Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Base-2 scientific notation

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Almost all, apart from the author, agree that this is original research and should not remain here. Whether and where to redirect it to might need more discussion. Sandstein 05:08, 2 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Base-2 scientific notation[edit]

(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

Article seems to be a vague WP:OR screed on powers of two (which is already the subject of an article). Despite the name, the article does not even seem to define a "notation" as the word is understood in mathematics. (Of course, there is a base-2 notation described in binary numeral system, but we have an article for that.) The cited sources do not seem to use the terminology "base-2 scientific notation," and online hits for this term all seem to refer to ordinary binary numerals (or occasionally binary floating point).

— Steven G. Johnson (talk) 19:37, 24 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Camber

I have spent some time on your MIT web pages and your pages within Wikipedia. You are a scholar and I certainly welcome and appreciate your comments. I would like to involve some of my academic friends to do some heavy editing to see if they can get the article to sit up a little straighter. -BEC

Redirect to floating point. That seems the target most likely to discuss anything being searched for under this search term. OK to merge content if there's anything encyclopedic and sourceable to merge. --Trovatore (talk) 19:56, 24 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Camber

Regarding the floating point redirect, as I said in the article, "Base-2 scientific notation should not to be confused with the base-2 numeral system ..." - BEC

The point is that what other people mean by "base-2 scientific notation" is a binary numeral system of some sort (with scientific notation referring specifically to a floating-point-style enumeration). Wikipedia nomenclature is dictated by common usage (see WP:TITLE); editors are not free to invent their own nomenclatures (see WP:OR and WP:NOT). — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 17:53, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment from Camber

Thank you. I'll continue re-reading scientific notation and the other uses within Wikipedia of that term as well as base-2 within radix. I am beginning to see your point, but would argue that base-ten scientific notation has set a more consistent standard for the use of the two combinations of words, "base-2" and "scientific notation." When referring to the binary numeral system, it appears that it is called base-2 binary notation. When used within logarithm, it does not impute floating-point or the binary numeral system. I'll continue studying Wikipedia. Yet, certainly I see your point when one puts the words "base-two scientific notation" in Google, they are all about normalizing numbers and floating point. Maybe we should change the title to "base-2 geometric notation" but then it looks like original research. Hmm, a Catch 22.

There are four articles that I have found to be helpful in filtering these comments.

Abuse of notation, Exponentiation in the section, Powers of two, Mathematical_notation#Modern_notation, and Power of two -BEC

BruceCamber (talk) 04:46, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Incomprehensible. 86.160.217.111 (talk) 20:47, 24 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Camber

Is it still incomprehensible? I have made some changes to make it less oblique. - BEC

I honestly don't think this article has any hope of surviving in anything remotely resembling its present form. It reads like a bunch of personal ideas that you have had and connections that you have made, some of which aren't very coherent, loosely grouped together under a confusing title. It does not amount to an encyclopedic article in any way that I can see. Sorry to be so negative, but that's the way I see it. We'll see how the consensus turns out. 86.186.8.216 (talk) 13:03, 26 April 2012 (UTC) (BTW, sorry my initial comment "incomprehensible" was so blunt; I didn't realise at the time that this was one person's work, I thought it was an accretion of various editors' inputs over time.)[reply]

Comment from Camber

Apology accepted. It was a bunch of ideas "loosely grouped together." I thought admitting it was project of five high school geometry classes would put the article out in left field immediately. It seems now that the consensus is with you and Stevenj. Again, as I said earlier (below), I can only respect your judgments. I am not well-versed in the deeper-seated traditions of Wikipedia. -BEC

BruceCamber (talk) 20:20, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Appears to be original research. Gandalf61 (talk) 08:40, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Camber

There is nothing original about it. Smarter people have blazed the trail. - BEC

Response to Camber - "original research" has a specific meaning in Wikipedia. Unless you can show that the concept you are describing is documented in reliable third-party sources (and is described as "base-2 scientific notation") then your article is not suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. Saying it is an extension of "base-10" notation/orders of magnitude is not sufficient. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:52, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Comment from Camber

I grew up in the Boston area and we used an expression, "Dawn is breaking over Marblehead" when people were slow on their uptake. I am getting it. Slowly. See my comments to Stevenj.

Comments from Camber

Of course as a 64-year old newbie to Wikipedia, I respect your judgments. Also, given my prior work with many professors at MIT (including Phil Morrison of Powers of Ten fame), I respect your disciplined thinking. This note is not so much an apology but a statement about an early observation back in December 2011. I looked for an article about base-2 notation online and on Wikipedia and found none. Even within base-ten, there was incompleteness. Those cited works did not start at the Planck unit and did not go to the edge of the observable universe. As a simple exercise, I wondered how many base-2 notations there were and was quite surprised that the number was so small. I found it curious that so much had been done on base-ten, and nothing on base-2 so proposed the article and it slowly emerged.

So, although my writing style may seem a bit like a diatribe, it is not. It has been an earnest attempt to follow the spirit of Wikipedia.

I would like to see an article on base-2 scientific notation written well enough to be accepted. I would like it to be the strongest possible article. I am open to suggestions, yet, of course, I would gladly withdraw the article that I initiated in place of the editorial work of others that is acceptable to you all. If I had found a base-2 notation article in the beginning, I would have used it, but the message from Wikipedia was "This page does not exist" along with an invitation to create it. I am open to any conversations about writing an encyclopedic article about base-2 scientific notation focusing on its geometries as a starting point.

-Bruce Camber 214-801-8521

BruceCamber (talk) 03:05, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Mr Camber, I took the liberty to make the heading you wrote a more compliant bold text, and added a level of indentation. I didn't change one word. 217.251.155.227 (talk) 14:17, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment from Camber Thank you, 217.251.155.227. Very gracious of you. I would welcome any word changes and word, sentence or paragraph deletions. -BEC

BruceCamber (talk) 21:38, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Undecided. The article mentions many different topics, yet it doesn't go into the necessary details with one. I assume it should treat the topic of powers of two and different phenomena at different scales, like the book "Powers of 10" does. But the writing is unclear and confusing because of the side topics. For example, buckyballs and nanotubes. They are example of structures at the molecular scale. They are not closely related to a base-2 notation. And in my eyes, 206 scales, each different from the others by a factor of two, are not 206 notations either. I would think that a notation is something like,

"Take the decimal number 9. Now multiply or divide by 2 to bring it into the 0.5 (excluded) to 1.0 (included) range, and note the factor as a power of two.

Thus, 9 = 0.5625 ^. 2⁴.

Or put back into the scales picture, the smallest scale to show an object 9 meters in size is the 2⁴ meters scale."

The other topics (buckyballs etc) should go into the other articles rather than this one, at least IMO.

217.251.155.227 (talk) 14:17, 25 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment from Camber I have deleted the buckyballs and nanotubes from the section "See more" and I have pushed a number of sentences around to focus on the nature of notation and the parallel constructs between notations in geometry. I agree about adding "...different phenomena at different scales" and anticipated that would be done eventually. Again, 217.251.155.227, thank you for your thoughtful response. -BEC

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. — Frankie (talk) 16:28, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. The gist of the article seems to be "We did the same thing that Morrison did in Powers of Ten, only we did it with powers of two; isn't that neat?" That's nice, but I don't see anything here that anyone would look for in an encyclopedia but that isn't already covered somewhere. I can think of lots of good webpages about science and mathematics that don't belong in an encyclopedia. —Tamfang (talk) 22:01, 26 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as WP:OR. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:59, 26 April 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Delete as WP:OR/WP:ESSAY. The basic topic is covered at Floating point, but I see nothing worth merging. I'm all for putting the work of high school students on the web, but a Wikipedia article might not be the best way. An illustrated web site somewhere might be more appropriate. -- 202.124.72.217 (talk) 10:22, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep but rewrite. The base 2 scientific notation does exist in both binary and decimal forms, see for example this tutorial note. I disagree that the floating point article would be appropriate - scientific notation would be better. But the base 2 scientific notation has its own areas of application, especially in computer science, and I would hope deserves an article of its own. The current content is poorly referenced inline, so it is hard to say what is valid and what is WP:OR. And anything worth keeping will also need editing for readability. Certainly, the notation itself needs to be properly explained. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 10:36, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Can you give an example of the application of base-2 scientific notation in computer science – other than for floating-point representation – that is described in a reliable source? --Lambiam 20:34, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  [Edit] Oops, it might have helped if I had actually read your question first. Sorry. Substantial rewrite follows:
  
  Off-hand, no. I suppose there might be an argument for moving that bit of the article to a new one called "Base 2 floating point notation", or merging it with floating point, but the present title; a) is preferable because it refers to the more general case and is sometimes used, and b) it offers the opportunity to clarify the different usages of the more general term. To back this view up:
  
  Wallis, W.D.; A beginner's guide to discrete mathematics, Birkhauser (2011), page 20:
  "Floating point notation is a special form of scientific notation" (Wallis' italics)
  
  and
  
  "One can also use floating point notation in bases other than 10—in base 2, ..."
  As so often, experts coming from different areas have subtly different takes on meanings and definitions, so that drawing a consistent view from a superficial scan of sources is pretty impossible. I give you my best shot in the time I can spare, but am open to stronger counter-examples! — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 21:36, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Errm... these examples do not exactly fit the profile of "other than for floating-point representation". --Lambiam 21:48, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    Apologies - now rewritten. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 21:58, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. --Lambiam 20:36, 27 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Scientific notation#Other bases. What can be said about the topic does not justify a separate article. The present article is mostly synthesis of material that is not really about notation per se, but some of it might find use somewhere else in our encyclopedia. --Lambiam 05:19, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd suggest a disambiguation link rather than a full redirect. Those of us familiar with this usage have to keep an open mind over whether other communities might have hijacked the term to mean something else. If someone has, and if there is enough material out there, then that merits its own place on Wikipedia. I saw some evidence of this from Google searches, so at this time I find it hard to justify wholesale deletion. I think it fair to give the "cosmic" discussion of the term a chance to develop greater encyclopedic rigour before deciding whether to delete. Further, I don't think that computer scientists are best placed to make that judgement (having been disambiguated to the sidelines, as it were), the material to date suggests that this is more a matter for that community itself; perhaps philosophers, historians and teachers of mathematics and physics. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 20:06, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You write "If someone has, and if there is enough material out there, then ...", but you do not give any verifiable evidence that this hypothetical situation has become reality. If we make this a dab page, we need at least two about equally plausible meanings for the term. I can think of only one, which is: scientific notation using base 2. --Lambiam 20:57, 28 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly so. However the article was created by an inexperienced editor. I'd just like to give him and his community a little more time to see if they can fix it up, before we hit them with a wholesale deletion. Is there some way to flag this deletion request for say revisiting in a few weeks' time? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 12:25, 29 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The original author's explanations on this thread already make it clear that his other meaning (a sequence of "notations" describing lengthscales increasing by factors of two from the Planck length, along with various analogies in geometry) is WP:OR. No valid justification has been given for any delay here. — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 13:09, 29 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.