The Bailey Notation article is up for AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bailey Notation with concerns over its veracity, any light on this topic from a mathematician will probably be more than welcome and appreciated. Thanks. KTo288 01:43, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Degrees of freedom (statistics) is a mess. It will take time to fix. The statement that d.f. is always one less than the sample size is nonsense. the "n − r − 1" identity is just as bad.
I'll be back..... Michael Hardy 04:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Here are some unreferenced mathematical articles that have been tagged since June 2006.
I thought editors might be interested in finding at least one general reference for each article. Thanks.-- BirgitteSB 19:20, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Metric (mathematics)#Content syncronizing. `' Míkka 17:52, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Banned User:Germanium, also known as Archetype, is pretty much a single-issue editor whose repetitive claim is that 1/0 is the theory of everything, or some such nonsense. I cannot decide if he's serious, but it doesn't really matter. Need some eyes on theory of everything and 1/0 and any other contributions of this IP address. -- Trovatore 23:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
The username Ademh ( talk · contribs) was created today, and immediately the owner started adding a long-winded and completely incorrect section to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Keep an eye out for edits by this person to other pages, in case the account is not as single-purpose as it seems to be. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A use manged to move Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics to QZ factorization. I tried to revert the move but its now living at Requested articles/Mathematics (wrong namespace). Could someone with admin privilages please put it back where it belongs. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I saw that the article missed references, so I added one (Swedis book, but valid, i guess). I needed to reformulate the definition to match the reference, and english is not my native language. Can someone just check up on it? Paxinum 16:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
This article has been tagged for cleanup since Nov 2005. Could someone knowledgeable look at it and see if there are still issues or if has been fixed sometime in the past two year and the tag was simply left on.-- BirgitteSB 18:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
I have been told that this project is considering creating an assessment unit. If any of you would like, I have performed the requisite banner changes and category and page creation often enough to be confident in my ability to create functional counterparts here. I am myself not exactly the world's foremost expert on mathematics articles, so I doubt I would be of much use expect in regards to biographies of mathematicians and the like, but would be willing to offer what assistance I could. Also, having a banner which substantially parallels that of the WP:1.0 group would certainly make it easier for important mathematics articles to be included in the various release versions of wikipedia being created and considered. In any event, if anyone would want an assessment unit created, just leave me a note below or one my user page and I should be able to attend to it in no more than a day or so. John Carter 21:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A quick question for those "in the know". I've noticed a lot of cleanup of Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics that consists of removing blue links. Unfortunately, some of those blue links appear simply because someone has created a redirect to another article that mentions the topic in passing. This does not, in my opinion, obviate the need for a separate article on the requested topic. I believe that these redirects are a good temporary solution; it's better that these link to some article where at least some information can be found. But how then do we maintain requests for articles that should be full articles in their own right? Or is Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics not the right place for this? VectorPosse 02:15, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
A prominent contributor to the FA process has suggested to me that there should be no obstruction in principle to an article on advanced mathematics reaching featured article status. As there aren't any such articles at the moment, I am interested in following this up, but I need to know if there is any support here for such an initiative. I have in mind trying out Homotopy groups of spheres. I'd like to do this as much to test the premise of advanced math FAs as to promote a particular article, so I am neutral, but curious, about what the outcome might be.
I need to know if there are a few others familiar with the topic who would be willing to contribute to such an FAC. I hope this thread won't generate snipes at FA: I'm interested in whether there is any positive support for this experiment; I am well aware that it might be a waste of time, but even a negative outcome could provide useful information on the current relationship between FA and advanced technical articles. Hey, it might even be fun! Geometry guy 19:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
Some comments from recent experience with FA's, starting with Orion (mythology) (thanks again, Jim): The actual normal level of promoted FA's is Does it have any glaring flaws? If not, promote. It is unlikely, and with homotopy groups almost certain, that any reviewer will be competent to evaluate content; what you will get instead is nearly random.
One possibility is that you will get loud and obscure complaints about violations of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style. If I were doing this, I would determine exactly what complaints were being made, and decide if they made sense as demands for good English; if not, I would ignore them. I regret that WP:MOS is a gathering ground for opinionated and provincial cranks. Examples available at request, but looking at the talk page will show several efforts to lay down a law for Wikipedia as a whole, some by reformers who don't care about English usage, some by editors who are appealling to their own usage without realizing that the point is one on which British and American English differ. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
In the past, many topics in logic had been neglected because they were philosophical logic topics which had been disincluded from the foundations field of WP:MATH. Then there was controversy over which articles would be included after the creation of WP:LOGIC, a project distinct from WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has now reorganized so as to accommodate articles from all the branches of philosophy in its assessment program, similar to the way WP:MATH does it. There is a tag "logic=yes" in the project banner which allows us to organize these articles similar to the way "field=foundations" works for WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has designated WikiProject Logic as its "Logic task force." The Math and Phil. projects keep two separate assessment worklists so as not to pollute each other's assessment with articles that are not relevant to the larger project. The Philosophy banner allows an article to participate in more than one field in the assessment, so there is no problem with articles getting lumped into the inappropriate field.
I think it would be nice if the members of WP:MATH interested in mathematical logic, set theory and foundations of mathematics would officially designate WikiProject Logic as the "Logic task force" of WP:MATH and do all the things within its own organization consistent with that designation. This would mean calling WP:LOGIC a descendant project of WP:MATH jointly with WP:PHILO. For more information about "task force-ization," see WP:REFORM. I guess you could call it the "Foundations task force" or whatever. I think this move would make some of our members more comfortable since the logic project has recently become more closely integrated with the philosophy project. Our goal should be for there to be as small an overlap (of maths rating|field=foundations and philosophy|logic=yes tagged articles) as is appropriate.
Oleg, is there a way to produce an assessment table for the math foundations field that appears in a way similar to the way the {{philosophy task force assessment|Logic}} philosophy logic task force assessment works? I would like to display them next to each other at WP:LOGIC. Be well, Greg Bard 21:49, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
The article titled mathematics of bookmaking is being worked on by various people who know that bookmaking is obviously a notable subject but are uncertain whether this stuff known under the name of "mathematics" (or something like that) is notable enough to get mentioned in an encyclopedia.
Perhaps some of those here can help that page. Michael Hardy 16:46, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
A discussion is going on in Talk:Linesearch about whether the article should be named linesearch or line search. I would appreciate any and all feedback. -- Zvika 11:14, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd be grateful if people could have a look at the Entropy (disambiguation) page, where I'm in a dispute.
It seems to me that that this previous version was a lot more helpful than the current edited one for users trying to find their way to the article they need.
In particular the older one
The latest edit -- removing Introduction to entropy from the page completely -- seems to me particularly user-unhelpful, verging on WP:POINT.
But I'd be grateful for third party input on this, as maybe I'm too close to what's been edited before. Jheald 16:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
hi! could you please have a little look at Panjer Recursion. i wrote this article new and i dont know how these mathematical articles here are usually written. maybe i made other format/style/math errors thanks! -- Philtime 17:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Nevermind. This really doesn't matter. Functor salad 19:13, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
this is not very important, but FWIW I think HTML is preferable for this. Example (wikilist workaround first, then HTML):
The second aligns properly and the source is more readable. Functor salad 18:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
George W. Whitehead was nominated for speedy deletion just after being created. R.e.b. 23:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
By the way, in its deleted state, the article consisted solely of the sentence "George William Whitehead is a mathematician working on algebraic topology who invented the J-homomorphism" and a link to his entry in the math genealogy project. If it had said something about his awards and distinctions (member National Academy of Sciences, Fellow AAAS, etc), or mentioned his text "Elements of Homotopy Theory" with some language about the significance of that book or of Whitehead's other works, and if it had also included some references to third-party sources about Whitehead and his works such as the review of that book in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 2 (1980), 237-239 or the MIT news office announcement of his death, it would have been much harder to delete. It's not so hard to build up a few details like that before putting an article online, I think. — David Eppstein 03:53, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I've restored it and told the person who deleted it to use some common sense. Michael Hardy 04:11, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Let the bureau-speak not dictate us how things are to be done. I agree with Michael. It is not too much to expect people to use a healthy dose of common sense, especially, while carrying out their hasty secret executions. The article was created at 23:11, tagged for speedy deletion at 23:30, the article's creator put the "hang-on" tag at 23:32, but it got deleted anyway at 23:46, contravening not only the common sense but also a number of common policies. I distinctly remember a discussion in this forum where almost identical sequence of events was reported to have occurred (articles being tagged for speedy deletion a few minutes after having been created). If this is a serious issue, then some policy level decision should be made to address it. For example, only experienced administrators to be given the authority to speedily delete articles. Warnings may be given to "trigger-happy" administrators, with their severity increasing if they exercised really poor judgement. Several warnings would lead to stripping them of the power to speedily delete articles. Arcfrk 07:02, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
For what it's worth, a similar case of an attempt to delete a brand-new and insufficiently-referenced article on a notable academic happened recently in chemistry with Richard H. Holm. Rather than going through speedy, though, it went to an AfD and was easily kept. — David Eppstein 18:43, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
I've created a one-liner at Michel Kervaire as a kind of experiment. Let us leave it alone for a while and see what happens. -- Horoball 10:09, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
May I gently suggest that this experiment is somewhat pointless: even the most trigger-happy admin is likely to check "What links here" before deleting an article. In this case Michel Kervaire is linked from 5 other mathematical articles. That would be enough to put me off from deleting it, even if I knew nothing about the subject. Furthermore, this discussion is linked, which rather gives the game away. So, how about fleshing out the article into a decent paragraph, adding a stub tag and a source, and moving on? Geometry guy 08:43, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
If anyone here is familiar with Object theory, that article could use some attention. My impression is that it is something in philosophy. It was recently expanded from a one-line stub to something longer, but I don't know that the something longer is actually object theory. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:11, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
That template was put on top of this talk page. I'm not sure exactly what its purpose is, but it looks like an announcement, so I'm moving it down here. Eventually it will get archived. If some sort of permanent notice is required, we can work it onto the WP:WPM somewhere. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Need more help at division by zero and any other articles edited by this IP. -- Trovatore 22:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
I have two announcements to help with the article assessment.
1. User:VeblenBot/Unassessed is a list of the 500 longest math articles that have not been assessed (from the list of mathematics articles). Not all of them should be assessed - the list of math articles is more inclusive than our assessments should be. But it's easy enough to page through the list to find a few articles you're interested in that are not assessed. Or find some long articles to work on. I will eventually start to have a blacklist to remove articles that shouldn't be assessed, so that fresh articles are listed.
2. I wrote a Javascript tool to make it easier to assess articles. To use it, you need to put the following code in your monobook.js:
The script adds a tab called 'rate math'. Click that tab when you are viewing an article or its talk page, choose the rating, and the right template will be added to the talk page.
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Waldhausen category has a line of TeX that fails to parse. Can anyone fix it? I don't know what the person who wrote it intended. Michael Hardy 19:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
At studentized residual, this expression appeared:
I changed it to this:
This took a bit of TeXnical work that probably cannot reasonably by expected of lots of casual users. (The reason why \scriptstyle had to be used in the subscript is that without it the characters there were too small.)
What to people think of the TeXnique and the result? Michael Hardy 23:11, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi, there's been a spate of drive-by teenager vandalism of bios of mathematicians lately... Sofia Kovalevskaya, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Évariste Galois and perhaps others. Y'all may wanna kinda take a look at your articles... Thanks... -- Ling.Nut 05:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
The article titled internal consistency could use some attention, to say the least, from someone who knows mathematical logic. The section on "gaming" was apparently written by someone who thinks no idea existed until it was applied to computer games. Michael Hardy 01:34, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Should category:networks really be a subcategory of category:graph theory? It leads to many things that have nothing to with graphs, like category:bloggers. Arthena (talk) 16:10, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld it is proposed to delete the article titled MathWorld, to which nearly 1500 other articles link. The person who proposed it first proposed it for "speedy deletion" (with no discussion) on the grounds that (he said) it was created only to advertise Wolfram. Given that MathWorld and Wolfram were generally considered far more noteworthy that Wikipedia at the time that article was created, that seems hard to fathom.
Please express opinions on whether it ought to be deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld. Michael Hardy 17:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
In the article average, there's a section about annualization (as used in finance), and some discussion on the talk page. Geometric average is covered in the article on average, but in finance the geometric average is used to average sequential periodic percent returns. I know that if you lose 50% in one period and gain 50% in the next period, the average gain/loss is 0%, but the dollar loss is 25%. Mutual funds use geometric averages to report average returns. I think this might be related to compound interest or rate of return. Can you take a look at the math in these articles and make sure the math is ok? I've looked at some online math articles, and they don't seem to have any problem with averaging percentiles to come up with an average financial gain or loss, but the percentile averages don't seem to match the dollar gains and losses. I know this is basic boring stuff for you, but if you'd take the time to check the wikipedia finance articles, it's much appreciated! -- Foggy Morning 01:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Of all the Wikipedia articles that have been requested for more than 2 years, the only one directly related to Mathematics is unbalanced data. In an effort to wipe out the last of these missing articles, I'm posting notices to the relevant WikiProjects. Anyone brave enough to write a stub or article for unbalanced data will be awarded a barnstar for patching this long-standing hole in Wikipedia content. Kaldari 16:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
If I'm feeling ambitious this Wednesday or Thursday, I might essay a brief article on unbalanced data. It's one of those topics about which everyone hears in graduate school (except those in fields other than statistics) but that lots of people never actually learn. I'm more-or-less in the latter group but I can write a definition and something about why it's important and why it involves difficulties not found in balanced data. Michael Hardy 20:50, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
The Bailey Notation article is up for AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bailey Notation with concerns over its veracity, any light on this topic from a mathematician will probably be more than welcome and appreciated. Thanks. KTo288 01:43, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Degrees of freedom (statistics) is a mess. It will take time to fix. The statement that d.f. is always one less than the sample size is nonsense. the "n − r − 1" identity is just as bad.
I'll be back..... Michael Hardy 04:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Here are some unreferenced mathematical articles that have been tagged since June 2006.
I thought editors might be interested in finding at least one general reference for each article. Thanks.-- BirgitteSB 19:20, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Please see Talk:Metric (mathematics)#Content syncronizing. `' Míkka 17:52, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Banned User:Germanium, also known as Archetype, is pretty much a single-issue editor whose repetitive claim is that 1/0 is the theory of everything, or some such nonsense. I cannot decide if he's serious, but it doesn't really matter. Need some eyes on theory of everything and 1/0 and any other contributions of this IP address. -- Trovatore 23:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
The username Ademh ( talk · contribs) was created today, and immediately the owner started adding a long-winded and completely incorrect section to Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Keep an eye out for edits by this person to other pages, in case the account is not as single-purpose as it seems to be. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:21, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A use manged to move Wikipedia:Requested articles/Mathematics to QZ factorization. I tried to revert the move but its now living at Requested articles/Mathematics (wrong namespace). Could someone with admin privilages please put it back where it belongs. -- Salix alba ( talk) 15:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I saw that the article missed references, so I added one (Swedis book, but valid, i guess). I needed to reformulate the definition to match the reference, and english is not my native language. Can someone just check up on it? Paxinum 16:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
This article has been tagged for cleanup since Nov 2005. Could someone knowledgeable look at it and see if there are still issues or if has been fixed sometime in the past two year and the tag was simply left on.-- BirgitteSB 18:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
I have been told that this project is considering creating an assessment unit. If any of you would like, I have performed the requisite banner changes and category and page creation often enough to be confident in my ability to create functional counterparts here. I am myself not exactly the world's foremost expert on mathematics articles, so I doubt I would be of much use expect in regards to biographies of mathematicians and the like, but would be willing to offer what assistance I could. Also, having a banner which substantially parallels that of the WP:1.0 group would certainly make it easier for important mathematics articles to be included in the various release versions of wikipedia being created and considered. In any event, if anyone would want an assessment unit created, just leave me a note below or one my user page and I should be able to attend to it in no more than a day or so. John Carter 21:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A quick question for those "in the know". I've noticed a lot of cleanup of Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics that consists of removing blue links. Unfortunately, some of those blue links appear simply because someone has created a redirect to another article that mentions the topic in passing. This does not, in my opinion, obviate the need for a separate article on the requested topic. I believe that these redirects are a good temporary solution; it's better that these link to some article where at least some information can be found. But how then do we maintain requests for articles that should be full articles in their own right? Or is Wikipedia:Requested_articles/Mathematics not the right place for this? VectorPosse 02:15, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
A prominent contributor to the FA process has suggested to me that there should be no obstruction in principle to an article on advanced mathematics reaching featured article status. As there aren't any such articles at the moment, I am interested in following this up, but I need to know if there is any support here for such an initiative. I have in mind trying out Homotopy groups of spheres. I'd like to do this as much to test the premise of advanced math FAs as to promote a particular article, so I am neutral, but curious, about what the outcome might be.
I need to know if there are a few others familiar with the topic who would be willing to contribute to such an FAC. I hope this thread won't generate snipes at FA: I'm interested in whether there is any positive support for this experiment; I am well aware that it might be a waste of time, but even a negative outcome could provide useful information on the current relationship between FA and advanced technical articles. Hey, it might even be fun! Geometry guy 19:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
Some comments from recent experience with FA's, starting with Orion (mythology) (thanks again, Jim): The actual normal level of promoted FA's is Does it have any glaring flaws? If not, promote. It is unlikely, and with homotopy groups almost certain, that any reviewer will be competent to evaluate content; what you will get instead is nearly random.
One possibility is that you will get loud and obscure complaints about violations of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style. If I were doing this, I would determine exactly what complaints were being made, and decide if they made sense as demands for good English; if not, I would ignore them. I regret that WP:MOS is a gathering ground for opinionated and provincial cranks. Examples available at request, but looking at the talk page will show several efforts to lay down a law for Wikipedia as a whole, some by reformers who don't care about English usage, some by editors who are appealling to their own usage without realizing that the point is one on which British and American English differ. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
In the past, many topics in logic had been neglected because they were philosophical logic topics which had been disincluded from the foundations field of WP:MATH. Then there was controversy over which articles would be included after the creation of WP:LOGIC, a project distinct from WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has now reorganized so as to accommodate articles from all the branches of philosophy in its assessment program, similar to the way WP:MATH does it. There is a tag "logic=yes" in the project banner which allows us to organize these articles similar to the way "field=foundations" works for WP:MATH. WP:PHILO has designated WikiProject Logic as its "Logic task force." The Math and Phil. projects keep two separate assessment worklists so as not to pollute each other's assessment with articles that are not relevant to the larger project. The Philosophy banner allows an article to participate in more than one field in the assessment, so there is no problem with articles getting lumped into the inappropriate field.
I think it would be nice if the members of WP:MATH interested in mathematical logic, set theory and foundations of mathematics would officially designate WikiProject Logic as the "Logic task force" of WP:MATH and do all the things within its own organization consistent with that designation. This would mean calling WP:LOGIC a descendant project of WP:MATH jointly with WP:PHILO. For more information about "task force-ization," see WP:REFORM. I guess you could call it the "Foundations task force" or whatever. I think this move would make some of our members more comfortable since the logic project has recently become more closely integrated with the philosophy project. Our goal should be for there to be as small an overlap (of maths rating|field=foundations and philosophy|logic=yes tagged articles) as is appropriate.
Oleg, is there a way to produce an assessment table for the math foundations field that appears in a way similar to the way the {{philosophy task force assessment|Logic}} philosophy logic task force assessment works? I would like to display them next to each other at WP:LOGIC. Be well, Greg Bard 21:49, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
The article titled mathematics of bookmaking is being worked on by various people who know that bookmaking is obviously a notable subject but are uncertain whether this stuff known under the name of "mathematics" (or something like that) is notable enough to get mentioned in an encyclopedia.
Perhaps some of those here can help that page. Michael Hardy 16:46, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
A discussion is going on in Talk:Linesearch about whether the article should be named linesearch or line search. I would appreciate any and all feedback. -- Zvika 11:14, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd be grateful if people could have a look at the Entropy (disambiguation) page, where I'm in a dispute.
It seems to me that that this previous version was a lot more helpful than the current edited one for users trying to find their way to the article they need.
In particular the older one
The latest edit -- removing Introduction to entropy from the page completely -- seems to me particularly user-unhelpful, verging on WP:POINT.
But I'd be grateful for third party input on this, as maybe I'm too close to what's been edited before. Jheald 16:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
hi! could you please have a little look at Panjer Recursion. i wrote this article new and i dont know how these mathematical articles here are usually written. maybe i made other format/style/math errors thanks! -- Philtime 17:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Nevermind. This really doesn't matter. Functor salad 19:13, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
this is not very important, but FWIW I think HTML is preferable for this. Example (wikilist workaround first, then HTML):
The second aligns properly and the source is more readable. Functor salad 18:23, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
George W. Whitehead was nominated for speedy deletion just after being created. R.e.b. 23:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
By the way, in its deleted state, the article consisted solely of the sentence "George William Whitehead is a mathematician working on algebraic topology who invented the J-homomorphism" and a link to his entry in the math genealogy project. If it had said something about his awards and distinctions (member National Academy of Sciences, Fellow AAAS, etc), or mentioned his text "Elements of Homotopy Theory" with some language about the significance of that book or of Whitehead's other works, and if it had also included some references to third-party sources about Whitehead and his works such as the review of that book in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 2 (1980), 237-239 or the MIT news office announcement of his death, it would have been much harder to delete. It's not so hard to build up a few details like that before putting an article online, I think. — David Eppstein 03:53, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I've restored it and told the person who deleted it to use some common sense. Michael Hardy 04:11, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Let the bureau-speak not dictate us how things are to be done. I agree with Michael. It is not too much to expect people to use a healthy dose of common sense, especially, while carrying out their hasty secret executions. The article was created at 23:11, tagged for speedy deletion at 23:30, the article's creator put the "hang-on" tag at 23:32, but it got deleted anyway at 23:46, contravening not only the common sense but also a number of common policies. I distinctly remember a discussion in this forum where almost identical sequence of events was reported to have occurred (articles being tagged for speedy deletion a few minutes after having been created). If this is a serious issue, then some policy level decision should be made to address it. For example, only experienced administrators to be given the authority to speedily delete articles. Warnings may be given to "trigger-happy" administrators, with their severity increasing if they exercised really poor judgement. Several warnings would lead to stripping them of the power to speedily delete articles. Arcfrk 07:02, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
For what it's worth, a similar case of an attempt to delete a brand-new and insufficiently-referenced article on a notable academic happened recently in chemistry with Richard H. Holm. Rather than going through speedy, though, it went to an AfD and was easily kept. — David Eppstein 18:43, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
I've created a one-liner at Michel Kervaire as a kind of experiment. Let us leave it alone for a while and see what happens. -- Horoball 10:09, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
May I gently suggest that this experiment is somewhat pointless: even the most trigger-happy admin is likely to check "What links here" before deleting an article. In this case Michel Kervaire is linked from 5 other mathematical articles. That would be enough to put me off from deleting it, even if I knew nothing about the subject. Furthermore, this discussion is linked, which rather gives the game away. So, how about fleshing out the article into a decent paragraph, adding a stub tag and a source, and moving on? Geometry guy 08:43, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
If anyone here is familiar with Object theory, that article could use some attention. My impression is that it is something in philosophy. It was recently expanded from a one-line stub to something longer, but I don't know that the something longer is actually object theory. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:11, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
That template was put on top of this talk page. I'm not sure exactly what its purpose is, but it looks like an announcement, so I'm moving it down here. Eventually it will get archived. If some sort of permanent notice is required, we can work it onto the WP:WPM somewhere. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:39, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Need more help at division by zero and any other articles edited by this IP. -- Trovatore 22:12, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
I have two announcements to help with the article assessment.
1. User:VeblenBot/Unassessed is a list of the 500 longest math articles that have not been assessed (from the list of mathematics articles). Not all of them should be assessed - the list of math articles is more inclusive than our assessments should be. But it's easy enough to page through the list to find a few articles you're interested in that are not assessed. Or find some long articles to work on. I will eventually start to have a blacklist to remove articles that shouldn't be assessed, so that fresh articles are listed.
2. I wrote a Javascript tool to make it easier to assess articles. To use it, you need to put the following code in your monobook.js:
The script adds a tab called 'rate math'. Click that tab when you are viewing an article or its talk page, choose the rating, and the right template will be added to the talk page.
— Carl ( CBM · talk) 14:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Waldhausen category has a line of TeX that fails to parse. Can anyone fix it? I don't know what the person who wrote it intended. Michael Hardy 19:16, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
At studentized residual, this expression appeared:
I changed it to this:
This took a bit of TeXnical work that probably cannot reasonably by expected of lots of casual users. (The reason why \scriptstyle had to be used in the subscript is that without it the characters there were too small.)
What to people think of the TeXnique and the result? Michael Hardy 23:11, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Hi, there's been a spate of drive-by teenager vandalism of bios of mathematicians lately... Sofia Kovalevskaya, Augustin Louis Cauchy, Évariste Galois and perhaps others. Y'all may wanna kinda take a look at your articles... Thanks... -- Ling.Nut 05:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
The article titled internal consistency could use some attention, to say the least, from someone who knows mathematical logic. The section on "gaming" was apparently written by someone who thinks no idea existed until it was applied to computer games. Michael Hardy 01:34, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Should category:networks really be a subcategory of category:graph theory? It leads to many things that have nothing to with graphs, like category:bloggers. Arthena (talk) 16:10, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
At Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld it is proposed to delete the article titled MathWorld, to which nearly 1500 other articles link. The person who proposed it first proposed it for "speedy deletion" (with no discussion) on the grounds that (he said) it was created only to advertise Wolfram. Given that MathWorld and Wolfram were generally considered far more noteworthy that Wikipedia at the time that article was created, that seems hard to fathom.
Please express opinions on whether it ought to be deleted at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/MathWorld. Michael Hardy 17:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
In the article average, there's a section about annualization (as used in finance), and some discussion on the talk page. Geometric average is covered in the article on average, but in finance the geometric average is used to average sequential periodic percent returns. I know that if you lose 50% in one period and gain 50% in the next period, the average gain/loss is 0%, but the dollar loss is 25%. Mutual funds use geometric averages to report average returns. I think this might be related to compound interest or rate of return. Can you take a look at the math in these articles and make sure the math is ok? I've looked at some online math articles, and they don't seem to have any problem with averaging percentiles to come up with an average financial gain or loss, but the percentile averages don't seem to match the dollar gains and losses. I know this is basic boring stuff for you, but if you'd take the time to check the wikipedia finance articles, it's much appreciated! -- Foggy Morning 01:39, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Of all the Wikipedia articles that have been requested for more than 2 years, the only one directly related to Mathematics is unbalanced data. In an effort to wipe out the last of these missing articles, I'm posting notices to the relevant WikiProjects. Anyone brave enough to write a stub or article for unbalanced data will be awarded a barnstar for patching this long-standing hole in Wikipedia content. Kaldari 16:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
If I'm feeling ambitious this Wednesday or Thursday, I might essay a brief article on unbalanced data. It's one of those topics about which everyone hears in graduate school (except those in fields other than statistics) but that lots of people never actually learn. I'm more-or-less in the latter group but I can write a definition and something about why it's important and why it involves difficulties not found in balanced data. Michael Hardy 20:50, 29 October 2007 (UTC)