Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Minimal negation operator

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. postdlf (talk) 02:20, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Minimal negation operator[edit]

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The 5min-consensus at WP:WPM was that this is WP:OR, despite the cool illustrations. Perhaps someone can find a source for it (other than Jon Awbrey). Tijfo098 (talk) 10:14, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. It may or may not be OR, but it certainly is completely unsourced, and -- perhaps even more relevant -- does not even try to explain why this apparently simple and uninteresting function is encyclopedically notable. At least, this could be stubbed to the first paragraph without losing any information. The rest is just a long rambling bag of "visualizations" that confuse more than they illuminate, plus some assorted definitions that don't belong there in any case. The illustrations are pretty and obviously constructed with loving care, but the meaning and relevance of many of them is completely opaque. –Henning Makholm (talk) 10:41, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Additional comment: The original creator of the article apparently tried to retract it after he was blocked, which generated a small edit war in the winter of 2007-2008. It looks like the creator tried to frame his retraction as a revocation of GFDL copyright permission, which (together with the block-evasion) did not sit well with the community. But that does not mean that we have to want the material. –Henning Makholm (talk) 10:41, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The article is unreferenced, and probably OR. There are no Google scholar or Google books hits for the exact phrase "minimal negation operator", and the hits for "minimal negation" don't seem to be relevant (at least not directly so) to the subject. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:59, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The originator just made it up along with a load of other articles which have been deleted in time. Nothing to salvage here. Dmcq (talk) 17:36, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The original creator tried to rewrite mathematics by inventing loads of new terms. That's why he is banned. It seems pretty clear that this is one of those articles. The illustrations are by another crank who is following a similar programme for revolutionising the iconography of Boolean logic. They are neither helpful nor evidence that any preservable effort has gone into the article. Hans Adler 18:02, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. It's not clear to me that the indefinite block was for original research (here is the discussion), rather it seems that the block was for disruption. However, that said, consensus seems to be that most of User:Jon Awbrey's contributions are iffy at best. Sławomir Biały (talk) 19:15, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That was before my time, but just from reading the discussion I think the ban was for many things, including the original research, although at the time it didn't play the biggest role. Now, years after he left, the disruption is almost forgotten, much of the ridiculous obfuscation of simple ideas has been fixed, but some of the original research is still in the encyclopedia. So it has become the main problem. But of course all this is off-topic here. ~~

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:49, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete No references (suggesting OR) and no indication of notability. Johnuniq (talk) 02:14, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hold on Nobody here has stated that they know anything about Peirce's logic. If JA follows Peirce's terminology (which influenced Shröder and later logicians and algebraicists, but is no longer common knowledge), then it's no wonder our mathematicians and logicians have trouble here, where they don't have trouble with unreferenced articles in math logic generally. Let's ask The Tetrast for help, and he can put out an alert on the Peirce discussion list. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (Discussion) 20:53, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'll run it by peirce-l but people will need to wait a few days for an answer. The Tetrast (talk) 21:18, 26 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]
- Hopefully, you'll come up with more than some blogger's reading of Pierce, because that would not satisfy WP:N/WP:RS. Tijfo098 (talk) 04:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Two hits on Google Books, one is at Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication by Robyn Carston, citing the other, The logic of language by Pieter A. M. Seuren. The term appears to be understood in linguistics. Southend sofa (talk) 17:43, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. These hits seem to have nothing to do with the subject of the article. Sławomir Biały (talk) 19:28, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think you didn't get my point. These hits are the only usage of the term that I can find in scholarly literature, so this, if anything, is what the article should be about. Southend sofa (talk) 19:48, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. How about we delete this article, and then you can write a completely unrelated article under the same title? Sławomir Biały (talk) 20:22, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Or how about we all just fix it? Southend sofa (talk) 06:25, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What purpose would that serve other than inflating the new article's history with completely unrelated stuff and making it easy to cause disruption by reverting to a pre-change version? Also, why should anyone besides you, who appear to have an interest, be required to do research on something completely unrelated that may or may not be a borderline notable topic (more likely not notable at all), just to get rid of an obviously invalid article? There are still millions of un- and underrepresented topics that need work before it makes sense to focus on a random expression that has two Google Book hits. Hans Adler 09:12, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

@Southend: Indeed. I'm not interested in "fixing it" along the lines you suggest because I don't think that the new topic is notable either. But that's irrelevant: this AfD debate is not about everything that anyone has ever meant by the particular conjunction of words "minimal negation operator". It is about the subject of this article. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"What purpose would that serve" -- improving the encyclopedia? Southend sofa (talk) 17:05, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you think you have enough material for an article about this different topic and you feel that it would help the encyclopedia, then you can go ahead and write that article, being careful to observe the WP:PILLARS. Because the article under discussion is completely unrelated to the one that you are interested in, the outcome of this discussion has no effect on your ability to do just that. Sławomir Biały (talk) 19:03, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Two replies at peirce-l, neither one recognizing the concept as Peirce-related or commenting on the terminology in the Wikipedia article. Meanwhile I've searched for alternate phrasings such as "minimal denial," "minimal negation," "minimal negation connective," and so on (sometimes in combination with the word "logic"), both on Google (Web, Books, & Scholar) and in digital editions of Peirce's works, but with minimal luck. I did find some things on a kind of "minimal negation" related to relevance logics and intuitionist logics, but it appears to my untrained eye to be quite unrelated to the kind of minimal negation discussed in the Wikipedia article. It might be worth it to wait a day past the weekend for further replies on peirce-l. Thanks in any case to Kiefer for the hold and everybody's patience to give the peirce-l crowd a chance at this. The Tetrast (talk) 05:05, 28 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]
Hold on this does not read like an OR to me. The negation operator is an important topic, and I believe that this one would be also sufficiently notable. I would prefer if more Logic majors would express their opinion. Nergaal (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Logical negation, which is something different, already has its own article. Sławomir Biały (talk) 18:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I work for a mathematical logic research centre. Most of those who have commented so far appear to have a similar background in mathematics, computer science or philosophy. Notability doesn't come from being potentially useful. It means that someone other than Wikipedia has written significantly about it. It is conceivable that this class of operators might have appeared somewhere in the literature related to Post's lattice, but apparently that is not the case. Hans Adler 08:02, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Could WP store a graveyard for weird stuff by Jon Awbry, like this article, perhaps connected to his user page? Many people have commented that it looks interesting .... Kiefer.Wolfowitz (Discussion) 22:08, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Something that should probably be considered in that case is that Awbury himself has stated that he wishes this content to be deleted. Sławomir Biały (talk) 00:51, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Awbrey has his texts, tables, graphic representations, etc., in various places such as MyWikiBiz, although his version of this particular article doesn't have the current illustrations (which help make the Wikipedia version not mostly Awbrey's work any more). So the questions remain - is the topic notable? and is it original research or in need of sourcing? Well, the topic of multigrade connectives appears in four books found by Google, one of them mentioning "theories of multigrade connectives (logics whose connectives fail to take a fixed number of arguments)". Probably some logician has discussed minimal negation (not to mention minimal affirmation), perhaps called by some technical names that we haven't guessed yet. Anyway such work seems hard to find. Latin essentially had both operations, as "aut non...aut non...aut non...[etc.]" and "aut...aut...aut...[etc.]," respectively. And, supposing that it is notable, then, given the definition of the operation, are any non-obvious claims (non-obvious at least to logicians) made about it, such as to require sourcing? Meanwhile, currently I don't expect that any more replies at peirce-l on this subject will arrive any time soon. The Tetrast (talk) 01:52, 29 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]

Comment I found somewhere online (I'm no logician) where somebody says that, in intuitionist logic, repeated XOR results in a compound (such as p XOR q XOR r) such that just one component (such as among p, q, r) is true. Of course such XOR is technically not a multigrade operator but that seems beside the point. (Meanwhile the phrase "minimal negation" is used in an unrelated sense, as far as I can tell, in the online texts on relevance logics and intuitionist logics that I mentioned earlier.) If intuitionist logic can do something notable with repeated XOR (likewise XOR NOT), then maybe it would be notable for classical logic too. Maybe there's some interesting application to be found by searching on multiple exclusive options. Well, I'm running out of ideas for ways to find more online touching on minimal affirmation and minimal negation. The Tetrast (talk) 03:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]

There's a valid point there: "Minimal negation" as defined in the article is actually just what we intuitively expect the family of n-ary XOR operations to be -- which happen to be not the same thing as the result of iterating binary XOR. There is some evidence that various authors work with some form or other of n-ary XOR, but in most cases I can't make out which one they are using. In any case that's a minor point to be mentioned at exclusive or, not a topic for a separate article, and the current title is useless for that topic anyway. Hans Adler 08:16, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Relation algebra was meant to capture such "multigrade connectors" (I put it in quotes because what you seem to describe has fixed arity). The program failed because there is no finite axiomatization. Tijfo098 (talk) 11:43, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If this article is deleted, Awbrey's content won't be lost to the Internet, as it remains at various sites, including MyWikiBiz which is at least one place where Awbrey himself keeps his version. Nobody on peirce-l seems to have anything more to say about it. At this point for my part I've no reason to vote keep, delete, or hold. So now I abstain. I doubt I'll find more to say about it. The Tetrast (talk) 17:19, 29 March 2011 (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.