Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dispersive PDE Wiki

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 no consensus to delete, default to keep, other solutions such as mergers are not ruled out. This was an unusually good AfD discussion, by the way, although several contributors referred to "votes" that, in fact, do not exist in an AfD discussion. Sandstein 09:45, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dispersive PDE Wiki[edit]

Non-notable website. Mike Peel 16:12, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy Delete — No ghits, ask got 4, yahoo has 1. Not all sites that run MediaWiki need to be on the wikipedia. The artice doesn't assert its importance and has no references. FirefoxMan 21:39, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Speedy per FirefoxMan (but as long as it's here on AfD I'll wait a day or so.) Melchoir 05:19, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This AfD was just mentioned on WT:WPM; I think the WPM people should be given a chance to respond, rather than cutting off debate early. And the involvement of T.Tao seems to lend notability to the subject. All that said, the relevant guideline seems to be WP:WEB; I'm not entirely happy with that guideline but I don't think this is the right test case for it. And this article seems clearly to fail that guideline. So weak delete, not speedy. —David Eppstein 06:08, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you think the article is worthwhile, regardless of how it relates to the guideline, you can change your vote to "keep". In this decision, it's the votes that matter. (We can fix the guideline later.) --KSmrq^T 07:27, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's my understanding that this process is not a vote on how much we like the article, but rather a discussion to build a consensus on whether the article meets the appropriate notability guidelines. —David Eppstein 07:53, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There might be some theory to that effect, just like there is a theory that juries in U.S. law should do exactly as the judge instructs. But, like the juries, we are free to decide however we like. An admin closes the AfD upon determination that a consensus has been reached, and usually that is based on the votes and the arguments. But then, that means the admin is not exactly bound by the votes either. There are benefits to "going by the book", and there are benefits to tossing the book. We hope to choose wisely, presumably with the goal of making a better encyclopedia. That said, here we have no need for extra-book activity, for WP:WEB states
This page gives some rough guidelines which most Wikipedia editors use…

In this instance we have a clearly non-commercial, non-vanity site full of quality content with a six-year history and world-class contributors. Do we really want to speedily delete our stub out of misguided devotion to a rough, non-binding guideline intended to prevent crank, vanity, and commercial site ads?

Notability is a peculiar Wikipedia concept. For example, my "Don't kick the baby!" link is to an article about a cartoon character in a TV show. So Ike Broflovski is "notable"; but by popular standards, probably 90% of our mathematics topics are not! (How many editors, even among mathematicians, are familiar with the Szemerédi regularity lemma, or have any interest in the Ganea conjecture?) Look at all the articles on Marvel Comics characters; is this mathematics article less worthy than one on, say, Modred the Mystic? Of course not, and it's up to us to say so, just like the Marvel Comics fans speak up for their interests. --KSmrq^T 11:45, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
People have written about the Szemerédi regularity lemma. No one has written about the Dispersive PDE Wiki. No article that we write on the latter could be an encyclopedic, tertiary reference; it can only be an advertisement, and I for one oppose advertising anything. This is why we have notability standards in the first place. Melchoir 18:51, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep ~~if article can be improved to WP standards before close of the AfD. Technically it meets the Speedy requirements, but~~ There is a lot more content in the referenced site that I first thought, and it looks very legit. For example, see [1]. The creator, User:Haseldon, seems to be an established mathematics editor on Wikipedia, and I think he could fix the article. I notified him that this is up for deletion. ~~Unless the article is improved, I'd vote for delete (but not speedy). The Dispersive PDE Wiki site itself does not meet WP:WEB, but~~ The content of the site is GFDL and some of it might be usable in WP's math articles. It would be a bit surly to delete the description of something we might later make use of. EdJohnston 06:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Changed my vote to a simple Keep after I expanded the article. This stuff looks like real Wikipedia-type material, and it's worth having an article that comments on it. In its present form I think the site has value to mathematicians and deserves at least a pocket explanation from us. I can imagine creating cross-links between WP articles and the sections of this site. EdJohnston 18:25, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with the way you've expanded the article. The whole of the second section could be moved into the Dispersive PDE article, sans self-references. The third section belongs in Dirichlet problem. That gets us back to the first paragraph, and the point of this AfD. Is the website notable enough to have a whole article dedicated to itself, rather than just having links to it from the bottom of pages such as Dispersive PDE? At 50 active contributors, assuming that no-one else is as notable as Terence Tao, I'd say that's a resounding no. Mike Peel 18:42, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep And let's do wait for comments from interested mathematicians, who are just now beginning to learn of this AfD. Those with little mathematical background may not appreciate why Terence Tao is relevant; the answer is that he is considered one of the best minds in contemporary mathematics, having just won a Fields Medal (a rare top prize in mathematics) and a MacArthur Fellowship (sometimes called a "genius award"). If he thinks the site is worth knowing about (making many hundreds of contributions to the wiki version), and you don't, who should we believe? Hmm. The article is a stub less than a month old, and the wiki form of the site has only existed since July 2006 (but using content hosted by Tao dating back to October 2000). It is unrealistic to expect it to get lots of search hits already. (In fact, given the nature of its content, it will likely never be heavily linked.) "Don't kick the baby!" --KSmrq^T 07:27, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment: looking at Tao's contributions they all seem to have been in July and August, soon after the wiki was created, with very little since then. --Salix alba (talk) 13:56, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- We don't keep articles just because we like their subjects, or because we think their subjects might become notable in the future. Advocates of various websites use those arguments all the time. Melchoir 07:56, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Rename to mathematics websites and expand. As it stands it clearly falls foul of WP:WEB and is unlikely to change it status. I don't particularly see the utility of having this article, it is basically just a link and the information here could be included in Terence Tao or an appropriate PDE page. Howerver there are a number of other similar mathematical communities, the Knot Atlas springs to mind. I think it would be more useful to have a single page documenting these than a lot of little stubs. --Salix alba (talk) 10:15, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: I'm not sure I understand the arguments for "keep". Why should we have an article on some wiki because Terence Tao likes to contribute to it? It's more of an interesting thing about Tao rather than an affirmation of the notability of the wiki. Does notability just transfer like that so easily? I'm sure the wiki will do well enough regardless of what is decided here. I'm sure with contributors like Tao, the site is worth knowing about. I don't see why this means that it becomes Wikipedia's mission to advertise it though. For example, there are obscure books that are worth reading. Are we supposed to say they are notable because we like them? --C S (Talk) 10:18, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I put the site's article up on AfD as it makes no claims of notability, and it doesn't appear to be notable. If it's got content that is useful, then by all means link to the site in articles on that topic (or better still, incorporate the content and reference it). But does the site need a whole article to itself? If so, please show that it is notable - e.g. news articles that discuss it, or references to it in the literature, etc.

Additionally, I dislike Salix alba's proposal to set up a mathematics website page, as Wikipedia is not a links directory. Mike Peel 12:10, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. The search term [dispersive-wiki -site:tosio.math.toronto.edu] gives me 28 ghits; perhaps not all unique, but clearly more than the proposer's 0 ghits. More to the point, this is not "just another" blog, webcomic, or social-network builder. Among the dispersive-pde websites, it is the number one. --Lambiam ^Talk 12:45, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I'm not ready to cast a vote yet, but I did read the guideline WP:WEB. And I looked at the website a little, and I searched Wikipedia for references to Dispersive Partial Differential Equations. The only relevant hits I got were in articles about Maxwell's equations, and about the Schrödinger wave equation. Those may not be the best understood PDE's in the world, but they are extremely important in physics. And I gather that the point of calling something a "dispersive" PDE is that its solutions don't look like persistent standing waves, but decay over time somehow (the sine wave versus a Bessel function, more or less). So it seems to me that the best solution might be to have an article that actually discusses dispersive PDE's, and why they're important, and maybe why mathematicians have unanswereed questions about them, and then link to Mr. Tao's wiki through that article. Oh -- I also read Mike Peel's home page, and see that he's in astrophysics. I understand now why he thinks Tao's website is not notable. The website is focusing on the well-posedness problem. I've studied with both physicists and mathematicians, and the physicists never seemed to care about the Dirichlet problem. But the math department devoted an entire 12-week class to it. This is analogous. DavidCBryant 13:18, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to DavidCBryant for the extensive comment. I took some words from David's comments and added them to the article. Please look at the article as expanded, and if you think it worthy of keeping, make further improvements. Feel free to replace any incorrect material. EdJohnston 18:25, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OT remark But please, not "Mr. Tao". Just "Tao" is fine, but if there's to be an honorific it should be Dr. Perhaps Dr.issimo, in Tao's case. --Trovatore 19:01, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Merge to Terence Tao or Delete (so that this !vote is not counted against a delete consensus). If the wiki were a reliable source, in our sense, it would be worth keeping in order to link to; but it can't be, for the same reason WP itself isn't. Salix alba's suggestion (Merge to List of mathematical websites) also has merit. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:37, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment If it's not notable now, it may be in a few months. Sometimes if there's a consensus to delete and an article accordingly gets deleted, that fact is cited if an article with the same title on the same subject is created later. What will be the course of events if this gets deleted now and not long afterward this topic becomes notable? Michael Hardy 21:30, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- This is one reason to merge; the link will be in Terence Tao, and the merger can be reverted. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:03, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- Presumably people will actually have to use their noggins and realize that the situation has changed, which could be demonstrated in some manner. --C S (Talk) 05:24, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Seems every bit as notable as anything else in Category:Wiki communities, or, for example, as notable as planetmath. linas 15:38, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. PlanetMath has a lot of links from other math articles (generally as the credit for some specific external link to a PlanetMath page on the article's subject, via the {{PlanetMath}} template). Do you see it as likely that the Dispersive PDE Wiki can be similarly linked from more than a handful of articles? —David Eppstein 16:13, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More importantly, people occasionally write about planetmath: try [2] or [3]. You wouldn't know this from reading the article, of course, but if our Planetmath article went on AfD I'd vote to keep while citing those sources. Melchoir 23:45, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PM has a lot of links because of WP:PMEX. In principle, we could copy most of the content from the PDE wiki into WP, which would result in hundreds(?) of links. It should be noted that none of te WP math regulars are active on PDE's.

More importantly, I note that we have wildly differing standards for notability on WP. In math, we tend to reject articles on mathematicians who haven't won any important prizes, whereas average joe-blow programmers get to have bio's. We don't have articles for most physics/math journals, but we have articles for comic books. Notability criteria for rock bands seems low but staunchly defended. So although I get the feeling we sometimes have too much crap on WP, I'm erring on the side of caution: do we through out the baby with the bathwater, by voting to delete things like this? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Linas (talk • contribs) 01:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC).[reply]

Comment another solution would be to move it to project space, we reciently had a discussion on WT:WPM about creating a list of resources for mainly books. This could be expanded to cover the good, but less notiable maths website as a resource for editors. --Salix alba (talk) 18:56, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very good idea; all we'd need there would be the link and a paragraph of explanation. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:11, 19 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. I agree with Mike Peel's comments. It's a great resource, but that is not a reason to have an article in Wikipedia. As long as no reliable source refers to the wiki, we should not have an article about it. ~~Do not merge with Terence Tao; the wiki does not seem to be an important part of Terry's life, and reversely, Terry is just one of the contributors as far as I can see~~. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:34, 19 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Actually, from 2000 until the wiki was started a few months ago, Tao hosted the content. Also, if he is just one of many contributors, that would seem to be an argument for keeping an independent page. (Ironically, if Wolfram owned and advertised the site and used it to feed their business, as with MathWorld, more people would know about it. Remember Catch-22?) --KSmrq^T 17:51, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the correction. I still feel that the wiki is not important enough for Terence Tao to be mentioned in his article, but perhaps one line is warranted. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 14:23, 21 December 2006 (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.