User:David Eppstein/Egyptian fraction

One of my interests, and a subject that I've edited several Wikipedia articles related to, is Egyptian fractions. Unfortunately this subject also appears to be the interest of some other editors who have dropped cruft about it into articles where I believe it does not belong. Since Wikipedia proper seems to be no place for opinions, let me take the opportunity to express here some of my own:

• Egyptian fractions are interesting and notable, both as modern number theory and as a subject for the history of mathematics. Wikipedia has and should have articles discussing both aspects of Egyptian fractions.
• Standards of documentation for historical research on Egyptian fractions should be higher than that for elementary mathematics: a web page may be an acceptable source for a pure mathematics article, but assertions about ancient history must be justified either by historical documents themselves, or reputable academic articles analyzing those documents. The reason is that mathematics itself, by its proof-based nature, is largely self-documenting: the correctness of an article may often be seen from the article itself, while the sources are needed mainly to justify notability, to guard against WP:OR, and to document assertions about the history of the mathematics in question. In the history of Egyptian fractions, though, almost everything beyond the original papyri themselves is interpretation and opinion, so we need some way to separate what's commonly believed among scholars from wild speculation.
• Discussion of the historical aspects of Egyptian mathematics should be limited only to those articles where the historical connection is relevant to the main subject of the article, notable as something one should know about the primary subject of the article, and documentable by appropriate sources.
• As Wikipedia already contains several extensive articles on Egyptian mathematics, any such discussion in other articles should be brief and to the point, with appropriate links to the Egyptian mathematics articles for more details. All such insertions should be written in such a way that they do not disrupt the main intellectual flow of the article.
• Articles in which the mathematical study of Egyptian fractions is relevant but the historical connections are not notable or documentable should refrain from mentioning Egyptians.
• Eye of Horus and related technical phrases from the historical study of Egyptian fractions should be used very sparingly in articles not primarily about ancient Egyptian mathematics.

I wouldn't have written all this if I hadn't seen articles that, to my mind, violated these tenets.