Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Buchholz hydra

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 keep. (non-admin closure) Waddles 🗩 🖉 19:53, 4 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Buchholz hydra

[Hide this box] New to Articles for deletion (AfD)? Read these primers!

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

Presumably a game as described by the article, however I'm not sure what this is even about exactly as it's too technical for me to decipher, but that isn't why I'm starting this discussion. My concern is that this is wholly written like a essay or guide on how to play it and also uses first- and second-person pronouns throughout the article. This is among other issues such as the lack of footnotes which brings concerns to whether this is notable and how much of it is factual, as the creator does have a history of creating articles about made-up topics. I don't think this should be an article on Wikipedia, it's more of just an essay. Waddles 🗩 🖉 21:42, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. Waddles 🗩 🖉 21:42, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Waddles 🗩 🖉 21:42, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment See hydra game or here for introductions to the general topic area that might make more sense than the writing here does. XOR'easter (talk) 22:15, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. A "game", in the mathematical logic sense, does not have to be fun. The first reference is by Buchholz, and the remaining ones are responses and additional knowledge about Buchholz's article (thereby establishing notability) or about other researchers' responses and additional knowledge. Notability does not require that a topic be easily understood by the layperson. Eastmain (talk • contribs) 22:21, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Eastmain: Note I did state "I'm not sure what this is even about exactly as it's too technical for me to decipher, but that isn't why I'm starting this discussion." My main concern is that this is just a guide/essay, not an article. Waddles 🗩 🖉 22:37, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - It's not a "guide", in the "how to get the lowest time in the original Zelda" sense. It's an article describing a mathematical problem. Nor would I call it an "essay"; in a couple places, it reads a bit opinionated, but that's a fairly minor cleanup matter. It uses "we" more than Wikipedia house style prefers, but again, that's a cleanup job; mathematics textbooks and journal articles use "we" all the time, and the uses here wouldn't be out of line there. XOR'easter (talk) 23:44, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Deletion is not cleanup — just copyedit ithe article yourself. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 22:40, 3 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- I would not recommend copyediting to editors unfamiliar with this area of mathematics. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:51, 4 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The nominator appears to misunderstand this article, which is about a piece of mathematics rather than a recreational game. As there is no subject-specific notability guideline for pieces of mathematics, I think we have to go by WP:GNG, which asks for non-trivial in-depth coverage from multiple in-depth sources. We have that from the original work of Buchholz, the works of Himano with the subject in the title, the published review of the work of Himano, etc., already listed in the article. There is more on the same topic, by other independent groups, not currently listed, for instance Weiermann, Andreas; Wilken, Gunnar (2013), "Goodstein sequences for prominent ordinals up to the ordinal of $\Pi _{1}^{1}$ - $\mathrm {CA} _{0}$ ", Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 164 (12): 1493–1506, doi:10.1016/j.apal.2013.06.019, MR 3093398. I think that's enough to meet the low bar of GNG. The fact that the article does not make its topic clear to non-specialists is problematic, but WP:DINC. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:48, 4 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. While the article may warrant being tagged for de-jargoning and re-writing, and needs footnotes and so on, I don't think it is close to meriting WP:TNT, and a quick WP:BEFORE suggests this meets WP:GNG. The nominator needs to read our WP:DELETION policy, and as others pointed out, this seems to be the case of 'deletion is not cleanup'. As for the claim that it is an essay, I don't think it is essayish enough to warrant TNTing. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:49, 4 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep As David Eppstein says, we have no guideline specifically for the wiki-notability of mathematical topics, so we go by the general method: did people other than the inventor of the idea care about it enough to write about it? Multiple people, writing in depth? It looks like that standard is met here. The article does need work (most do). Perhaps the most important thing is that it lacks inline references, so a reader can't go directly to a source for a specific claim. It also needs a much more gentle ramp-up in difficulty; see WP:TECHNICAL and in particular WP:UPFRONT. But those are solvable problems, not grounds for deletion, and to be fair, getting the technical details right is often an easier starting point than writing an introduction that is more broadly intelligible. XOR'easter (talk) 17:12, 4 September 2021 (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.