Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Strong (relative detectability)

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. –MuZemike 02:40, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Strong (relative detectability)[edit]

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Strong can mean, umm, intense. One of the least necessary articles I've ever come across.

I am also nominating the following related page because it says the same thing:

Clarityfiend (talk) 10:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC) Clarityfiend (talk) 10:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:32, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Signal strength seems much better, and about the same thing. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 15:40, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I created this article as a target for "Strong" in the disambiguation, in desperation (I think as a third-party editor) when an objection was raised years ago to calling Cygnus X-1 (in its FA review) "one of the strongest X-ray sources" in the sky. I searched (not exhaustively, but at least until I was exhausted) for a reliable source for the usage in vain, yet it is firmly and widely established in scientific and technical literature (from physics to biology, signal processing, electronics, statistics, etc), and generally understood by practitioners and interested lay people. A vast number of examples could be found, a la OED, but listing examples did not seem to formally satisfy Wikipedia sourcing requirements (and listing such examples would seem to be inappropriate WP:OR in any case) so I just decided to break the rules. (I see the definition is no longer linked in from our Strong or Strength disambig pages. I can understand how that might have happened, but it seems to me something is needed to answer the fair question of a [technically] naive editor.)

I used the fussy "relative detectability" qualifier because in practice the term is never absolute, but always used with respect to some practical context, usually implicit, which is often the relative standing among other similar members of some abstractly defined class (eg, cosmic X-ray sources, as observed from Earth), or more fundamentally with respect to some statistically detectable sensitivity floor, defined in terms of a specific relevant observational noise level.

I favored "strong" versus "intense", "bright", or other possible alternative terms (which are also commonly used) as "strong" is probably the most general adjective used in this context. "Intense", in particular, has very specific technical meanings (eg, in optics, signal processing, and radiation transfer theory), which are not synonymous, though it is often used to mean loosely the same thing.

Although formally irrelevant per Wikipedia rules, I hope I will be forgiven for stating that I am a professional scientist (PhD physicist. now retired) with sufficient experience to make me confident that the above assertions are at least "true", though labor intensive to properly verify according to my understanding of Wikipedia rules. Perhaps some other more knowledgeable editor knows just how to do it with reasonable effort. I suppose the correct solution would be to get the term, in this general but technical sense, defined in Wiktionary, but I have no experience with that. (BTW, I appreciate this criticism, at least for my own education here, as I think this kind of situation is fairly general, and probably not uncommon.) Wwheaton (talk) 00:40, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete both as WP:DICDEF. Magnitude (astronomy) and Signal strength cover the same topic in far more detail. -- 202.124.73.175 (talk) 03:16, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My problem with these solutions is that they are insufficiently general. "Magnitude" in astronomy is not used for wavelengths far from the optical. The article on Signal strength could in principle serve as a target for "strongest", except that it currently defines it only in terms of radio signals, and would need to be considerably generalized to address the problem with Cygnus X-1, and countless similar cases. Wwheaton (talk) 01:04, 11 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Miskwito (talk) 20:30, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comment / Weak delete: One or both could be redirected to 'Signal strength' if that would aid in disambiguation of the term on relevant pages. That seems to be the intended usage (though I'm happy to be corrected on that point), and redirects are cheap. On the other hand, I don't think that deletion would entail much loss of information. Cnilep (talk) 00:55, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the original objection to "strong" in the Cygnus X-1 article FA review was ill-advised? I think the term is surely not ambiguous for any likely reader, and really should not have been challenged. Yet I could not find any applicable definition in the sources I searched at the time. A dictionary of scientific and technical terms would probably have it, but I had none such available then. Wwheaton (talk) 01:13, 11 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Cygnus X-1 use of the word "strongest" appears to me to have no more than its everyday, prosaic meaning, and not refer to some precise scientific definition, which you yourself admit you cannot dig up. Even if you found such an entry in a dictionary, that would run afoul of WP:DICTDEF. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:21, 11 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as lacking independent third party sources. Stuartyeates (talk) 04:52, 15 November 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.