Talk:Chebfun

RfD
I am very reluctant to believing that this should be on Wikipedia, or that it sets a good signal.

Before I explain my reasons, let me clarify: 1) There are *numerical softwares* that certainly deserve to be on wikipedia; e.g. IPOPT or BLAS. This is so because 1.1) they are incredibly widely used by hundreds of millions of people. 1.2) they are reseached and worked on by hundreds of thousands of researches. 1.3) they are critical for the functioning of our infra-structure (Internet routing, video compression, scheduling,...). 1.4) they are utilized within the treatment of important classes of problems that literaally every engineer encounters on a daily basis. 1.5) it is non-trivial, with an incredible effort involved in its development to getting it to where it is today. 2) There are *algorithms* that certainly deserve to be on wikipedia; e.g. Fourer transform. This is so because 2.1) they are incredibly widely used by hundreds of millions of people. 2.2) they are reseached and worked on by hundreds of thousands of researches. 2.3) they are critical for the functioning of our infra-structure (Internet routing, video compression, scheduling,...). 2.4) they are utilized within the treatment of important classes of problems that literaally every engineer encounters on a daily basis. 2.5) it is non-trivial, with an incredible effort involved in its development to getting it to where it is today.

The present project "cheyfun" differs. It is rather a student's homework or project work on a trivial subject (like "code your own Fourier transform") than a sophisticated result. X.1) It is probably not used by anyone other than its developers. X.2) There was no research necessary or no working force needed to create it. X.3) The existence or non-existence of this "software" (or Matlab-sheet) is irrelevant for anyone. X.4) There is no documented relevance yet of this piece of code for anything outside of it. X.5) It is trivial and can be recreated easily, probably at a time shorter than digging into what they coded.

Since it has not been published in a peer-reviewed paper, it also falls into the category of original research and should therefor not be published on Wikipedia. I believe Github or Stackoverflow or Mathoverflow seems a more appropriate place then. I see indeed it is on Github. This is excellent.

If we settle a wikipedia article for every little student project then we would become another "Code-Ocean" (yes, that site exists). The issue with this trend would be: 1) people could not be sure that the article has high quality, presenting settled knowledge. 2) there would arise a mismatch in amount of articles on subjects versus relevance of the respective subjects.

In conclusion, people should be prevented from artificially creating the impression of relevance of their work by creating a wikipedia article of it.

– comment by 2A02:908:1657:A860:59B:A21:CC1F:3E6D, 14 March 2021


 * This is absolute nonsense. Chebfun is a large-scale long-term research project developed by a team of professional applied mathematicians explicitly funded as a project by (relatively) large government grants, is the result of decades of their peer-reviewed research work, has been cited in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=chebfun, is the basis for multiple academic books, and sees at least some practical use in industry. Every single claim written above is false. What is true is that the Wikipedia article isn’t very complete. Please feel free to significantly extend it. –jacobolus (t) 02:18, 28 July 2021 (UTC)