avoid certain jargon that almost all textbooks use. You may have to explain a certain mathematical formalism in much more detail than the textbooks presentations do. It may be advantageous to use a mathematical formalism that textbooks do not use in the context of the topic.
So, textbook presentations should not necessary be the norm of how we present material here on Wikipedia. And editors shouldn't just present material in Wikipedia in their favorite ideosyncratic way either. Count Iblis ( talk) 17:45, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) To be clear about what these contested proofs are:
For contradiction, suppose there is a computer program HALT(X) which tells you whether X halts or not.
Write SPITE to do the following:
This is the proof the caused so much controversy.
For Godel's theorem, the proof is as follows: suppose an axiom system S is computable, meaning there is an algorithm to list the theorems, and capable of making statements about a computer. Then consider the program GODEL which does the following:
This is the proof of Godel's theorem. The Godel sentence is "Godel does not halt". It is true, but unprovable.
To prove Rosser's theorem, with the same assumption as Godel's theorem, consider the following program ROSSER:
The Rosser sentence is "ROSSER does not print to the screen". Neither this statement nor its negation can be printed out.
Godel's proof length theorem of 1934 states that for any computable function "f", there is a provable theorem T, whose statement is of length N bytes, but whose proof is longer than f(N).
To prove this, you do the following:
This construction provides the proof. This theorem was controversial for decades.
Post's work in the 1940s led to the injury/priority method, which involves very complicated computer programs. The essence of injury methods is programs similar to those above. The goal of my edits was to build up to a presentation of the injury/priority method here, which would be extremely useful.
The point of my contributions was to see how amenable the encyclopedia was to presenting injury methods in a natural way. Instead, I got arguments that the trivial review proofs of Godel's theorem/Halting problem was OR! That's complete nonsense. This proof is equivalent to Kleene 1940's paper. The place where OR (arguably) starts is with Rosser's theorem, which is proved here in an ever-so-slightly different way than Rosser's 1936 paper.
The proof-length method is essentially equivalent to Godel 1936, but takes more liberties (still not enough to be independent), while the injury/priority argument does not exist, because I got discouraged by the amount of flak that this type of presentation got.
Having gotten bogged down in arguments over trivialities with exceptionally ignorant people demanding that I show sources, I have little patience for editors who say "show me the sources". These people are not helpful to the encyclopedia, since they are not contesting material they believe is wrong, just material that they find unusual. This is not a battle for accuracy, but a battle against innovative exposition. Likebox ( talk) 01:43, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) I think Count Iblis hit the nail on the head about physics culture: I always just assumed that reworking and streamlining of old proofs is not publishable work.
About the proof length theorem: this is a great theorem of Godel, an underappreciated follow-up to his 1931 paper, and I wanted to explain the result and the proof here, because it has an ignominious history. Godel published the theorem in 1934 with a one-page proof, nobody understood it at the time, as far as I can see, and I can see why: I couldn't make heads or tails out of the paper.
But it passed review, probably because Godel's reputation was godlike back then, but I think that nobody really understood it. Every once in a while somebody presents a simplified proof. Because the original is so short, and the proof has been controversial for so many decades, a lot of people don't believe that Godel had a real proof.
The proof length theorem is about a (consistent, computable) axiomatic system S which is sufficiently strong that the incompleteness theorem applies. It has three parts:
Godel proved 1 and 2 by a method which I couldn't follow very well, because it is tied up to his ideosyncratic notation. But the proof is extremely short, less than a page, indicating that the essential idea is already present in the incompleteness theorem.
The actual proof can be reconstructed ex-post-facto from the statement and Godel's previous result as follows: consider the computer program PROOFLENGTH which:
Since S is consistent, PROOFLENGTH will eventually halt and print "finished". Since PROOFLENGTH halts, S will eventually prove that it halts, and also that it prints "finished" to the screen.
But by construction S will not prove this with a short proof. The proof will necessarily have length greater than F(L), where L is the length of the statement "PROOFLENGTH prints to the screen". This is obviously just a finitistic version of Godel's original method.
To prove 2, note that S+consis(S) will prove that PROOFLENGTH halts and prints "finished" with a proof which doesn't depend on the function F. This is Godel's proof shortening.
To prove point 3 is a little trickier, and I showed how on the talk page of Godel's incompleteness theorems a few months ago. It involves finding one program which T proves does not halt but S does not, and following the operation of this program for a long time, to see if it halts.
The controversy about this theorem came from what exactly the "length of a proof" is. In the preceding, it is the length of the proof in bytes. But there is a different definition of length, which is the number of applications of the axioms and deduction rules, which is not the same as the length in bytes because the axioms can get unbounded. In this interpretation, the proof shortening theorem depends on something called "Kreisel's conjecture", which says that proof-length is equivalent to proof-byte-size for the purposes of this theorem. But, complications aside, this gloss helped me make sense of Godel's paper. Likebox ( talk) 21:35, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
The use of analogies is being questioned here which has relevance to this essay. See what you think. -- Michael C. Price talk 23:48, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
The fight over showing the "failed" tag, is really a problem with the use of general templates. I think we need to replace the "failed" template with a one-off template that more clearly describes what has gone on. I do not think that it failed as a policy, because it very clearly would never fit into the rather small set of wikipedia policies. It might have become a guideline, but it failed to reach consensus on that. It evolved to be an essay that some science editors might find useful. The template needs to state something along those lines and not just raise the temperature about this. -- Bduke (Discussion) 22:36, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
In the summary it says: "This page in a nutshell: WP:ESCA is claptrap from people who have the WP:TRUTH"
When I tried to change this sentence to make it more neutral, I was told "edit your own essay". I don't think it is a good idea to stray away from constructive criticisms and resort to such language. Of course, my edits don't have to be accepted in that essay, but then they could have changed the wording in some other way. Also, they should address the choice of words in their essay. It now contains literal copies of entire sections of this essay.
As long as this situation remains the way it is now (i.e. not only does that essay contain these statements, but there is no willingness to address the problematic issues), one cannot leave out these facts. I.e. the essay is plagiarized from this essay and it uses the word "claptrap" when describing this essay. If people don't like it, they are free to edit that essay and rewrite it in their own words. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:28, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
|
|
Editors are editing away the actual content of this essay. That means that instead of having people discuss and think about this proposal, it is being reworded to mean the exact opposite of what it is saying. In order to prevent this, I will put a copy down here in the talk page. This is what was being discussed above (more or less, there is also the original Count Iblis version, which he might want to put here too)
This page in a nutshell: Be very careful when editing or creating articles of a scientific nature. Check and double check everything you write. When you quote from sources, make sure that the context is preserved. If you are an expert with a working knowledge of the subject, make sure you are as rigorous when writing for Wikipedia as you are when you write for scientific journals |
Wikipedia's content policies are often unambiguous when working with sources which use ordinary language and everyday concepts. But scientific terms are much more precise, and require much more care. When writing about science and mathematics, accuracy is paramount, and the policies must be followed carefully to avoid introducing technical errors.
For scientific articles, following the letter of Wikipedia policies often is not enough to guarantee that an article won't contain serious factual mistakes or misleading statements. When editing scientific articles, try to follow these suggestions:
I recieved a comment on my talk page that Jayjg thinks I am being tendentious. This editor would like to take administrative action. Likebox ( talk) 04:51, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
One may well ask whether Admins are following WP:Block. In my opinion, they are not. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
Count Iblis: Thanks for your vote of confidence. I don't know anything about mentorship, but unless it involves a shield from ridiculous blocks and motions that are simply time sinks over complete trivia, I don't think my participation on WP is likely. Statements by TenOfAllTrades, MBisanz, Jehochman and others indicate no tolerance for any activity I might attempt. Brews ohare ( talk) 17:25, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, but misreading is from all sides. If you find all this tiresome, try experiencing harassment over trivia for months. Nothing I have been doing is related to Case/Speed of light apart from the fact that that case underlined some major problems on WP. Those problems are endemic and transcend any particular case. They can be found all over WP and occupy WP:AN/I and administrators for weeks and months. It's hard for me to understand why my actions to mitigate this situation should be continuously distorted and misinterpreted. This strange campaign extends the sanctions to include a remark like Superman travels at the " vitesse de la lumière". (Pardon my French.) And even to objections to composing an essay on my user page and a block for answering a question about this essay!!! Brews ohare ( talk) 18:33, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
My attempt to keep Jayjg to stick to politics has failed Count Iblis ( talk) 21:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The poor quality of this section speaks for itself. The editor who inserted allows no correction, with the comment " if you npov my section, I'll npov yours.". Fine, have your way. I'm sure the section won't survive in the long run but if, in the meantime, it prevents disruption to the evolution of the main text, then I'm okay with it. -- Michael C. Price talk 13:04, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I removed it, we already know that the essay gives the view of a minority. Now if that section is not going to discuss in detail what the problems are, then it is a useless section. It would be similar to Woit coming to the string theory article and writing in that article a one line sentence that Woit, Professor of mathematics disagrees with string theory, without even discussing why. Count Iblis ( talk) 14:39, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
Are you going to make it clear this essay is the point of view of the minority in any way, or are you both just going to tag-team revert to your preferred version? Would you prefer this essay be userified? Hipocrite ( talk) 15:05, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
My take is that this essay has wandered from its original purpose and has become less effective. It seems to me that the main area of dispute concerns OR, and that has infected the entire article development. Perhaps it would be clearer for the article to have a separate section dealing directly with the OR issue. Then the rest of the article could be returned to more like its original form, and dispute would be more focused. That division also would be clearer for the reader. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The OR issue has arisen already on WP:NOR in discussion of syllogism. There is a great fear on the part of some that they cannot tell when a technical derivation is accurate, so it's best to require it to be verbatim from a source. This is the nub of the problem: how can a non-expert tell whether a section is correct or not. If that cannot be done, how can a non-expert determine that another editor is more qualified than they? Or, can non-experts be relied upon to admit to incompetence that they know themselves to be so? Brews ohare ( talk)
A different solution, based upon sourced premises and conclusions, would seem to limit the possible damage of an incorrect deduction, but even that fails to reassure the non-expert. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:19, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Yet another solution, the argument from first principles, also is resisted by the non-expert because (i) they don't understand the principles, and (ii) they don't have any confidence in their ability to track an argument. Brews ohare ( talk) 18:21, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
I never thought the original essay [1] was about OR in the first place. Of course you are right that we simply do not require all deductions to appear verbatim in sources, and people who believe we do are overreading the actual NOR policy. But I don't think it is practical to try to clarify that sort of thing in a guideline, because there is little one can say in general; the actual policy is to make decisions on an article-by-article basis.
It is pretty common for editors who follow some policy page closely to read that policy as being more strict than it is, and this is visible at least among people who follow WP:V, people who follow WP:NOR, people who follow WP:NFCC, and people who follow WP:CSD. I am sure that if I proposed a guideline that clarified what the CSD policy actually is (versus what the page WP:CSD claims the policy is), that proposal would get opposition for the same underlying reasons that this essay did when it was proposed as a guideline. The same would be true for WP:NFCC, and it is clearly true here for WP:NOR.
So I think that we should just make sure any attempted explanation here is clearly marked as an essay. It might be better, actually, to just put it in userspace. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 18:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) On expertise and noOR: There is a legitimate fear among editors that with nontrivial content, which includes derivations of mathematical statements, and detailed exposition, then verification will become a circus of diverging ignorant opinions. This is a reasonable worry, but I think it is overblown. The question is do we need a big boss to step in and say "this is correct" and "this is incorrect"? Or can we rely on non-expert editors to acquire this knowledge through editing, reading, and talk-page discussions.
The notion of expertise was important in the print era, when access to information was slow, and acquiring expertise took years and years of patient study in a university with a mentor. We are living through a transformation in the availability of technical knowledge, and we are now at a point where even the most detailed stuff is widely accessible to anyone with a search engine. This means that it is not absolutely necessary to defer to expert opinions, because anyone can know all there is to know, with patience and help.
This does not mean that every editor will have an easy time verifying technical information in articles--- far from it. They will have to study the subject, read the literature, read the sources, and learn about the topic in an in-depth way. But I think Wikipedia can ask this of its contributors, and in many cases, non-expert contributors have taken the time to do this, and have written wonderful expositions. For historical material, possibly non-expert contributors were able to present technical material in a lucid way that went far beyond standard textbook expositions (although not beyond the literature).
For example, the historical information about Moseley's law on Bohr model is not usually found in textbooks, but it is found in the literature. Same with the discussions of Laplace's argument about the speed of gravity. These contributions are known, but not included as part of the standard curriculum. If we treat out contributors as capable readers, we can expect them to understand the literature that they are reviewing at the highest level. If there is a problem of understanding, we can hope that experts will step in to correct the errors. If the discussions with the experts goes along the way suggested by these guidelines, everyone will get up to speed. Verifying material is a time consuming task, but there is no reason to suppose that it cannot be done. Likebox ( talk) 23:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) To quale: all the arguments I have included are obvious to experts, anyone who disputed them is, almost by definition, not an expert. I did not meet any actual experts who disputed the correctness of the content of any additions I have made, at least not after patient explanation and a rewrite or two. If you think you have an example of such a case, please bring it up, and I will explain what was going on.
Following this guideline does not weaken OR, it removes a bad interpretation of OR which allows sourced misinformation to propagate, because of misinterpretation. For example, the equation "dU < TdS - PdV" is correctly intepreted in the following form: "dS > 1/T dU + P/T dV", which is correct in a certain sense, it says that the entropy can go up even if there is no energy flowing into a system nor any volume change. But it is incorrect when applied to a system like a gas which is already in equilibrium, which is the automatic interpretation found in the article. For such a system, the inequality is an equality. While this statement is easy to source, it is also obvious to all knowledgable editors, and should not be disputed. When a mistake such as this creeps into an article, the only way to fix it is for discussions to go from first principles.
An example of a simplification for thermodynamics articles which is a trivial rewrite is to replace all "dU = ..." forms of thermodynamic identities with the equivalent "dS = ...." forms, as above. While you can find sources that use "dU = ..." and sources that use "dS =....", most often appearing as "d(F/T) = ...." where (F/T) is the entropy-like quantity which is the free-energy divided by the temperature, or the logarithm of the canonical partition function. To put the entropy-like quantity on the left is the better representation, as understood from statistical mechanics, because this way makes the Maxwell relations obvious. But for historical reasons, we are saddled with historical forms. In this case, there is no reason for us to use the most transparent form. We now know that energy is more microscopically fundamental than entropy.
In order to determine which form is clearest, sources are of absolutely no help. Although there are a few sources that make the argument that entropy-like terms should be put on the left, these sources are useless, because we aren't writing a page called "how to write thermodynamic identities". The thing to do it to verify the material from the sources, then put the sources aside and think hard about how to present the material, and think hard about whether to follow the advice about presentation in the other sources. Likebox ( talk) 03:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
Brews, on his talk page, mentioned the audience we're writing for, when arguing in favor of different presentations. This is a very important point to consider. I think Likebox has made this point also.
The readers of a Wikipedia article are not the same students who are following a university course on that topic. But textbooks are written for these university students. This can mean that you have emphasize certain points in a Wiki article that textbooks pay little attention to. You may have to avoid certain jargon that almost all textbooks use. You may have to explain a certain mathematical formalism in much more detail than the textbooks presentations do. It may be advantageous to use a mathematical formalism that textbooks do not use in the context of the topic.
So, textbook presentations should not necessary be the norm of how we present material here on Wikipedia. And editors shouldn't just present material in Wikipedia in their favorite ideosyncratic way either. Count Iblis ( talk) 17:45, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) To be clear about what these contested proofs are:
For contradiction, suppose there is a computer program HALT(X) which tells you whether X halts or not.
Write SPITE to do the following:
This is the proof the caused so much controversy.
For Godel's theorem, the proof is as follows: suppose an axiom system S is computable, meaning there is an algorithm to list the theorems, and capable of making statements about a computer. Then consider the program GODEL which does the following:
This is the proof of Godel's theorem. The Godel sentence is "Godel does not halt". It is true, but unprovable.
To prove Rosser's theorem, with the same assumption as Godel's theorem, consider the following program ROSSER:
The Rosser sentence is "ROSSER does not print to the screen". Neither this statement nor its negation can be printed out.
Godel's proof length theorem of 1934 states that for any computable function "f", there is a provable theorem T, whose statement is of length N bytes, but whose proof is longer than f(N).
To prove this, you do the following:
This construction provides the proof. This theorem was controversial for decades.
Post's work in the 1940s led to the injury/priority method, which involves very complicated computer programs. The essence of injury methods is programs similar to those above. The goal of my edits was to build up to a presentation of the injury/priority method here, which would be extremely useful.
The point of my contributions was to see how amenable the encyclopedia was to presenting injury methods in a natural way. Instead, I got arguments that the trivial review proofs of Godel's theorem/Halting problem was OR! That's complete nonsense. This proof is equivalent to Kleene 1940's paper. The place where OR (arguably) starts is with Rosser's theorem, which is proved here in an ever-so-slightly different way than Rosser's 1936 paper.
The proof-length method is essentially equivalent to Godel 1936, but takes more liberties (still not enough to be independent), while the injury/priority argument does not exist, because I got discouraged by the amount of flak that this type of presentation got.
Having gotten bogged down in arguments over trivialities with exceptionally ignorant people demanding that I show sources, I have little patience for editors who say "show me the sources". These people are not helpful to the encyclopedia, since they are not contesting material they believe is wrong, just material that they find unusual. This is not a battle for accuracy, but a battle against innovative exposition. Likebox ( talk) 01:43, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
(deindent) I think Count Iblis hit the nail on the head about physics culture: I always just assumed that reworking and streamlining of old proofs is not publishable work.
About the proof length theorem: this is a great theorem of Godel, an underappreciated follow-up to his 1931 paper, and I wanted to explain the result and the proof here, because it has an ignominious history. Godel published the theorem in 1934 with a one-page proof, nobody understood it at the time, as far as I can see, and I can see why: I couldn't make heads or tails out of the paper.
But it passed review, probably because Godel's reputation was godlike back then, but I think that nobody really understood it. Every once in a while somebody presents a simplified proof. Because the original is so short, and the proof has been controversial for so many decades, a lot of people don't believe that Godel had a real proof.
The proof length theorem is about a (consistent, computable) axiomatic system S which is sufficiently strong that the incompleteness theorem applies. It has three parts:
Godel proved 1 and 2 by a method which I couldn't follow very well, because it is tied up to his ideosyncratic notation. But the proof is extremely short, less than a page, indicating that the essential idea is already present in the incompleteness theorem.
The actual proof can be reconstructed ex-post-facto from the statement and Godel's previous result as follows: consider the computer program PROOFLENGTH which:
Since S is consistent, PROOFLENGTH will eventually halt and print "finished". Since PROOFLENGTH halts, S will eventually prove that it halts, and also that it prints "finished" to the screen.
But by construction S will not prove this with a short proof. The proof will necessarily have length greater than F(L), where L is the length of the statement "PROOFLENGTH prints to the screen". This is obviously just a finitistic version of Godel's original method.
To prove 2, note that S+consis(S) will prove that PROOFLENGTH halts and prints "finished" with a proof which doesn't depend on the function F. This is Godel's proof shortening.
To prove point 3 is a little trickier, and I showed how on the talk page of Godel's incompleteness theorems a few months ago. It involves finding one program which T proves does not halt but S does not, and following the operation of this program for a long time, to see if it halts.
The controversy about this theorem came from what exactly the "length of a proof" is. In the preceding, it is the length of the proof in bytes. But there is a different definition of length, which is the number of applications of the axioms and deduction rules, which is not the same as the length in bytes because the axioms can get unbounded. In this interpretation, the proof shortening theorem depends on something called "Kreisel's conjecture", which says that proof-length is equivalent to proof-byte-size for the purposes of this theorem. But, complications aside, this gloss helped me make sense of Godel's paper. Likebox ( talk) 21:35, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
The use of analogies is being questioned here which has relevance to this essay. See what you think. -- Michael C. Price talk 23:48, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
The fight over showing the "failed" tag, is really a problem with the use of general templates. I think we need to replace the "failed" template with a one-off template that more clearly describes what has gone on. I do not think that it failed as a policy, because it very clearly would never fit into the rather small set of wikipedia policies. It might have become a guideline, but it failed to reach consensus on that. It evolved to be an essay that some science editors might find useful. The template needs to state something along those lines and not just raise the temperature about this. -- Bduke (Discussion) 22:36, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
In the summary it says: "This page in a nutshell: WP:ESCA is claptrap from people who have the WP:TRUTH"
When I tried to change this sentence to make it more neutral, I was told "edit your own essay". I don't think it is a good idea to stray away from constructive criticisms and resort to such language. Of course, my edits don't have to be accepted in that essay, but then they could have changed the wording in some other way. Also, they should address the choice of words in their essay. It now contains literal copies of entire sections of this essay.
As long as this situation remains the way it is now (i.e. not only does that essay contain these statements, but there is no willingness to address the problematic issues), one cannot leave out these facts. I.e. the essay is plagiarized from this essay and it uses the word "claptrap" when describing this essay. If people don't like it, they are free to edit that essay and rewrite it in their own words. Count Iblis ( talk) 23:28, 23 April 2010 (UTC)