User talk:Ericmccorkle

I've put the comments quoted below at talk:probability theory as extended logic. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:11, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

redirect


I have redirected this page to Cox's theorem. Possibly much of its material should get merged into that article.

Imagine that a book about biological evolution, titled Evolution Clarified was published last week. Then someone could create a new Wikipedia article that could begin by saying:
 * Evolution is a theory introduced in the book Evolution Clarified, by John Xmith, which was published last week.

That's what this article does. The theory presented here is that of Richard T. Cox, who wrote a book published in 1961 titled Algebra of Probable Inference. Edwin Jaynes included a chapter about it in his posthumous book on scientific applications of probability theory, published four decades later. So this article begins by saying that it's a theory from Jaynes' book, and doesn't even mention Cox!

The article pretty thoroughly disregared some basic standard Wikipedia conventions, starting with all capital initial letters in the title, where WP:MOS calls for lower case, and similarly in section headings, and it indiscriminately italicized everything in non-TeX mathematical notation, where WP:MOSMATH calls for italicization of variables but not of digits, puncutation, etc. (that being consistent with TeX style). It's creator hasn't been seen before or after creating this on December 15th. He put no tags on it and didn't link to it from any other articles, so that it didn't come to the community's attention until now. Michael Hardy (talk) 16:09, 1 February 2012 (UTC)