Talk:Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Old talk
Not sure if this isn't just a copy of a press release from the project but in any case it should not be linked to in articles that are hardly relevant to it, like the Federal Reserve System or Money Supply.radek (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Those are citation links. The citations reference pages within that site. There is no question that the article needs improvement and further referencing. My understanding is that the article was resurrected from a redirect last night. --Pleasantville (talk) 19:36, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Pleasantville, you seem to be in charge of Wolfram's PR in Wikipedia. I've flagged this article as advertisement, due to a high proliferation of peacock terms like "broad, industrial-scale algorithms" and "extremely simple and declarative" and emphasising just how "free" [sic] this tool is. Before I engage in an edit war with you over the NPOV of this article, I want to make sure we agree first on how to fix it. Swap (talk) 15:04, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

One good approach for fixing this article would be to delete it. As written it's obviously an advertisement; of the six references supplied, the first is a dead link, the second is just a paid (or unpaid) advertisement listed in the Buyer's Guide of the CERN Courier, the third is written by an employee of Wolfram Research, the next two are brief, poorly-written descriptions of a few specific examples from the Demonstrations Project, and the last reference indicates that the Wolfram Demonstrations Project is "Parent's Choice Recommended" but says nothing about any award. But even ignoring the issue of suspicious sourcing, I believe it's inappropriate to have an entry for this website on Wikipedia in the first place. I'm sure there are people in the world who have found the Wolfram Demonstrations Project useful in a practical context (although the author of this article failed to find any), but that doesn't change the fact that WDP is essentially a large advertisement for Mathematica, in the same way that the Processing Exhibition is an advertisement for Processing. Of course there's a place for these sorts of exhibitions, but there is no reason to have an entire Wikipedia article devoted to such an advertising initiative. The useful and objective content of this article could be summarized in a sentence or two and incorporated into the article on Mathematica. I'm not willing to do this myself, because my personal experience with the Wolfram Demonstrations Project has not indicated that it's actually useful in any way, but others may differ.

In short, the article as it stands is clearly a piece of mendacious propaganda. Any article that was not, would necessarily be extremely short and better suited for incorporation into the main Mathematica article. For these reasons I'm marking this article as spam. Flyingspuds (talk) 22:42, 8 February 2010 (UTC)