Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Internet shorthand 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 redirect to Mathematical markup languages. Majorly (hot!) 21:12, 19 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Internet shorthand notation[edit]

No sources, no clear focus. $\neg \exists$ a clear definition supported by reliable sources $\implies$ $\neg$ article. —xyzzy_n 01:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
$\neg$ Article - patently impossible to categorize or standardize, by its very nature. Not an encyclopedic topic, and will always be WP:OR. --Haemo 04:49, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Delete If this is 'widely used' then source it and I will change my vote. Until then the burden is on the creator, not the reader.--killing sparrows 05:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
delete I've never heard this called 'internet shorthand', and a quick search confirms that it may not be in any sort of wide use. All it appears to be is using the computer programming notation for things requiring superscript, subscript or other non-standard ASCII symbols (IE SQRT() as opposed to the square root sign carrot (^) for exponent, and so on). Wintermut3 06:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- "^" is a caret not a carrot. Uncle G 12:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - oddly this was used (showing my age here), when computer programs only coped with text. Appears to be a topic that is completely unsourceable to any reliable sources. Definately original research by our standards - Peripitus (Talk) 11:25, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: These notations are well-known, but somehow it seems strange to me to write an article on some kind of mathematical "Internet shorthand notation". The real source, such as it is, is the Internet, or more properly, Usenet, where this notation is used all the time in newsgroups such as sci.math. One will also see it on web math documents written by old fogeys. But there really isn't a a name for it per se, and I think these notations can be rather ad-hoc. I've always referred to it as ASCII math notation and had no problem being understood. There's also a fairly typical way people use ASCII art-like commutative diagrams and such, but again, it would be strange to have an article on that. --C S (Talk) 09:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- If it has never been named or documented, then Wikipedia isn't the place to be the first to name or document it, per our Wikipedia:No original research policy. It should be first named and documented somewhere else. Uncle G 12:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Potential keep, this is usually called ASCII math notation and should be so renamed. Google results Google Scholar results --Dhartung | Talk 21:50, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep but rename to ASCII math notation per Dhartung. I did a search for that phrase and found two relevant links which I added as references to the article. But the current name is no good. —David Eppstein 22:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete This falls under the realm of a slang dictionary, which Wikipedia is not Adam McCormick 00:58, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and rename to ASCII math notation per Dhartung. Jmath666 01:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Mathematics in e-mails or on Usenet is often written in ASCII. Everybody has their own ad-hoc way to do this. Some websites have attempted to formalize it (the "references" mentioned by David Eppstein), but none of these attempts has taken off and a short study of the Google Scholar results mentioned by Dhartung indicates that there are no secondary sources about such attempts; those article that do talk about ASCII notation only say it's ad-hoc and ambiguous. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:27, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Think about it ;) There is a potential article here, on what some mathematicians (including myself) call "pigtex". Mathematicians frequently use TeX source notation to communicate with each other in emails, although this source is usually not parsable: for instance, dollar signs are often omitted, and undefined but common macros (such as \R) are used without comment. It might be nice to document this phenomenon in WP. Geometry guy 17:25, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes, but, as with any other kind of slang, multiple people must have done research on this before we write an article. Somehow I don’t think mathematicians find TeX so fascinating as to waste time on documenting other people’s use of it (in the best case, they document their own macros). Neither of the two links added so far to the article does this, anyway. —xyzzy_n 18:19, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - My impression is that there isn't a single standardized usage, but that there are some widely used common usages. So I think the article should make clear that this is how mathematicians often communicate electronically, and that it isn't standardized, but that (starting with eqn and TeX etc) there exist systems for converting this kind of ASCII simplified math notation into something more formal. I think the references I included support that and that plenty of other references could be found stating similar things, both in printed books such as Knuth's and in online documents. —David Eppstein 20:16, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I've used Kernighan & Cherry's EQN (which I liked), Knuth's TeX (which I liked less), Lamport's LaTeX (which I liked better than TeX), W3C's MathML (which is absurdly bloated to mark up), and Jipsen's ASCIIMathML (a tolerable crude way to produce MathML via JavaScript). (To write the number "1" in MathML, we must write "<mn>1</mn>", so clearly no one will use that informally!) I've also used Macsyma, Mathematica, Maple, and MATLAB, among others. The notations in the article seem ad hoc and arbitrary, not necessarily based on a study of formal syntax for equation processors nor a study of informal syntax employed for communication in ASCII. An article comparing formal syntaxes used for typesetting and for manipulation would be of interest, and well-founded material on informal practice might also be of some interest. The present article is useless, or worse. --KSmrq^T 09:58, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Delete probably not sourceable, and not very encyclopedic even if sourced. WP is not a guide to notation; rather, we use notation to get the content across. --Trovatore 02:38, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to new article Mathematical markup languages. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-04-13 07:10Z

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Quarl ^(talk) 07:15, 13 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep needs to be sourced. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 17:13, 13 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Keep article has potential. just needs a bit more information and expanding —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dark Devil (talk • contribs) 11:43, 14 April 2007 (UTC).[reply]
Redirect to new article Mathematical markup languages, this new article covers the same as this but in a much more encylopedic style. --Salix alba (talk) 13:17, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect. Changed from keep, above. It may be (though it seems unlikely) that there is enough material on the ASCII notation alone to split it out of the new article Mathematical markup language, but in the meantime that is a good place for this material. —David Eppstein 15:15, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to Mathematical markup languages. (The corresponding content there is still unsourced, but that can be sorted out in situ.) —xyzzy_n 15:38, 16 April 2007 (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.