User talk:David Eppstein/2008a

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Wenocur

Legrand is a new employee, a new hire. That is why he did not know me until recently. He applied for a consulting position, had good credentials, and we hired him recently. Now he knows me; before, he used my results in the Wenocur-Dudley and Wenocur-Salant work as well as the other statistics. So he once knew of me, now he has met me. Clear? Hope so. Our website is in its infancy, and we have put it to sleep for a while, until we can make it better. RDSW (talk) 18:20, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

So, the extreme similarity in names between your employee Alfred Legrand and your brother Alfred Small is just that, a coincidence? And how is it that new hire Legrand was so interested in your family that he created the Alfred Small article? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:34, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Would you care to contribute to the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/R. S. Wenocur? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Steven J. Anderson (talk • contribs) 02:26, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Probably I will, eventually. I want to take the time to formulate my opinion carefully. Btw, you should be aware of WP:CANVAS — going around to individual talk pages asking people to contribute to an AfD, unless they've contributed significantly to the article (and I don't think my categorization counts), can be seen as bad form. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:04, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
  • The "Hello." at Legrand's user talk matches the "Goodbye." at MathStatWoman's user page. And it is suggestive of something that one of Alfred Legrand's creations was Alfred Small, with such a similar name. But I'm not sure I see what you mean about the talk page similarity: you mean the fact that they both leave their replies elsewhere? Don't a lot of people do that? —David Eppstein (talk) 06:28, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm kicking myself for not having noticed the Small/Legrand bit. Sorry, I was being too imprecise, by "similarity" I meant more of a gestalt, behaviour warnings and NN bio notifications, etc. I'll do some more time line comparisons, and look into MathStatWoman's sock history a bit over the net few days. Cheers, Pete.Hurd (talk) 07:03, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Nicely done, that geneology find. Cheers, Pete.Hurd (talk) 23:32, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

An edit to Pick's theorem

Hi Professor Eppstein,

Thanks for making me smile. Cheers!

« D. Trebbien (talk) 17:47 2008 January 13 (UTC)

Erdős number of Jonathan Harel

Dear Professor Eppstein,

I noticed you removed Jonathan Harel from the List of people by Erdős number and that The Erdos number project lists a Jonathan Harel with Erdős number two (via Robert J. McEliece). scholar.google.com did in fact find something with those two authors ('Proceedings of the International Symposium on Information'). Could you elaborate on your (the) criterion for including people on the List of people by Erdős number? Thanks. Lklundin (talk) 10:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Basically the same as the criteria for making redlinks anywhere in Wikipedia: only do it if it seems likely that the subject of the link is notable enough to support an actual article, and that the only reason the link is red instead of blue is that nobody has yet taken the trouble to make the article. That is, we're not listing everyone with Erdos number 2 (that would be unmanageably large, and redundant with the Erdos number project's list) but only the subset of those people who are notable enough to have Wikipedia articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:42, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
OK, you made a convincing argument that the redlink should be removed. And you have a good point that listing all known people with an Erdős number of two but make for a rather large page. I brought up the issue initially because I am considering to try and complete the list of people with an Erdős number of one - and because the bottom of the page has the expand list tag - perhaps the use of this tag should be reconsidered for this particular list. Lklundin (talk) 17:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

is it vandalism?

User David Eppstein deleted a link and wrote that big article printed in well-known scientific journal by Springer is "non-notable paper" - is it vandalism? See: Talk:Graph isomorphism#The_absurd_reason_that_looks_like_vandalism_against_NPOV--Tim32 (talk) 17:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

No, it's merely a content dispute. See Wikipedia:Vandalism for a description of what vandalism really is. Note also that accusations of vandalism for good-faith edits such as this may be considered as a violation of policies and guidelines on Wikipedia to be civil, assume good faith, and avoid personal attacks. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:09, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

It is not dispute, because you did not answer my arguments and you do not want to find any compromise!--Tim32 (talk) 21:38, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Tim32's comment in Talk:Graph isomorphism, where he used the term 'Vandalism against NPOV' is contrary to the current understanding of 'vandalism.' Vandalism is a deliberate attempt to make the encyclopedia worse, which does not seem to be the case here. Use Wikipedia:Dispute resolution if you can't get any satisfaction in a content dispute, but don't use the term 'vandalism' because that will suggest you are a person who should not be taken seriously. EdJohnston (talk) 18:42, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Pseudoforests enumeration

Hi,

I discovered pseudoforests accidentally some years ago working with a method of perfect hash. Since that time I called them quasiforests, in lack of a name to give to the graphs that appeared in my work. One day I see the article Pseudoforest in Wiki and I thank: It is well written, the definitions and properties are well structured, and better, now I have a “standard” terminology to communicate my work in hash. Because of that I wish to thank you for your time and your work on the subject.

A few days ago I wrote about numbers of distinct pseudoforests with cycles of length one. My text is no more in the article Pseudoforests. Could you explain why?

Thanks in advance.

Best Whishes --Webonfim (talk) 01:58, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Washington G. Bomfim

There are two answers. One is that Wikipedia isn't the place to publish new discoveries about the subjects of its articles. Your addition did include citations to OEIS for the sequences concerned, but did not have sources for the equality of these sequences with the numbers of pseudoforests you described, and your inclusion of a signature in your addition was also a sign in the same direction. The second answer, though, is that I think pseudotrees with cycles of length one (which is to say, trees in which one node has been distinguished from the others by the existence of a self-loop) are a very specialized subtopic more closely related to trees than to pseudotrees, and that the inclusion of that material in the article is out of balance with its importance to the overall subject of pseudoforests. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:27, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi,

I agree with your first answer. In the future, if I edit an article in Wiki directly, even a stub, I will not put a signature. I will also try to give sources. I am a neophyte in Wiki so perhaps I deserve the opportunity to fix errors.

I will write some stuff on pseudoforest enumeration. I will write on your talk page so if you want to edit my text, it will be less painful. You also will have the opportunity to try to dissuade me to add a text. I am not going to send a lot, after all, it appears that enumeration must be concise on the article, see below.

I understand that is not informative to write about numbers of pseudoforests with specific characteristics. One could, for example, insert OEIS results on the number of unicyclic graphs “of several types”.

I studied a uniform model of random multigraph generation, as in Janson and others1, starting with n vertices, and stopping when exactly n edges are added, i.e., with c = 1.

In this model, when m = n = 6, more than 12% of the random graphs are pseudoforests having only loops. The majority of those graphs, roughly 67%, are pseudotrees, and less than 5% have 3 pseudotrees.

For n = m = 13, the probability of a pseudoforest with loops drops to approximately 1%. Of course, for n = m = 1 all graphs are pseudoforests with loops. For n = 41, we have to try 913,532 times on the average to see a pseudoforest with loops.

When n tends to infinite, we know that for c > 1/2, i.e., for c << 1, almost every random graph with cn edges is not a pseudoforest, but in CS, for example, are we always interested only in asymptotic results? Those results fail up to what values of n? Unfortunately I cannot have now an answer for the case c ~1/2, c > 1/2, and pseudoforests “in general”, but for n = 50, I conjecture that more than half of the graphs are pseudoforests “of any kind”.

It is clear that pseudoforests with cycles of length one have a limited scope, but aside of asymptotical results, there are any results about any kind of random pseudoforests? Probably no. However I now will not insist to add results on those forests. Washington G. Bomfim --Webonfim (talk) 13:42, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

1 The Birth of the Giant Component, Svante Janson, Donald E. Knuth, Tomasz Luczak, and Boris Pittel

WoS

How come you're using GS for AfD comments? Has Irvine dropped Web of Science? :) DGG (talk) 02:34, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Two reasons:
  1. I like GS much better than WoS for computer science. WoS has really bad coverage of the important CS conferences. So GS is what I go to as a default, more than WoS.
  2. When I'm working from home, I don't have to go to the trouble of setting up a proxy connection to use GS.
—David Eppstein (talk) 02:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Boolean algebra task force

I'd like to invite you to participate in the Boolean algebra task force that I am forming. Despite the name, a task force is just an ad hoc subcommittee of a wikiproject to work on a particular issue. In this case, I think that our articles on various aspects of Boolean algebra, propositional logic, and applications would benefit from some big-picture planning of the organization of material into various articles. The task force would not require a great time commitment. The main goal is to work out a proposal for how the material should be arranged. A second goal is for the focus to remain interdisciplinary, including computer science, logic, and mathematics. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:12, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Devonte Hynes

Hi, I don't entirely know how these things work but should Devonte Hynes still be protected? Thing is, if he's not going to have his own article then the redirect should quite possibly point to [[Lightspeed Champion]] instead of Test Icicles now, as his Lightspeed Champion moniker is getting fairly notable. Sorry if this message is a bit left field :P - rst20xx (talk) 16:21, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I've unprotected it. Feel free to change the redirect or (if you think he has enough sources now to pass WP:BIO compared to the version considered in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Devonte Hynes) replace with a new article. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:46, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Ta. Someone else has changed the redirect already, hah! - rst20xx (talk) 00:36, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Lawnbott, Google Sketchup

Thanks for the references David, I will fix Lawnbott tomorrow. Btw, I saw the reference to Google sketchup for dummies on your web page...thanks, I've ordered the book, I need to improve my skills. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 04:39, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome! I'm glad for the chance to help your work here and elsewhere. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:24, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! (copied at my userpage) - Dan Dank55 (talk) 16:37, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the category at Lawnbott. Does the article look good? Any suggestions? - Dan Dank55 (talk) 07:09, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
It could use a source for the statement that it sells less than the RoboMower. Otherwise, it looks pretty good: factual, balanced, and sourced. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:16, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Ashley West

Hi David, I thought I added the AfD Ashley West to the list of Visual arts-related deletions, but I think I screwed it up, can you check it out? Thanks, Modernist (talk) 17:20, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Done. Looks like you copied the text of the AfD into the next AfD in the list, rather than adding the name of the AfD to the deletion sorting page itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:27, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Instruction creep

Thanks so much for invoking that guideline, I didn't know about that one. The links from that page were fantastic, too. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:45, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome! (For my own future reference: this is in the context of Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal.) —David Eppstein (talk) 17:52, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
Ah right, it would have been a good idea to provide the link. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Visual arts

The archiving bot seems to be ignoring the bottom AfD on the list Vinyl Art by Daniel Edlen. Tyrenius (talk) 13:30, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

There was an unnecessary space in the AfD name that, I think, might have prevented the bot from handling it. If it's still there after the next pass I'll archive it manually. Thanks. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:02, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Notable Erdos numbers

Eppstein,

Since there was no activity after that, I said or proposed to delete just the discussion page that you and I used. I did not use the word "Thretened". Deeleting really doesnot remove - It is always possible to recontsruct using undo. It has disappaered now. Did you delete? It does not matter whether it is there or not (I donot want to talk about it.)

Someone or you might have deleted using the backdoor tools.

Raj 00:02, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I didn't delete it, just moved it to an archive. In general, it is preferred not to delete old conversations here. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:04, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.

151.199.254.144 (talk) 00:43, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Citation et al.

Howdy, I noticed you disliked the early reliance on et al. in the {{citation}} template. I too was bothered by it. I did not see a general, n-author, solution, but I upped the limit from 3 to 8. I think you need to be an administrator to actually change the live template, but my userfied version works fine and you can see it in action:

  • {{User:JackSchmidt/Citation | last1=A | last2=B | last3=C | last4=D | last5=E | last6=F | last7=G | last8=H | year=2009 | title=Alphabet Soup }}
  • A; B; C; D; E; F; G & H (2009), Alphabet Soup

Hopefully one of the {{citation}} authors will pick it up, but I wanted to check with you if it looked reasonable. You should be able to replace any {{Citation}} template with {{User:JackSchmidt/Citation}} and preview without change, except for the 4 or more authors. JackSchmidt (talk) 03:55, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daniel Johnston (Consultant)

This isn't really an academic bio. This is a person who does "consulting" for the petroleum industry. This is really more of a business-related discussion. DarkAudit (talk) 20:13, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

More than half of the article described academic accomplishments: writing books, editing a journal, having a position as a lecturer... It may be true that the person himself is not really an academic, but we're here to debate the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:22, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

You have got a very interesting job on Wikipedia !! Note: I chnaged my signatire for fun Changed RNaik100 to Raj 22:41, 14 February 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rnaik100 (talk • contribs)

"Job" is not really the right way to describe it. My employer pays me to do other things and would be unhappy if my Wikipedia editing got in the way of doing those other things. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:02, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

When I was working for a Corporate America, we were asked to get out from such work. They meant it affects productivity. Also one has to be careful about the legality involved when using Internet on Employer's computer etc. I try to keep away from such things,but sometime I get tempted. On the top, I get tired after working 8 to 10 hours for my employer and no time (healthy time) left after that for any good work.

71.242.85.75 (talk Raj) 01:13, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Changed RNaik100 to Raj 01:16, 15 February 2008 (UTC) It was me; forgot to signin.

Good thing I don't work for Corporate America, then, isn't it? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:52, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

So far it looks like you are lucky in many ways Changed RNaik100 to Raj 02:58, 18 February 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rnaik100 (talk • contribs)

I write the following 4 Changed RNaik100 to Raj 00:30, 19 February 2008 (UTC) to sign.

Changed RNaik100 to Raj 00:30, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I use the (Changed RNaik100 to Raj 00:31, 19 February 2008 (UTC)) chars to sign.

Changed RNaik100 to Raj 00:31, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I think you need to go into "my preferences" (top right corner of the page), and, on the User Profile tab of the preferences, set the Signature to what you really want it to be. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:13, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

In the signature box it was Rnaik100 to begin with. Now (Since last few days) I set it to (Changed RNaik100 to Raj).

Therfore my signature is "Changed RNaik100 to Raj". It says clearly that my signature was RNaik100 and now I changed it to Raj which I write as "Changed RNaik100 to Raj" which shows the history of my signature changing. Eventually after few days I will use "Raj". It might sound amusing, but I like it. Thanks.

Changed RNaik100 to Raj 02:29, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, obviously SineBot doesn't recognize it as a signature. Maybe because it doesn't link to your user or talk pages? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, bye.

Bye 00:46, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Pseudoforests

I want to verify the term "pseudotree". By analogy with "pseudoforest" a pseudotree should have at most one cycle. I assume you're following precedent in defining it to have exactly one cycle. Am I right? I wonder how established that usage is? (I'm sorry, my copy of Dantzig is not handy. I'll be checking it for pseudos and disguised bicircular matroids!) Zaslav (talk) 07:46, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Try this Google scholar search. The term seems to be used in two ways: the first hit (Kowalik) says at most one cycle, but the fourth (Fekete and Szego) uses the version with exactly one cycle. I didn't check carefully how often it is used in which sense. The article already states that the terminology is not very standardized but perhaps that could be made more clear. I added a note mentioning the other definition; feel free to re-edit. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:22, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Further down the same search's reply page is "A pseudotree is a rooted tree with a self-loop at its root." - Solving Cheap Graph Problems on Meshes, JF Sibeyn, M Kaufmann, Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 1995. Oy! I'll work on this aspect. Zaslav (talk) 21:40, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
I think "unicyclic graph" is unambiguous. Perhaps it would be best to make sure the rest of the article uses that in place of pseudotree. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:51, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Modified as follows: "pseudotree" changed to "1-tree" (because it's less of a mouthful than "unicyclic graph", and is common enough in the literature). I'm also adding redirects from 1-tree and, if necessary, unicyclic graph. Also, I assumed the alternate definition by number of edges is that a component has no more edges than vertices; this was worth adding, and I hope the reference you gave is the right one for it (but it probably isn't, since you have a different counting definition later; probably this should be re-edited). Smaller edits will follow, but if you have any problem with this, please let me know.
I also corrected an error in maximal pseudoforests, but not anything in directed pseudoforests.
I think the terminology is getting good. I often have use for these graphs, so I'll be using "pseudoforest" and "1-forest", et al., in my research. Zaslav (talk) 01:03, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all the work you've put into this, it looks like a clear improvement to me. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:26, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, and thanks for the feedback. We know different traditions so it's valuable to trade comments. I'll put in some more work later. Zaslav (talk) 03:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikiproject Academic Journals Collaboration notice

The current WikiProject Academic Journals Collaboration of the Week is
Electrical Experimenter
Please help to improve this article to the highest of standards.

Erdos numbers

Yes, we have checked in MR MR Erdos Number = 2 Bogdan W\polhk eglorz coauthored with Siemion Fajtlowicz MR0224528 (37 #127) Siemion Fajtlowicz coauthored with Paul Erdös1 MR0441939 (56 #330) Węglorz has Polish letter in name. Is it a reason of deletation? Regards, Krzysztof Szajowski(ksz1950) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ksz1950 (talk • contribs) 13:21, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

No, accented letters aren't a problem. It's because the Wikipedia guidelines on when to include redlinks state that they should only be for people who are sufficiently notable to warrant creating an actual article. I wasn't convinced, from the little information I could find out about them online (e.g. publications and citation counts in Google scholar) that that was true. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

The second name deleted is Jacek Cichoń(the author of Cichoń's diagram: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagram_Cichonia and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichoń's_diagram -K.Szajowski (talk) 14:00, 24 February 2008 (GMT)

James McConvill

You might want to revisit the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James McConvill AfD. It seems yet additional material was removed from the article before it was nominated from deletion--he's published 6 academic books plus a number of articles. I'm going back to see what else may have been omitted. DGG (talk) 15:27, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

codeuu.com(Jef41341)

This site is a code site that everyone can edit,you said that it used codes in your old lecture notes,but it was added by anonymous users,when you said to take it down,when we saw it , we immediately delete it.you should not delete all links of this site from wikipedia.we are not no respect for copyright,just edit by users from the world.we hope that you can restore other links of my site from wikipedia.so that it can bring great help to the people who want to search code.thanks for you help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jef41341 (talk • contribs) 03:42, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The discussion has been going on at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computer science#codeuu.com, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam#codeuu.com, and MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist#codeuu.com. You'd probably get farther joining the discussion in those places than here. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Subgraph isomorphism?

Hi David,

I've recently found myself implementing a subgraph isomorphism algorithm for hypergraphs, where I have to also match the labels on the hypergraph edges and verticies. This is for a linguistics application, some English language semantic parsing. I was wondering if perhaps you'd seen any particularly good algorithms for this sort of thing. I can happily continue in my ad-hoc manner, but thought that perhaps there'd be benefit in some scholarly research as well. linas (talk) 19:20, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately the algorithms I know the most about are more of theoretical than practical interest. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I finished my code... my subgraph was presented as a list of trees, which shared nodes. Once I had this clearly in my head, it was a simple matter of trying to lay down one tree, and string all the others together to follow. Seems like this should have decent performance; I current can't imagine how to improve on it. linas (talk) 14:47, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Do you know anything about category theory? I have a nutty question; but first an intro: Cartesian closed categories have lambda calculus as their, umm, language. Lambda calculus is "just" a bunch of symbols strung together, not associative or commutative, with a lambda symbol used to bind variables. One can do something similar with graphs: let me use a lambda symbol to bind certain nodes (or edges!?) as "variables"; and so, just as in lambda calculus, one may use these to nest graphs one in another, and also define reductions, etc. Seems like much of the mechanics of lambda calculus would just go across. I haven't quite grokked what the equivalent of a combinator would be, though. The question is this: 1) does the study of lambda-applied-to-graphs have a name (what keywords would folks publish under?) (I assume people have written books about this!?) and 2) what would the analogue of the Cartesian closed category be, in this case? Its not perhaps by accident a topos or anything like that? linas (talk) 14:47, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
No, I tend to avoid category theory. What I've seen of the theory looks pretty, but it's an area where I don't have a good intuition about what's just genuine progress vs what's just abstraction for the sake of abstraction. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Random Smile From Somebody Who Needs To Go To Sleep

WarthogDemon has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Cheers, and Happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

-WarthogDemon 06:41, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Question about Erdős-Graham conjecture

I'm wondering if you can clarify for me something about the Erdős-Graham conjecture. The article states that "if {2,3,...} are partitioned into finitely many subsets, then one of the subsets can be used to form an Egyptian fraction representation of unity." My question is: is {2, 3, ...} the set of prime numbers or just the set of integers greater than 1? PrimeFan (talk) 00:58, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Integers greater than one. The other version doesn't make sense: you can't have a finite sum of unit fractions with different prime denominators that adds to one. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:19, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Vlado Kotnik

Thanks for this. I was surprised that they were the same, but thanks for the housekeeping. Is there any procedure for non-admins to see previous content or it just has to to AfD until an admin can check it? TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 00:47, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. I think the only way for a non-admin to see a deleted article is to ask an admin to show it to them. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:48, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Thought so, just wanted to not extra-flood AfD if possible. Have a good evening TRAVELLINGCARIMy storyTell me yours 01:23, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Megalithic Geometry

You have deleted a full-fledged article. Why did you do such an extremist thing> Do you think you are God or something that youcan destroy in one click the diligent work of contributors? I had gone through all the trouble to give all the details and references, everything verifiable, everything objective and so on?You should be ashamed of yourself! And what about the one about Alan Butler? He's a well-known, prolific English author, he's a professional writer to boot! What the hell?--Little sawyer (talk) 18:26, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I was merely reimplementing the consensus established at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Megalithic geometry, which was violated by the recreation of deleted material without going through the proper deletion review process for such recreation. Re-doing the deletion discussion whenever anyone feels like re-creating the article would be a waste of time for all concerned; that's why we have a speedy deletion process. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:04, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Richard nixon

Hi David, You recently declined a speedy, noting "Redirect is from a natural misspelling and is properly tagged {{R from other capitalisation}}".

The issue here is that although strictly speaking it's properly tagged, it's a useless redirect, in that nothing links to it and it adds nothing to the default behavior of the Go box -- if I type in "richard nixon" or "Richard nixon", the software will automatically convert this to "Richard Nixon" and take me to the right page. That is, the "natural misspelling" in this case is automatically and properly handled; there is no need to add potentially hundreds and thousands of redirects to handle this particular case for every multi-word proper name.

I've tagged similar redirects in the past (most recently Eliot spitzer), and they've been removed. (You can try typing "Eliot spitzer" or "eliot spitzer" and you'll see that nothing was lost by the redirect's removal.)

Clearly this is more a nit than anything -- I mainly propose these when I find them because it eliminates the odd "Redirected from John doe" message that appears when people enter a name in lowercase into the Go box. Would you be willing to reconsider? Thanks, NapoliRoma (talk) 18:37, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

When I type "Eliot spitzer" into a url of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., though, I don't get redirected to the right place. I almost never use the Go box myself. If the mediawiki software automatically found the redirect when given the name as a URL, I'd be more convinced. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:41, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
The logical extreme conclusion to this concept would be that there should then be "First last" redirects for every "First Last" in the encyclopedia. Why just have one for "Richard nixon"? Is his name more commonly hacked into a URL in lowercase than say, Dan Aykroyd's?
We'd also need to create the appropriate parallel URLs for Richard m nixon, Dick nixon, President nixon, Richard milhous nixon, Tricky dick nixon, President richard nixon, and so on -- all of these work today in the Go box in lower case, but none of them work in URLs in lower case.
I agree with you that if "I should be able to hack proper names into URLs in lowercase" is a desired behavior, it should be fixed in the software, not by creating a ton of redirects. Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 20:20, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Re-reading my above, I may have come off as more confrontatory than I intended. I just wanted to point out that this particular type of redirect is at best a band-aid compensating for a possible limitation in the mediawiki software -- and to carry the metaphor to its extreme, it's a 1" band-aid for a 5 mile scrape :-/... Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 20:30, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't really disagree with you, I guess. On the other hand, I'm not sure this really fits the "unlikely typos" category for speedy deletion, so... —David Eppstein (talk) 20:40, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Understood, thanks for the discussion. I'm thinking as I poke around that this probably ought to be brought up for a broader airing, as there are a whole bunch of these links lying around (I tried several presidents and they all had them). Do you think it makes sense to bring this up on Rfd? I haven't actually done anything like that before, so I'm not sure of the process. Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 21:50, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Sure, why not? It seems like a reasonable way to clarify what we should do for this sort of case. I don't really know what to expect from there, though, as I haven't used the rfd process myself. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:53, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hey. Thanks for grabbing that template. Must have missed it. SynergeticMaggot (talk) 03:35, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I do the same thing myself frequently enough... —David Eppstein (talk) 03:37, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

ShamanDhia

Please consider CoffeePushers comments and read my responses regarding this page, as per revisions and discussions. I am a Wiki newbie, and wrote my page because I need to understand copyright and wiki editing, and I made a lot of mistakes, but ppl seem to think the original mistakes are not cause for deletion in my case. I am trying to use Wiki to freely distribute my image, not make $ with it. I have revised the content and links considerably based on the editors/bots information, and I was 2 days into it before CoffeePusher sent me the welcome/style sheet stuff. I think I have a grip on it now, and even if the page is deleted, I am thankful for the messaging because I got a crash course in copyright info, citing sources, and editing on wiki. If deletion is necessary, please don't block the page if someone wants to write about me later. 161.38.223.246 (talk) 15:42, 13 March 2008 (UTC) ShamanDhia Note: This debate has been included in the list of Visual arts-related deletion discussions. —the Hitochi Princess (talk) 14:17, 13 March 2008 (UTC)ShamanDhia

Patinkin

Ta. See User:Daniel/SP. Daniel (talk) 03:28, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Happy to help. You'd think he'd figure out how I keep finding them so quickly... —David Eppstein (talk) 03:31, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to know too :) Daniel (talk) 03:32, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity —David Eppstein (talk) 03:33, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
See your email :) Daniel (talk) 03:52, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

DYK

Updated DYK query On 19 March, 2008, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

--Gatoclass (talk) 08:51, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Zekki Pasha

David: Zeki Pasha can be redirected to Zekki Pasha as I have already transferred the salient content of Zeki (one paragraph or so) into Zekki. I wouldn't worry about the orthographic spelling as I created a redirect for that one also. Yours. Anatoliano (talk) 20:33, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Graph Drawing

Dear Sir

I would like to ask how you create images such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Paley13.svg and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Convex_shelling.svg. Do these pictures require a lot of time to create?

Vbatz (talk) 10:53, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

They were both done in Adobe Illustrator. For the Paley graph, I made a regular 13-gon using the polygon tool, made a circle with a number centered inside it, copied the circle to each of the vertices, changed the numbers to 0-12, and added the extra diagonals. I'd guess it took maybe 15 minutes to draw and upload. The shelling one is a little more complicated so it might have taken me a little longer. —David Eppstein (talk) 14:59, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Edward D. Goldberg

Updated DYK query On 22 March, 2008, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Edward D. Goldberg, which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

--BorgQueen (talk) 10:00, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Larry Dablemont

I see you've deleted this before. Can we get it salted? [1] Thanks. Qworty (talk) 04:51, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

UserPage

Hey David, I was actually practicing with the twinkle javascript in my namespace. I placed the phrase "Twinkle Training Page" on it, but is there a way that I should tag my userpage to avoid confusion? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Torchwoodwho (talk • contribs)

Sorry, did you not want that deleted? I saw it in categories for speedy deletion, and saw that you had placed a speedy deletion tag on it yourself, so I figured I should delete it under U1 even though the tag you used was G1. If the page itself said something about ignoring the tags in it, I would have paid attention to that. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:49, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
No problem, I'll make the on-page text more clear next time. I think I have the hang of the script now though.--Torchwood Who? (talk) 05:55, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Josh Bloxham

After another editor found the NZ info, I checked the team's page. I found this. The article is probably written by a school-age fan. a complete re-write is necessary to save it. Only the subject's name is salvageable. DarkAudit (talk) 18:42, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


Diamond graph

Do we find DIAMOND graph on Wikipedia? Do we accept .jpg or .jpeg files? or any photo pictures?

--Tangi-tamma (talk) 02:20, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Huh? I'm not sure I understand your question. You mean the diamond graph from this list, as included in this illustration? I don't think ut has (and may not deserve, unless sufficiently many reliable sources can be found) its own article. As for image types, for graph drawings, SVG is preferred. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:38, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, can we copy it the K4-e (Diamond) to Wikipedia for our(my) use? Thanks. --Tangi-tamma (talk) 10:47, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

You want a separate image of just that one graph? You don't need my permission to make it yourself but if you'd like me to do so you'll need to tell me what you want to do with it. —David Eppstein (talk) 14:03, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

First of all, can I put this graph .jpg) in one of my articles? This is not a svg file. Do you know who could create this graph for me? If someone gets me the procedures , I will do it. How about you creating using SVG?. Thanks in advance --Tangi-tamma (talk) 22:24, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Something like  ? I left out the bracket on the bottom, as that's more complicated to include; was that an important part of the image? I use Adobe Illustrator to make svg drawings, and then upload to wikimedia.org (the upload process there is essentially the same as directly on wikipedia, but that way the image becomes available to other wikimedia projects). —David Eppstein (talk) 00:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

That is fantastic; we do not need the bracelet. I need this to write an example for the article "Intersection graph (Line) graph pf k=uniform...


Thanks. --Tangi-tamma (talk) 01:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Gilbert NMO Morris

You declined the speedy deletion i put on Gilbert NMO Morris; thank you. As i'm really still a beginner at this game, may i ask your advice as to what i ought to have put there? The Citation template you put there helps, but there's still not enough to even begin to know who this man is or why he is notable. And i did wait ten or so days from the first time i came across the article for something to be added before i did anything. Please understand, i'm not arguing or defending mine action; i just what to know what to do next time. Thanks for your help & (in advance) advice. Cheers, Lindsay 05:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The speedy tag got some attention to the article, so in that sense it was successful. Other possibilities would have been (1) to tag it with {{unreferenced}} or {{notability}} (not usually very effective), (2) to use {{prod}} instead of a speedy deletion tag; then if nobody fixes it up within 5 days it can be deleted; (3) to take it to a full deletion discussion using {{afd}}, or (4) (my favorite) do some searching to try to find more material to expand the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:41, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

TorrentRelay

Hello,

How come TorrentRelay was deleted? It is just as valid of a client as TorrentFlux or TorrentFox.

Please advise, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Broaxis (talk • contribs) 06:01, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

It's not a question of validity, but notability. Some reliable sources indicating that some third party has paid attention to it would have helped. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:08, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

National BackUp Day

Speedily deleted; Afd closed as such. - CobaltBlueTony™ talk 17:05, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Repeating violations of changing the users flag such as {{cleanup}} may revoke your license to work on Wikipedia

You have done it for me and others.

As it states on Wikipedia:Vandalism, such act is generally considered vandalism. Please refrain from doing so in future; repeated violations of this could lead to your account being blocked. I ask you to take user comments with a positive and a professional attitude and work with them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tangi-tamma (talk • contribs)

Please refer to this response I gave to someone else recently who also objected to the removal of tags. The short answer is that you are mistaken: removal of tags may be appropriate in some cases, and may be inappropriate in others, but it is not vandalism (except for certain very specific tags, such as the afd notices). The only item in Wikipedia:Vandalism pertinent to tags is "Abuse of tags: Bad-faith placing of ... tags on pages that do not meet such criteria." For instance, your repeated application of {{refimprove}} to articles that have perfectly adequate references might plausibly fall under this. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:39, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

ok.--Tangi-tamma (talk) 00:04, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

We should always remember this - It should attempt to tell the non-mathematician reader at the outset. That is the bottom line.

--Tangi-tamma (talk) 00:20, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Shrikhande

The list of authors must be there because this is a bio article. Bio articles should speak two things - the contributions and the life style which includes family memebrs and the one who worked closely with. That speaks the personality and then only the article is complete. Why do we have Erdos # mathematicians listed on Wikipedia? It carries a lots good memories.

I recommend you adding your family members and your famous students etc. on the Bio article you have on Wikipedia.

--Tangi-tamma (talk) 22:36, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I have over 100 co-authors. I don't think it would make for interesting reading to add the list of all of them to the article. And, in any case, it would be a conflict of interest for me to add them myself; I try to avoid editing my own article these days unless there is something blatantly wrong with it. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:13, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Muc Wap

I am not sure how this page got deleted because of advertising, I was just trying to give information on one of my favorite authors? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mallow20 (talk • contribs) 09:14, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

It would probably be best to wait until the book has been published and, more importantly, professionally reviewed, before writing about it, so you can cite the reviews as reliable sources that would establish the notability of the subject. But in general, self-published books (and fictionpress, the site you linked to for the book, is a place where people self-publish) aren't generally considered notable enough for Wikipedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:52, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Clean up a little and remove taggi-tagga's pointless taggery. Still needs more work but I'll come back to it later

I liked it. Thanks. --Tangi-tamma (talk) 23:11, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

projective configurations

Maybe you can improve on this recent edit of mine. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:19, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

How's this? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:11, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Nick Savoy page

Hi! I didn't write the Nick Savoy page but I worked on it extensively. I noticed that you voted to delete. I'm not sure if this sways your decision (which was made based on 'notability' but he is on the Dr Phil show tomorrow, April 11. I just saw him on TV as the Dr Phil show is promoting him extensively (www.drphil.com/shows). So now I have found:

  • Dr Phil
  • CBS National Radio
  • Fox TV
  • Playboy TV
  • Brink Magazine
  • Globe and Mail magazine (quoting him as an expert)
  • Mentioned in other wikipedia pages such as Mystery Method
  • As far back as 2006 there was some consensus to include him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Seduction_community)

Does the Dr Phil showchange your opinion? If not, what would? I would like to get the page back up; I worked really hard on it. Thanks so much for your time! Camera123456 (talk) 23:52, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

DYK

Updated DYK query On 11 April, 2008, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Johannes De Groot, which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

--DaughterofSun (talk) 10:01, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Artisol2345's sockpuppet

This is very obvious. See, somebody forgot to suspect that guy as a sockpuppet. This is too close to the previous name (Artisol and Aristol). This needs to be categorize util Artisol2345's sockpuppet. Good thing Rschen7754 block him indefinitely, because his changes obviously defies over WP:MOS, and deleting changes from at least 50 other changes plus at least 15 month ago. Plus on his user page he wrote bad stuff about Rschen7754. --Freewayguy (talk) 03:01, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Not just on his own user page. A deserving block, but given the past history I'm guessing he'll be back again. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:38, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Long time no chat

Hey David, I am doing stuff with style guidelines and WP:GAN these days, I would welcome your input any time. Notice that when I saw the current question at WT:CITE, I notified the WT:FAC folks right away. That seems like the right call, I don't think that's "canvassing", but do you think there are other groups who should also be notified to give input on similar issues? - Dan (talk) 22:04, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Template talk:Citation and Wikipedia talk:Scientific citation guidelines come to mind. Other than that, I'm not sure. I found out through an announcement in WT:WPM; maybe the other scientific projects would also be interested. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:16, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

PMID removed from citation template

In this edit, the PMID was removed. I think that this was probably not intentional. Can you please fix it? Thanks. --Karnesky (talk) 07:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed, I hope. Thanks for letting me know. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Ptolemy's Theorem

Hello David

I submitted Proof 3 on this page because it is needed for the corollaries which follow from presenting Ptolemy's Theorem in trig form. I don't have a written source but I have no doubt there is one somewhere (there certainly is on the web) and am quite happy to reference it.

The corollaries are fairly obvious derivatives - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work them out and I have no doubt that in principle what I have presented on the web page is no more than a regurgitation of material which is at least a couple of millenia old. I would not be at all suprised to find someone else has similarly reworked Copernicus/Ptolemy Thms 2,3,4,5 etc into modern trig format (eg Cut the Knot references) and once again would be more than happy to quote any such sources other than these 'originals'.

Referencing in this context is something of a problem - I have simply gone back to source as far as I am able: namely Copernicus in 'Liber Primum' of 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' following Ptolemy in 'Almagest'. English translation of Copernicus as provided in Stephen Hawking's book 'On the Shoulders of Giants'.

In the examples section I have used the term 'ancient magi' in my submissions because I need once again to acknowledge a 'road well travelled'. How well travelled is I think a question open to debate since we have the curious anomaly of Copernicus/Ptolemy presenting and using Ptolemy's Theorem ('Theorema Secundum in DROC') in some detail whilst not - apparently - realising that 'Theorema Primum' could be relatively easily derived from it as shown in the 'Examples' section of the Wiki page. Instead the justification comes from a reference to some unecessarily complex Euclidian proofs.

In particular we need to understand - in ancient context - the statement that the "sum of squares of the sides of the (inscribed) hexagon and decagon equals the square of the side of the pentagon". In modern trig notation:

sin^2(18) + sin^2(30) = sin^2(36).

Resolving this may lead to yet another anomaly indicating that "Ptolemy's Theorem" may in fact precede Ptolemy and that is why I have followed the "ancient scribe" persona used on Leon Cooper's "Deep Secrets" site. If there is a 'less theatrical' means of acknowledgement, I am quite happy for the script to be altered accordingly and to otherwise deal with the concerns you have raised in whichever way is appropriate.

Neil Parker (talk) 10:31, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Redirects are quite handy!

See here. Hope that's fixed it! Carcharoth (talk) 07:29, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Comment

HEy WHY DID YOU DELETE MY PAGE IT WAS A CHARACTER FROM A STORY — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nugghins (talk • contribs) 14:32, April 21, 2008

Whether fictional or not, all articles need to meet Wikipedia standards for verifiability and notability. Your page Shanus did not. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:47, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Unneeded redirects

Can you delete Doctor Doctor(The Secret Show Character) and C.O.P.S. (Comics), like you did to Billly Kaplan? Tried putting them for speedy deletion, but was declined. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 00:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I deleted the first one. But it's difficult to argue that the second one is an implausible typo (and would be a bad idea to delete it) when there are so many wikilinks that go through it. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:39, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
For what it is worth, I've had good luck at WP:RFD for figuring out / queuing reasonable, but not speedy, redirect deletes. I haven't been in a while, but the backlog there was variable. If any admin has a vendetta against useless redirects that need to be deleted, or anyone has a mission to fix all the redirects that have stale {{rfd}} tags on them, I bet the backlog will provide fun. JackSchmidt (talk) 00:55, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
Well, I've gotten to all the C.O.P.S. (Comics) redirects. Can you delete it now, using Andrew Nolan (Comics) as a precedent? Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 01:06, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
It's still not a speedy deletion, for the same reason. At the start of WP:RFD, one of the reasons it lists for not deleting redirects is that it will break old versions of other pages that used to use that redirect. If you really feel it's important to get it deleted, it needs to go through WP:RFD. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:19, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Image that I tried to delete

Hi, I noticed you replaced a tag on an image that I blanked. Basically I did this because I later uploaded the same image to the wikimedia commons page and it's supposed to be better off there. I was trying to get the image deleted from wikipedia by deleting the license info. I mean, if the image is on wikimedia commons you don't need it on wikipedia because it'll automatically use the wiki commons one anyway. Cheers. Ben 2082 (talk) 15:40, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

If you later uploaded the same image to commons, you should use the {{nowcommons}} tag. It takes a few days for the waiting period to expire so the local copy can be deleted, but is a clearer explanation of what's happening than just blanking the page. Yes, uploading to commons is better, because it makes them easier to use for the versions of wikipedia in other languages; that's where I put all of my images. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:53, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/James V. Downton

Thanks for listing this at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academics and educators. You may also want to consider listing it at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Social science and Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Religion. Cheers, Cirt (talk) 11:22, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

  • I tend only to list articles for deletion on the deletion sorting pages that I follow myself. But there's nothing stopping you or anyone else from adding them to other such pages. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:50, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
    • Oh, I thought you were someone that added stuff to all sorts of deletion sorting pages on a regular basis, no worries. Cirt (talk) 20:12, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

England Vs New Zealand

Sorry! I guess I was reading your comment with my eyes crossed or something... I really have no other explanation how I got it exactly backwards... Ashanda (talk) 02:03, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I just don't want the article to say something wrong. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:12, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
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