Portal talk:Mathematics/Archive2018

Village Pump proposal to delete all Portals
Editors might be interested to see a discussion concerning the proposed deletion of all Portals across Wikipedia. See Village_pump_(proposals) Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 19:43, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Notice from the Portals WikiProject
WikiProject Portals is back!

The project was rebooted and completely overhauled on April 17th, 2018. Its goals are to revitalize the entire portal system, make building and maintaining portals easier, support the ongoing improvement of portals and the editors dedicated to this, and design the portals of the future.

As of May 2nd, 2018, membership is at 60 editors, and growing. You are welcome to join us.

There are design initiatives for revitalizing the portals system as a whole, and for improving each component of portals. So far, 2 new dynamic components have been developed: Template:Transclude lead excerpt and Template:Transclude random excerpt.

Tools are provided for building and maintaining portals, including automated portals that update themselves in various ways.

And, if you are bored and would like something to occupy your mind, we have a wonderful task list.

From your friendly neighborhood Portals WikiProject. Hope to see you there. Sincerely,    &mdash; The Transhumanist   07:37, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Outdated links
In section "Things you can do", there are two links to Pages needing attention/Mathematics. However, this page shows a disclaimer at its top telling it is inactive. Could somebody who is familiar with this portal page please update the links? Are there still collections of articles requiring an image and/or pages needing attention? - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 12:05, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I have updated that template to favor categories over manually constructed lists. Retained one link to Pages needing attention/Mathematics, however. - 72.182.55.186 (talk) 19:52, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
 * "That template" being Portal:Mathematics/Things you can do. - 72.182.55.186 (talk) 20:47, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

After the April 2018 reboot, the problem still remains. I suggest to delete the outdated link Pages needing attention/Mathematics, in order not to discourage newcomers. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 09:25, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I thought indicating that it's an "Old page" (in the link text) was sufficient (yes, that IP editor was me, editing away from home). Besides, many articles listed there still do need help. I started to remove dealt-with articles from the first section of that page, "Accuracy disputes", and about half of them seem to still have that problem. I assume similar results would be found in the other sections. Of course, this means that tagged articles are languishing that way for years, so these lists (and the templates and categories they're based on) don't seem to be encouraging editors to actually fix the problems. That may be partly due to being "hidden away" in places no one looks at. Ideally, the relevant templates (Dispute about, etc.) would be modified to indicate relevant subject area, for automatic sub-categorization, like stubs. Those subcategories could then be more easily linked to and bookmarked by editors interested in working on such matters. But that may be more difficult to accomplish (as it likely requires consensus for the change) than simply requesting another bot resume updating the page we're talking about. - dcljr (talk) 17:57, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Change of intro
Note that the intro section of this portal has been replaced by a "live" copy (transclusion) of the Mathematics article's lead section. Do we want this? - dcljr (talk) 20:59, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, so one person doesn't want it... I think a slightly longer intro would be nice. Should we update our static copy with a little more info from the current Mathematics lead section? (I actually agree that selective transclusion is too "risky", but since no one commented here I figured I'd try out the template feature...) - dcljr (talk) 20:45, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I think transcluding an article is problematic in a few ways, mostly that anyone editing the article could change it in ways that make the intro look odd, meaning it requires even more maintenance, using obscure transclusion methods, than it needs as just text. If you think it could be improved feel free to edit it. I a while ago drastically shortened it as I thought it far too long, taking up most of the page, but there is no right or wrong length.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 20:52, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Here Portal talk:Mathematics/Archive2015 is the discussion on the intro length, for a rationale for it being shortened.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 23:05, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Quantity and number
The lead sentence currently says


 * ”Mathematics is the study of numbers, quantity, space, structure, and change.”

I’ve always thought that the conventional list of topics is just the last four, without “numbers”, since quantity is measured by numbers. The lead of our page Mathematics lists only the last four. Any objection to my deleting “numbers”? Loraof (talk) 21:30, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Numbers do more than just measure quantity. The fact that p is prime can be important without actually having (or even imagining) a set of p items, and even has practical uses in cryptography etc.  But if that's not important enough to deserve a mention, let's remove it. Certes (talk) 21:49, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
 * This was not actually done, but now the lead section of the Mathematics article is being transcluded into that section of the portal page, so this discussion is now moot. - dcljr (talk) 20:01, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
 * And now my previous comment is moot because the transclusion I was talking about has been reverted. (!) - dcljr (talk) 19:50, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Example of citation for a small page
Hi,

I have a problem, occurring often. I create pages such as nilsemigroup. And the page obtain the remark "it has insufficient inline citations". Do you have an example of such small wikipedia page with sufficient inline citation ? Because, the wikipedia page is quite small, there is not a lot to say about nilsemigroups. And every single information page came from page 198 of Mathematical fundation of automata theory by Pin. And is also present in page 110 of Semigroups by Grillet. I'm not exaggerating, every single informations about nilsemigroups themselves are on the very same page of the book. I assume that adding as reference «page 198 of Pin» on every statement of the article is quite useless. Since it would just be repeating the same fact over and over and over. So what am I supposed to do ? Would you have an example of a small page, with sufficient inline citation, where every single citations are related to the same page of the same book ? Arthur MILCHIOR (talk) 08:41, 3 December 2018 (UTC)