This page has archives. Sections older than 15 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.
New article needs expert eyes
Hi. Could someone take a look at
Zonal wavenumber. It's a new article, and I would have added a project to the talk page, but am even unsure which wikiproject is the most appropriate. Thanks.
Onel5969TT me 12:41, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
@
One15969: It looks like it should go under
WP:WikiProject Meteorology. The article (besides the specific mathematics) comports with the definition provided at the external link (provided you search for the phrase therein first). --
Izno (
talk) 13:05, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I agree and added the meteorology wikiproject. --
Mark viking (
talk) 20:49, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Two things requiring understanding of mathematics are in this article. One was the equality
This is a one-time-only message to inform you about a technical proposal to revive your Popular Pages list in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey that I think you may be interested in reviewing and perhaps even voting for:
If the above proposal gets in the Top 10 based on the votes, there is a high likelihood of this bot being restored so your project will again see monthly updates of popular pages.
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Stevietheman — Delivered: 18:03, 7 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Please assist the draft author to get this draft into acceptable shape. It seems to be a notable topic but the main problem is the apparent lack of independent sources.
Roger (Dodger67) (
talk) 11:25, 12 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks — I've gotten a few through but it's always good to see more of these. At a quick glance, I think you're likely to get dinged for numerous unsourced paragraphs — you might want to find a few more footnotes to add to fill the gaps there. Also, the QFT and open string links go to disambiguation pages and should be fixed. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 17:54, 20 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Disambiguation done. Yes, referencing is a never ending task. It is not always easy, especially for the section on infinite-dimensional reps. By the way, is there to your knowledge a good reference on the Riemann P-functions? My google/google scholar searches give little, and one of the references I use for that section is extremely off-topic (but reliable).
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:09, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Yes, I have glanced at that one. But, alas, the technical/(familiarity to the casual reader) ratio is much higher here.
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:48, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I'm seeing at least two glaring issues:
WP:MOSCOLLAPSE in the introductory section. If the material is actually vital to the topic (and I'm not sure it is), then it should not be collapsed. If it is not vital, refer to next list item and cut the size of this content.
WP:SIZE. The article currently sits at 200kb, giving quite a number of other articles a run for their money for largest article. Consider
WP:SPLITING some of the content.
There's a third issue, less-glaring, with the self referential tone of the last paragraph of the lead--you could toss it and no one would suffer greatly. The note about notes is really just discussing normal behavior for Wikipedia; the note about conventions might be useful but isn't
WP:LEAD material; and a summary of the introduction should appear in the lead elsewhere above the last paragraph of the lead.
I think issue #2 is enough to cause problems as a GAN, but I believe the failure to observe
WP:LEAD might be a failed GA candidacy, since that is one of the criteria for GA. --
Izno (
talk) 20:31, 20 December 2016 (UTC)reply
For your item one: Principles clash. There is item (a) of criterion (1) in the list of GA criteria; the prose is clear and concise. This is for a highly technical articles nearly impossible, while keeping it accessible to a wide audience and at the same time not bore the seasoned reader. Per
WP:TECHNICAL, I have tried to write a "one level down" introduction that I put in a collapse box. Yes, this is absolutely vital for someone unfamiliar with the topic, but due to size considerations, and of consideration of the typical seasoned reader (for whom the section is redundant rather than vital), I put it in a hide box.
For your item two: Again principles clash. This clash is between item (3a) in the GA criteria list, which is about broad coverage, and
WP:SIZE. Since size is not a GA criterion, and since, when probing before the nomination, I have been advised to keep things in rather that out (and actually include more subtopics, not fewer), the decision is easy. But I feel sorry for the poor sod that will actually be doing the review. If done properly, the reviewer must read the whole thing, from beginning to end
Failing the article due to its size would be a failure on part of the reviewer, not the article.
Your third item needs consideration. It is not without reason that the last paragraph is there. People have (repeatedly) asked for an early pointer to the notation used in the article. (It is not uncommon for books to have the structure foreword, then notation, and then the table of contents.) I also think that this is a very good spot to steer the casual reader to the "one-level-down" introduction (and steer the seasoned reader away from it). But I'll definitely cut out the note about notes.
YohanN7 (
talk) 09:50, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
In other words, I need more convincing before making major changes along the lines you suggest.
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:12, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I'll try and respond sometime in the next week or so, but I'm on mobile only for that timeframe, so depending on how long this conversation gets, I might decline to respond until the middle of next week. Already I'm thinking I'll be writing much in discussion, so indeed I might wait until I have a proper keyboard. --
Izno (
talk) 11:18, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
There's absolutely no hurry. To be honest, I am temporarily quite fed up with the article as I have been editing it intensely for a couple of weeks.
YohanN7 (
talk) 13:20, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Well, the wait for a GA reviewer to come along can be months long, so hopefully that should give you a refreshing break from it. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 04:40, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Regarding length: It should be possible to reduce the length with a bit of copy editing. I also think it's a little too detailed and textbookish in places. Better summary style will reduce the length as well. Parts are not really specific to the Lorentz group (the section on the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, eg), and (in my opinion) could do with some culling.
Sławomir Biały (
talk) 16:42, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Yes, the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence could be cut out. Where to place it? It is not general enough for Lie correspondence article, and it is too specific for matrix exponential. Perhaps matrix Lie group would be a good home for it. Can you be more precise on which sections are too detailed and textbookish?
YohanN7 (
talk) (10:49, 23 December 2016)
Please explain the "ring in equal to" symbol
Hello. I'm an admin at Wiktionary. About this symbol, here linked to the Wiktionary entry: ≖ (U+2256, "RING IN EQUAL TO"). The Wiktionary entry is under discussion and could be deleted.
Discussion link:
wikt:WT:RFV#≖. When the discussion ends, it's going to be archived at
wikt:Talk:≖.
I have two requests or questions, if it's OK:
How is the symbol used? Could someone please write a short usage definition for Wiktionary? For example: "The symbol indicates equality in the context X."
As per the policy
wikt:WT:CFI, can we find three independent durably-archived works where the symbol is used in the stated sense? The discussion already links to a few works:
This symbol has been used to denote graphical equality, or the literal equality, of two strings of symbols, which is a type of formal equality used in free semigroup theory, monoid theory, and free group theory. But I think this symbol is fairly rare. More common notations for graphical equality are an equals sign with a dot above it, or just a simple equals sign. --
Mark viking (
talk) 00:48, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Another GA nomination
Georg Cantor's first set theory article fell short last time it was nominated as a "Good Article". It has been improved a lot since then, with the various "Good Article" criteria in mind. Maybe I'll nominate it in the next few days unless someone else beats me to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 01:24, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Could someone please take a look at this page and let me know if it counts as mainstream and if not how far out of mainstream?
Naraht (
talk) 18:26, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Well, I'm no philosopher, and I know little about the philosophy of mathematics. But he says things like, "I am convinced that this operationalist conception of natural number is the central fallacy that underlies all our thinking about the foundations of mathematics. It is not confined to heretics but is shared by the orthodox Cantorian majority.” This puts him far, far outside the mainstream. It seems to be a rejection of the standard
axiom of infinity in
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. The axiom of infinity is independent of the remaining axioms of ZF; in particular it is not fallacious.
The more I read about his "arithmoi", the more it sounds like he is simply repeating the fundamental observations of set theory, draped in his own esoteric jargon and sometimes without proper attribution to his predecessors. I am not impressed.
Ozob (
talk) 03:14, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
But then, being unimpressed and thinking they're reinventing the wheel is a common reaction of mathematicians to philosophers of mathematics, so not necessarily informative for determining how far from mainstream he might be. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 04:42, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Does it mean two disjoint, incompatible mainstreams (one of math, the other of its philosophy)?
Boris Tsirelson (
talk) 05:40, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
It depends on the mainstream you are considering. Mayberry studied the foundations of set theory from a philosophical point of view and his book on the matter has been reviewed in a number of reputable journals, e.g.
[1]. I'd say that it is probably considered a mainstream work in the philosophy community. Mathematically, he embraces the cardinal POV of a set as a finite collection and rejects the ordinal, inductive POV. This places the work outside the mathematical mainstream as a sort of
finitism and indeed Mayberry is mentioned in that article. --
Mark viking (
talk) 10:25, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
No one has commented on this yet, but it seems worth mentioning that as a biographical articleJohn Penn Mayberry is in really terrible shape. --
JBL (
talk) 14:25, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
OP here. I agree that as a Wikipedia article, specifically as a biographical article it is in terrible shape. A split into a biographical article and an article about his theories might be possible. I was mostly wondering if it was a
Time cube level and the answer here seems to be that it isn't but rather is somewhat more similar to either the early works on
Non-Euclidean geometry or even what
Surreal numbers might have been considered if people less well known than Conway and Knuth had come up with the concept.
Naraht (
talk) 15:50, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I read the review linked above and, to my surprise, found it interesting. Based upon what I read there, I must now retract my earlier assessment. Mayberry is a philosopher, and his work is a branch of finitism. His criticism of "operationalism" as "fallacious" is not meant mathematically but philosophically. In more mathematical terms, it seems to me that he rejects infinite recursion and induction. Mathematically, he is studying highly restricted fragments of Peano arithmetic. His "arithmoi" are not sets in the sense of ZFC (or other axiomatic set theories) but are related objects which he considers to have firmer philosophical foundations (it sounds like he is some kind of realist).
The current biographical article does him a great disservice. It makes him sound halfway to being a crackpot, which he certainly does not deserve.
Ozob (
talk) 14:00, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Incredibly, we've never had an article titled
Functional differential equation until this month. Probably it could use some work. In particular, there is the question of which other articles should link to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 21:23, 25 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I think you should start by making a section in
partial differential equation, which barely mentions the subject (and only in a solutions subsection) and redirect the link in question to that new section, until such time as a full article can be written per
WP:SPLIT. (I realize that the topic is certainly notable but this way we can grow our treatment of the topic slowly without making a stub or worrying about a silly AFD.) --
Izno (
talk) 10:50, 27 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Good idea. A split just seemed simpler and could save having to transfer the nonlinear content material out of
partial differential equation into its own article.
M∧Ŝc2ħεИτlk 12:09, 27 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I've split them and done a bit of copy-editing. But a remaining task is this: Which links to the two articles should link to which of the two? That shouldn't be hard. I'll be back to work on it if no one beats me to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 19:48, 30 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks! Good work both of you.
M∧Ŝc2ħεИτlk 09:25, 31 December 2016 (UTC)reply
This page has archives. Sections older than 15 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.
New article needs expert eyes
Hi. Could someone take a look at
Zonal wavenumber. It's a new article, and I would have added a project to the talk page, but am even unsure which wikiproject is the most appropriate. Thanks.
Onel5969TT me 12:41, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
@
One15969: It looks like it should go under
WP:WikiProject Meteorology. The article (besides the specific mathematics) comports with the definition provided at the external link (provided you search for the phrase therein first). --
Izno (
talk) 13:05, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I agree and added the meteorology wikiproject. --
Mark viking (
talk) 20:49, 1 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Two things requiring understanding of mathematics are in this article. One was the equality
This is a one-time-only message to inform you about a technical proposal to revive your Popular Pages list in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey that I think you may be interested in reviewing and perhaps even voting for:
If the above proposal gets in the Top 10 based on the votes, there is a high likelihood of this bot being restored so your project will again see monthly updates of popular pages.
Further, there are over 260 proposals in all to review and vote for, across many aspects of wikis.
Thank you for your consideration. Please note that voting for proposals continues through December 12, 2016.
Best regards,
Stevietheman — Delivered: 18:03, 7 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Please assist the draft author to get this draft into acceptable shape. It seems to be a notable topic but the main problem is the apparent lack of independent sources.
Roger (Dodger67) (
talk) 11:25, 12 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks — I've gotten a few through but it's always good to see more of these. At a quick glance, I think you're likely to get dinged for numerous unsourced paragraphs — you might want to find a few more footnotes to add to fill the gaps there. Also, the QFT and open string links go to disambiguation pages and should be fixed. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 17:54, 20 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Disambiguation done. Yes, referencing is a never ending task. It is not always easy, especially for the section on infinite-dimensional reps. By the way, is there to your knowledge a good reference on the Riemann P-functions? My google/google scholar searches give little, and one of the references I use for that section is extremely off-topic (but reliable).
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:09, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Yes, I have glanced at that one. But, alas, the technical/(familiarity to the casual reader) ratio is much higher here.
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:48, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I'm seeing at least two glaring issues:
WP:MOSCOLLAPSE in the introductory section. If the material is actually vital to the topic (and I'm not sure it is), then it should not be collapsed. If it is not vital, refer to next list item and cut the size of this content.
WP:SIZE. The article currently sits at 200kb, giving quite a number of other articles a run for their money for largest article. Consider
WP:SPLITING some of the content.
There's a third issue, less-glaring, with the self referential tone of the last paragraph of the lead--you could toss it and no one would suffer greatly. The note about notes is really just discussing normal behavior for Wikipedia; the note about conventions might be useful but isn't
WP:LEAD material; and a summary of the introduction should appear in the lead elsewhere above the last paragraph of the lead.
I think issue #2 is enough to cause problems as a GAN, but I believe the failure to observe
WP:LEAD might be a failed GA candidacy, since that is one of the criteria for GA. --
Izno (
talk) 20:31, 20 December 2016 (UTC)reply
For your item one: Principles clash. There is item (a) of criterion (1) in the list of GA criteria; the prose is clear and concise. This is for a highly technical articles nearly impossible, while keeping it accessible to a wide audience and at the same time not bore the seasoned reader. Per
WP:TECHNICAL, I have tried to write a "one level down" introduction that I put in a collapse box. Yes, this is absolutely vital for someone unfamiliar with the topic, but due to size considerations, and of consideration of the typical seasoned reader (for whom the section is redundant rather than vital), I put it in a hide box.
For your item two: Again principles clash. This clash is between item (3a) in the GA criteria list, which is about broad coverage, and
WP:SIZE. Since size is not a GA criterion, and since, when probing before the nomination, I have been advised to keep things in rather that out (and actually include more subtopics, not fewer), the decision is easy. But I feel sorry for the poor sod that will actually be doing the review. If done properly, the reviewer must read the whole thing, from beginning to end
Failing the article due to its size would be a failure on part of the reviewer, not the article.
Your third item needs consideration. It is not without reason that the last paragraph is there. People have (repeatedly) asked for an early pointer to the notation used in the article. (It is not uncommon for books to have the structure foreword, then notation, and then the table of contents.) I also think that this is a very good spot to steer the casual reader to the "one-level-down" introduction (and steer the seasoned reader away from it). But I'll definitely cut out the note about notes.
YohanN7 (
talk) 09:50, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
In other words, I need more convincing before making major changes along the lines you suggest.
YohanN7 (
talk) 10:12, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I'll try and respond sometime in the next week or so, but I'm on mobile only for that timeframe, so depending on how long this conversation gets, I might decline to respond until the middle of next week. Already I'm thinking I'll be writing much in discussion, so indeed I might wait until I have a proper keyboard. --
Izno (
talk) 11:18, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
There's absolutely no hurry. To be honest, I am temporarily quite fed up with the article as I have been editing it intensely for a couple of weeks.
YohanN7 (
talk) 13:20, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Well, the wait for a GA reviewer to come along can be months long, so hopefully that should give you a refreshing break from it. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 04:40, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Regarding length: It should be possible to reduce the length with a bit of copy editing. I also think it's a little too detailed and textbookish in places. Better summary style will reduce the length as well. Parts are not really specific to the Lorentz group (the section on the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, eg), and (in my opinion) could do with some culling.
Sławomir Biały (
talk) 16:42, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Yes, the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence could be cut out. Where to place it? It is not general enough for Lie correspondence article, and it is too specific for matrix exponential. Perhaps matrix Lie group would be a good home for it. Can you be more precise on which sections are too detailed and textbookish?
YohanN7 (
talk) (10:49, 23 December 2016)
Please explain the "ring in equal to" symbol
Hello. I'm an admin at Wiktionary. About this symbol, here linked to the Wiktionary entry: ≖ (U+2256, "RING IN EQUAL TO"). The Wiktionary entry is under discussion and could be deleted.
Discussion link:
wikt:WT:RFV#≖. When the discussion ends, it's going to be archived at
wikt:Talk:≖.
I have two requests or questions, if it's OK:
How is the symbol used? Could someone please write a short usage definition for Wiktionary? For example: "The symbol indicates equality in the context X."
As per the policy
wikt:WT:CFI, can we find three independent durably-archived works where the symbol is used in the stated sense? The discussion already links to a few works:
This symbol has been used to denote graphical equality, or the literal equality, of two strings of symbols, which is a type of formal equality used in free semigroup theory, monoid theory, and free group theory. But I think this symbol is fairly rare. More common notations for graphical equality are an equals sign with a dot above it, or just a simple equals sign. --
Mark viking (
talk) 00:48, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Another GA nomination
Georg Cantor's first set theory article fell short last time it was nominated as a "Good Article". It has been improved a lot since then, with the various "Good Article" criteria in mind. Maybe I'll nominate it in the next few days unless someone else beats me to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 01:24, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Could someone please take a look at this page and let me know if it counts as mainstream and if not how far out of mainstream?
Naraht (
talk) 18:26, 21 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Well, I'm no philosopher, and I know little about the philosophy of mathematics. But he says things like, "I am convinced that this operationalist conception of natural number is the central fallacy that underlies all our thinking about the foundations of mathematics. It is not confined to heretics but is shared by the orthodox Cantorian majority.” This puts him far, far outside the mainstream. It seems to be a rejection of the standard
axiom of infinity in
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. The axiom of infinity is independent of the remaining axioms of ZF; in particular it is not fallacious.
The more I read about his "arithmoi", the more it sounds like he is simply repeating the fundamental observations of set theory, draped in his own esoteric jargon and sometimes without proper attribution to his predecessors. I am not impressed.
Ozob (
talk) 03:14, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
But then, being unimpressed and thinking they're reinventing the wheel is a common reaction of mathematicians to philosophers of mathematics, so not necessarily informative for determining how far from mainstream he might be. —
David Eppstein (
talk) 04:42, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Does it mean two disjoint, incompatible mainstreams (one of math, the other of its philosophy)?
Boris Tsirelson (
talk) 05:40, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
It depends on the mainstream you are considering. Mayberry studied the foundations of set theory from a philosophical point of view and his book on the matter has been reviewed in a number of reputable journals, e.g.
[1]. I'd say that it is probably considered a mainstream work in the philosophy community. Mathematically, he embraces the cardinal POV of a set as a finite collection and rejects the ordinal, inductive POV. This places the work outside the mathematical mainstream as a sort of
finitism and indeed Mayberry is mentioned in that article. --
Mark viking (
talk) 10:25, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
No one has commented on this yet, but it seems worth mentioning that as a biographical articleJohn Penn Mayberry is in really terrible shape. --
JBL (
talk) 14:25, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
OP here. I agree that as a Wikipedia article, specifically as a biographical article it is in terrible shape. A split into a biographical article and an article about his theories might be possible. I was mostly wondering if it was a
Time cube level and the answer here seems to be that it isn't but rather is somewhat more similar to either the early works on
Non-Euclidean geometry or even what
Surreal numbers might have been considered if people less well known than Conway and Knuth had come up with the concept.
Naraht (
talk) 15:50, 22 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I read the review linked above and, to my surprise, found it interesting. Based upon what I read there, I must now retract my earlier assessment. Mayberry is a philosopher, and his work is a branch of finitism. His criticism of "operationalism" as "fallacious" is not meant mathematically but philosophically. In more mathematical terms, it seems to me that he rejects infinite recursion and induction. Mathematically, he is studying highly restricted fragments of Peano arithmetic. His "arithmoi" are not sets in the sense of ZFC (or other axiomatic set theories) but are related objects which he considers to have firmer philosophical foundations (it sounds like he is some kind of realist).
The current biographical article does him a great disservice. It makes him sound halfway to being a crackpot, which he certainly does not deserve.
Ozob (
talk) 14:00, 23 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Incredibly, we've never had an article titled
Functional differential equation until this month. Probably it could use some work. In particular, there is the question of which other articles should link to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 21:23, 25 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I think you should start by making a section in
partial differential equation, which barely mentions the subject (and only in a solutions subsection) and redirect the link in question to that new section, until such time as a full article can be written per
WP:SPLIT. (I realize that the topic is certainly notable but this way we can grow our treatment of the topic slowly without making a stub or worrying about a silly AFD.) --
Izno (
talk) 10:50, 27 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Good idea. A split just seemed simpler and could save having to transfer the nonlinear content material out of
partial differential equation into its own article.
M∧Ŝc2ħεИτlk 12:09, 27 December 2016 (UTC)reply
I've split them and done a bit of copy-editing. But a remaining task is this: Which links to the two articles should link to which of the two? That shouldn't be hard. I'll be back to work on it if no one beats me to it.
Michael Hardy (
talk) 19:48, 30 December 2016 (UTC)reply
Thanks! Good work both of you.
M∧Ŝc2ħεИτlk 09:25, 31 December 2016 (UTC)reply