Talk:Toy model

Lack of context
This article does a poor job of explaining the nature of the "toy" description. My feeling is that this is a distinction from a physical model, however neither article does a good job of communicating this distinction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.254.117 (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Borderline POV
This article does little to establish a toy model as an objective classification of models, and has a whiff of name-calling by labeling a theory a "toy". My feeling is that there is a real distinction being made, but that it's expressed in a very vague way. The sense in which it is being used, seems to suggest that it means "not full known fidelity", however, it would seem to me that this notion is already known within physics under the effective theory terminology. If a toy model and a effective theory are the same idea, then there should probably not be two separate articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.254.117 (talk) 22:49, 21 December 2016 (UTC)


 * "Toy model" and "effective theory" are obviously not quite synonymous. "Effective theory" may be the real deal used for the most "adult" theory one actually uses for real-world problems; the adjective "effective" simply means that one accepts that a more accurate theory might exist. The term "toy model" belittles the term "theory" in a very different way and is widely used by physicists and mathematicians and the word "toy" in the phrase isn't a typo. It is deliberate and indeed, "toy" sounds "childish", but that's the very purpose of the phrase. Lumidek (talk) 11:37, 29 March 2017 (UTC)


 * It would be very helpful if you would cite some reliable sources for what you said above, and add them to the article. The article currently does not cite any sources at all. Without reliable sources, it's difficult for a nonspecialist to ascertain whether the article (and your comment above) is a partial (or idiosyncratic) POV as 75.139.254.117 claimed above, nor not. Biogeographist (talk) 11:50, 29 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Dear Biogeographist, "toy model" is a self-explanatory phrase frequently used by theoretical physicists, see e.g. these 55,000 papers - but it is not any complicated technical term, so it doesn't have any formal definition in any textbook. It is an informal term whose meaning is obvious. I founded this Wikipedia page on toy model in 2004 *exactly* so that there exists a page where laymen may check that this indeed means a "model that is used as a toy" rather than something technical (some particular model) that they need to learn in a technical textbook. It's ludicrous to demand that there should be some other source backing this one. Lumidek (talk) 03:02, 30 March 2017 (UTC)


 * The phrase may be self-explanatory to you, but the comments by other editors on this talk page show that its meaning is not necessarily obvious and self-explanatory to others. Your assumption that the meaning is obvious may be an example of the curse of knowledge. And it is not ludicrous at all to demand reliable sources; in fact, it is a Wikipedia guideline (WP:V). In principle, every statement in a Wikipedia article should be referenced by a source. As the Wikipedia help pages say: "All content should ideally be supported by a reliable source, but content that is controversial or likely to be challenged will definitely require them! Unsourced material may be removed at any time and it is the obligation for the editor adding material to provide a reliable source." That is the reason why this article has been tagged with Template:Unreferenced since December 2009, over seven years ago. Multiple editors are demanding reliable sources here, so reliable sources are definitely required. Biogeographist (talk) 18:47, 30 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Also, the search for "toy model" on Google Scholar that you linked to above presents several problems: (1) it is not clear that all of those papers define the phrase "toy model" in the same way—one would have to review a representative subset of those articles for their implicit and/or explicit definitions of the term in order to verify that they are indeed all using the same definition of "toy model", which is exactly why we need reliable sources cited within the article; and (2) many of those papers would be considered primary sources, when what would be most helpful are secondary and tertiary sources—sources that provide a review of the kind called for in point 1. Biogeographist (talk) 19:34, 30 March 2017 (UTC)


 * There may be differences in the meaning and purpose of the term "toy model" in various subdisciplines of science (or even subdisciplines of physics), although I don't see any substantial ones, but that shouldn't be a justification for some delegitimization of this term or this Wikipedia page. Every other word has various meanings and nuances. Take liberalism. In much of Europe, it's meant to be an ideology focusing on the human freedom, including pro-market policies etc. In the U.S., it's usually used for left-wing extremists. But there's still a Wikipedia page for liberalism. If you think that you have some particular things to fix, why don't you do so? Otherwise the requirements for the primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so on indefinitely sources that you mentioned are utterly unreasonable. If encyclopedia had to do things like that, they would be pretty much useless. Encyclopedias themselves should be the authority in the review of the meaning and selection of the essential information about each phrase. Your attitude – in which you persistently suggest that something is inaccurate about an article even though you openly admit that you have no clue what it could be – is absolutely unconstructive and only serves to waste other people's time. Lumidek (talk) 18:47, 2 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Work on Wikipedia is entirely voluntary; if you choose to write a long response here, and you consider it a waste of time, then you are the one who is choosing to waste your own time. I have never claimed that there is anything "inaccurate" about the article, as you impute to me above. The issue I addressed, lack of references, does not imply that the article is "inaccurate" (again, your word, not mine). However, lack of references does imply a poor-quality article: in its current state, this article does not meet Wikipedia's good article criteria, notably number two of the six criteria. I will also point out that I am not the one who started this conversation by proposing the merger into Conceptual model, a merger which I oppose, as I noted below. I have no intention of improving this article; I am only participating in this conversation because I oppose the merger. Biogeographist (talk) 19:29, 2 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Also, you mentioned "quaternary sources": this is not a term that is used on Wikipedia, but primary, secondary and tertiary sources are terms that are used in the Wikipedia core content policies, and for important reasons. The nature of the sources cited in a Wikipedia article strikes at the heart of the issue of encyclopedic "authority" that you mentioned, because in an encyclopedia like Wikipedia that anyone can edit, the kind and quality of sources cited (along with text–source integrity) are the main indicator of how "authoritative" a given Wikipedia article is. No reliable sources, no authority. That is why some have argued: No reliable sources, no verifiability, no article. Biogeographist (talk) 20:46, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Merge proposal, December 2016

 * Oppose: I oppose the merge of toy model and conceptual model proposed by 75.139.254.117, because the semantic range of "conceptual model" is much wider than the range of "toy model" (if the articles are to be believed). The article on toy models refers to certain models in physics, whereas the article on conceptual models refers to certain models in a wide range of domains, many of which are much less formal than toy models in physics. By the way, I think this article is in surprisingly bad condition for being a mid-importance physics article that was created almost 13 years ago. Perhaps User:Lumidek can tell us more about what he hoped this article would become when he created the article in 2004? Biogeographist (talk) 18:01, 3 March 2017 (UTC)


 * AFAICT, toy model seems to be a pejorative form of conceptual model, with no objective distinction. While I continue to see claims that this is not the case, I have yet to find objective evidence with a meaningful distinction.  To what extent are the existing articles substantiated by objective evidence?  Also, how is a toy model different from a model in physics?  Models come in a variety of fidelities.  In fact it is a defining characteristic of models that they aren't exact, so fidelity is necessarily a continuum.  Your statement seems to suggest that a "toy model" has "more rigor", but this is really unclear, as "toy" suggests simplicity and lack of rigor, while the "more rigor" thrust seems to contradict this.  75.139.254.117 (talk) 18:12, 9 March 2017 (UTC)


 * 75.139.254.117: I don't see any indication in the article that the term is pejorative; I think you are making that interpretation based on your own assumption that there is something pejorative about the word "toy" (and I don't see why that assumption is necessarily correct), not based on what is written in the article. Toy model as currently defined in this article is a simplified set of objects, and equations relating them, in physics (as opposed to more complex models of the same mechanism). Conceptual model as currently defined in that article is any representation of a system used to know, understand, or simulate a subject the model represents in a wide variety of fields: that article mentions, as one example, soft systems methodology (SSM), which is about as far from physics as you can get. That is not to say that SSM (or psychology, to mention another example from that article) is not "rigorous" (to use your word, not mine); it is just not as formal. Your call for "objective evidence" seems to me to be either a request for better references (which this article certainly needs, which is why this article is already tagged with Template:Unreferenced), or a request for a better rationale in general for the content of the articles (which I agree would be a good thing), or a suggestion of lack of notability, which in the case of toy model also seems possible and could be a cause for simply deleting the article, which I wouldn't oppose. Biogeographist (talk) 21:24, 9 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Support. Once one removes the wordiness (as I have done with ), there is not really much to say except that a toy model is a deliberately simplified/simplistic model, that it omits details for clarity and brevity. Tinkertoy is a brand name, but I've left "tinker-toy model" as such (rather than "Tinkertoy model") for now, although it's unreferenced anyway. 84.3.187.196 (talk) 09:06, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * To be clear, it's a merge only in the sense this could be a short section in "conceptual model" with this left as a redirect. Otherwise it needs significant expansion to say how a toy model differs from just, er, any other model (as User:Biogeographist noted in one of the tags). I think the key is that a toy model does not even intend to be a full description of a system; its simplification is intentional, not for want of trying. 84.3.187.196 (talk) 09:09, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * A minor correction to the previous comment: I haven't touched the article apart from [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toy_model&diff=prev&oldid=768418851 editing the merge template]; somebody else added the tags.
 * I am still not convinced that merging into Conceptual model is a good idea, for all the reasons I mentioned above. But here's another option: Delete this article, create an entry for "toy model" on Wiktionary, and edit all existing wikilinks to Toy model to point to the Wiktionary entry instead (or just redirect to the Wiktionary entry, if that's possible). User:Lumidek's testimony above seems to indicate that when he created this article in 2004 his intention was to create something more like a dictionary definition of the term rather than a fully developed encyclopedia article. Deleting this page and replacing it with a Wiktionary entry would serve that purpose. Biogeographist (talk) 13:45, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Oppose. You are misrepresenting what I wrote. I have never written an article that was meant to be more appropriate for a dictionary. I just wrote an initial article that was meant to expand into a full-blown, high quality encyclopedic entry just like any other. "Toy model" is a self-explanatory phrase but it's also a rather standardized one, and there also exist lots of examples, look e.g. at Spekkens Toy Model, not that it's one of the most famous toy models. The status of "toy model" is completely analogous e.g. to "democratic republic". I could find lots of phrases like that. It's a combination of an adjective and a noun that is partly explained by the combination of the meanings of the two words; but the combination itself is standardized enough and also appears as a part of the name of many countries, and things like that. So if there's a Wikipedia entry for a democratic republic, I don't understand why someone would question that there should be one for a toy model, too. And again, a toy model is *not* the same as an effective theory or a conceptual model or other proposals that were claimed to be synonymous. Lumidek (talk) 18:38, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I see now that your intention was not "to create something more like a dictionary definition of the term rather than a fully developed encyclopedia article" as I wrote above. However, [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toy_model&oldid=8906363 the article that you wrote] was a one-sentence definition that looks very much like a Wiktionary entry, and did not come close to meeting Wikipedia's guidelines on citing sources (as the article still does not), much less Wikipedia's good article criteria, but your opposition to a Wiktionary entry is noted. Please notice that that the article on Democratic republic, which you mentioned, suffers the same problems as this article, and it is not a good article for similar reasons. However, I agree with you that Toy model should not be merged into Conceptual model. Biogeographist (talk) 19:53, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

❌ I removed the merge template since there is no consensus to merge after almost four months. Biogeographist (talk) 13:18, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Ambiguous page title
When I first came across a link to this page I was expecting a page about modifying the laws of nature for thought experiments and the like in a recreational manner. After reading the page it is clear that the main author was intending a more pedagogical concept. This should be merged as a section in the main physical models page dedicated to pedagogical simplification.

Gsurfer04 (talk) 17:14, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I came here trying to find info about model toys. Maybe there could be a better title. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:19, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Could you show this Gif? And direct traffic to this? It would answer most of the comments in the Talk Page, and would give a nice picture for the wikiarticle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer#/media/File:Toffoli_BilliardBall.gif — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.220.69.200 (talk) 06:27, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

the Ising model[clarification needed] as a toy model for ferromagnetism, or lattice models more generally;
Ising model for melt ponds on Arctic sea ice Yi-Ping Ma1 , Ivan Sudakov2 , Courtenay Strong3 , and Kenneth M. Golden4,*

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.2487v3.pdf

(this isnt a large pdf to view, and a layman can skip the maths, it is explained well) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Transmission Medium (talk • contribs) 10:56, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Spekkens' Toy Model
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Spekkens'-toy-model-in-all-dimensions-and-its-with-Catani-Browne/9f99a4d1467c67648d19e62e0743aea290b0f5cd

This explains a 10pg Pdf, it links to. and it has several pictures.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0401052.pdf

The second link, the one just above this text, is 32 pages, and is the original of the Spekkens' toy model, written by Skeppens. It has some pictures, though it is 32 Pgs long. The following is the preamble to the document.

In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states: a toy theory Robert W. Spekkens Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline St. North, Waterloo, Canada N2L 2Y5 (Dated: February 1, 2008)

We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide variety of quantum phenomena are found to have analogues within this toy theory. Such phenomena include: the noncommutativity of measurements, interference, the multiplicity of convex decompositions of a mixed state, the impossibility of discriminating nonorthogonal states, the impossibility of a universal state inverter, the distinction between bi-partite and tri-partite entanglement, the monogamy of pure entanglement, no cloning, no broadcasting, remote steering, teleportation, dense coding, mutually unbiased bases, and many others. The diversity and quality of these analogies is taken as evidence for the view that quantum states are states of incomplete knowledge rather than states of reality. A consideration of the phenomena that the toy theory fails to reproduce, notably, violations of Bell inequalities and the existence of a Kochen-Specker theorem, provides clues for how to proceed with this research program. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Transmission Medium (talk • contribs) 11:08, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Macroeconomics...?
Does this really belong here? It certainly doesn't fit in with the physics modelling that the intro describes so one or other should be changed. Personally I'd ditch macroeconomics as it isn't any sort of science, but that might be a bit PoV so I'll leave it to someone else to decide! --Vometia (talk) 10:41, 7 January 2023 (UTC)