User talk:Andrewa/Primary Topic, statistics and reasonableness

Why this page
This was inspired by this post. See here for just how silly it was.

But it got me thinking... I haven't studied the theory of statistics for many years, and as far as I can remember my only Wikipedia contributions in the area have related to Daryl Huff. But I do remember a recurring theme in Math Stats classes was reasonableness testing... does the answer look right? And that's why I queried the first chart, and the failure to do reasonableness testing was the main problem with the initial post (whose diff I gave above).

Now it's a tricky area. The fact that it doesn't look right does not entitle you to ignore the result. It just motivates you to double-check the methods that produced the result. (Or at least it should.)

Now we don't seem to have a good definition of Primary Topic. If I had to give one it would be What we think enough people are going to think it means to justify ignoring the others. And even that is problematic, because those we hope to advantage, even though they agree with us on what it means, might be more aware then we are of the other views in the matter, and so not expect to find the article at the ambiguous name we have chosen although they agree with us.

But we have had many proposals to define Primary Topic objectively, notably to do away with the significance criterion and just go by page views. This is, essentially, giving up a reasonableness check. That and recentism are the main reasons that, if a notable band or TV show were to be called Mathematics, we'd think twice about moving their article to the base name Mathematics and disambiguating the name of the article currently there regardless of how many page hits the two articles were getting.

And I think we'd have consensus not to move the articles, even if the policy were to be changed to suggest they should be moved to comply with the page stats. We'd make it the occasional exception perhaps.

Food for thought? Andrewa (talk) 10:00, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

I was going to link to WP:DAB above, but it's a bit volatile lately to say the least! Andrewa (talk) 01:14, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

A similar view
See here for an excellent IMO post on this general area. Andrewa (talk) 21:27, 29 August 2019 (UTC)