User talk:Geometryfan

Managing a conflict of interest
Hello, Geometryfan. We welcome your contributions, but if you have an external relationship with the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest (COI). Editors with a conflict of interest may be unduly influenced by their connection to the topic. See the conflict of interest guideline and FAQ for organizations for more information. We ask that you:


 * avoid editing or creating articles about yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, company, organization or competitors;
 * propose changes on the talk pages of affected articles (you can use the request edit template);
 * disclose your conflict of interest when discussing affected articles (see Conflict of interest);
 * avoid linking to your organization's website in other articles (see WP:Spam);
 * do your best to comply with Wikipedia's content policies.

In addition, you are required by the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use to disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution which forms all or part of work for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. See Paid-contribution disclosure.

Also, editing for the purpose of advertising, publicising, or promoting anyone or anything is not permitted. Thank you. MrOllie (talk) 11:46, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Just my two cents:
 * Mr.Ollie is not completing wrong in pointing out that adding your own publications and websites in many articles can be problematic and it is certainly a case of issue. However I also agree that at least in some articles those additions are clearly helpful. My advice would be restrict to the addition to case where they significantly improve the article. So for instance add a your own website as an external link only in articles, they do not have an abundance of external links already. Add your own publication only when it is needed to source new content (not easily available in other sources) or the article still lacks literature in general. In that sense (at least at first glance) I would view your edits at Pitot's theorem as welcome and appropriate whereas at Vivian's theorem they can be seen as problematic.
 * Also if you do at lot of additions of your own publication in short time frame at a lot of articles, that is bound to create a (usually justified) backlash.--Kmhkmh (talk) 15:14, 4 September 2020 (UTC)


 * It would be even better (and in agreement with best practices for COI editors) if you would propose additions of references to yourself and external links on article talk pages, adding request edit to draw the attention of unconflicted editors to assist you. - MrOllie (talk) 15:44, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Geometryfan (talk) 18:40, 4 September 2020 (UTC) Thanks for the advice, everyone - appreciated.

Geometryfan (talk) 10:09, 6 September 2020 (UTC) I'm not sure who to ask here, but if you're a geometer, or you know of anyone here, and if you & the other person think it relevant, kindly please consider this addition of an External Link to the Van Aubel's Theorem page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Aubel%27s_theorem


 * Some generalizations of Van Aubel's theorem to similar quadrilaterals at Dynamic Geometry Sketches, interactive geometry sketches.

Consideraton of Relevant Link
Geometryfan (talk) 10:16, 6 September 2020 (UTC)I'm not sure who to ask here, but if you're a geometer, or you know of anyone here, and if you & the other person think it relevant, kindly please consider this addition of an External Link to the Van Aubel's Theorem page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Aubel%27s_theorem


 * Some generalizations of Van Aubel's theorem to similar quadrilaterals at Dynamic Geometry Sketches, interactive geometry sketches.


 * , I'm sorry what are you asking for?  Heart  Glow (talk) 00:08, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This is not a question and definitely not a question about how to edit. If you want to make content suggestions, please do so on the talk page of the article in question but don't couch it in a help me request. That's not what the template is for.  — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 01:29, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Geometryfan (talk) 14:12, 12 September 2020 (UTC) @HeartGlow30797 ... Thanks, but the issue has been resolved. @jmcgnh ... How does one make content suggestions at a particular webpage?

golden parallelogram
Hi Geometryfan,

Thanks for your contribution to golden ratio. I took out the section about the "golden parallelogram" that you added, because after searching for the term "golden parallelogram" in the academic literature, I could find only 2–3 sources using it the way your section proposed, all by the same author (along with a few sources each using the term in several other distinct ways). None of these is nearly as established as the rest of the sections in the article, and I'm not sure any of them yet rises to the level where they belong. See WP:DUE.

If you disagree, feel free to start a discussion about it at talk:golden ratio. –jacobolus (t) 17:42, 14 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi Jacobolus
 * The book by Hans Walser (2001, p. 45) similarly defines a golden parallelogram as a parallelogram with an angle of 60 degrees and sides in the golden ratio.
 * Walser, H (2001). The Golden Section. Washington:DC: The Mathematical Association of America.
 * URL: https://maa.org/press/maa-reviews/the-golden-section
 * regards
 * GF Geometryfan (talk) 07:05, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Okay, but searches for "golden rectangle", "golden triangle", "golden angle", "pentagram", "penrose tiling", "golden spiral", "Kepler triangle", "golden rhombus", etc. all return at least hundreds of results, and there's little ambiguity about the primary meaning of these. By contrast "golden parallelogram" has been used extremely rarely, and is used in different ways in    and possibly, none of which is used more than once or twice in the literature, and all of which are different than the version you proposed which is used by only 2 (?) authors. My point is, this is not an established term with any established definition. It doesn't really need to be in Wikipedia yet. If for whatever reason it becomes significantly more popular and widely adopted in a decade or two, it can be added then. –jacobolus (t) 16:45, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I get your point.
 * But don't you think, it's perhaps educationally important for the public to learn that something like a 'golden parallelogram' can be conceptualized & defined in different ways? And that conceptualizing & defining a concept in a particular way may be more fruitful than others.
 * As an aside: just relying on searching the internet is hardly the correct way to review the available academic literature. Yes, it might be a useful starting point, but one needs to do a proper search via an academic institution like a university or national library. Many publications are not yet fully digitized or freely available on the internet. Geometryfan (talk) 19:43, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * educationally important for the public to learn that something like a 'golden parallelogram' can be conceptualized & defined in different ways? – This doesn't really seem important to me. I think it's more important that Wikipedia articles about mainstream topics stay focused on the consensus mainstream understanding instead of trying to cover every fringe spinoff idea. If we included every problem or configuration where the golden ratio appeared anywhere in the academic literature, I'm sure we could fill hundreds if not thousands of pages about it, but that's more scattershot than is really helpful to readers. (Articles about more niche topics sometimes only have a few relevant sources about a particular sub-topic, or even only 1 relevant source, and that's of course fine when it's all we have to go on.)
 * I was doing a Google scholar search, but if you have a preferred citation index, or a better search via a university library, knock yourself out. –jacobolus (t) 20:09, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Please permit me to clarify more clearly my 'disagreement' with you as follows:
 * 1) I fully understand & agree with you that there is currently not yet any agreed-upon definition for a 'golden parallelogram'.
 * 2) That is precisely why I was very careful in my entry about the golden parallelogram to simply say: "One way to define a golden parallelogram ...", clearly suggesting that there are other ways to define concept.
 * Note that I did not claim that there was consensus about this being 'the' definition of a golden parallelogram; only that if we chose to define it this way, then we can prove that it has the interesting properties mentioned. Defining it in other ways lead to other properties.
 * So my entry was just about promoting the propositional viewpoint of mathematics as a discipline which studies logical if-then relationships, and that there is a measure of freedom in mathematics in how we may choose our definitions. For example, there are several different ways in which to axiomatise (define) projective geometry. Is this not a very important perspective to convey to Wikipedia readers?
 * But I suppose, as you say, there are hundreds if not thousands of entries one could make about the golden ratio. And I understand & agree that selective choices need to be made.
 * But I'm nevertheless concerned about the fact that the propositional nature regarding the golden ratio does not really come across strongly in the Wikipedia page, and can easily be misinterpreted by the uninformed as 'divine dogma'.
 * (On an aside: university librarians use far more varied & sophisticated searches than Google Scholar.) Geometryfan (talk) 04:40, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * This argument isn't changing my mind at all. Every encyclopedia article's job is to accessibly define a topic, tell the most important/influential things known about it, answer people's basic questions prompted by coming across unfamiliar topics "in the wild", help experts look up reference answers about topics where they already understand the basics, and point readers in the direction of the best or most important published resources. For better or worse, there's not really a good place for an encyclopedia to show off the "measure of freedom in mathematics in how we may choose our definitions", except in a few topics more directly related to that idea. But please feel free to start a conversation at talk:golden ratio if you want to get further input from other Wikipedians who are interested in the golden ratio article. –jacobolus (t) 04:47, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, I didn't expect you to change your mind - that your mind was already made up was quite clear from the start.
 * Thanks any way for clarifying your reason for the removal which I respect.
 * As for your invitation to chat further about the 'golden ratio', I respectfully decline as I have to honestly say it's one of the most over-rated and horribly misunderstood concepts in the public image of mathematics. It's hardly unique or special within mathematics in any way, which is why in my more than 40 years of research in mathematics I've studiously focused on more interesting & productive fields. Geometryfan (talk) 13:29, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. Personally I'm a fan of the symmetry systems of the pentagon, dodecahedron/icosahedron, and 120-cell/600-cell, and I find the arithmetic of Q[ϕ] pretty interesting. But it's true there's a lot of nonsense baggage associated with the golden ratio (which is a kind of sociologically interesting phenomenon, if not particularly mathematical).
 * I think Wikipedia's golden ratio article does a relatively decent job of sorting out meaningful aspects from nonsensical ones, better than might be expected for a wiki project. It got that way because enough editors who cared worked to keep it relatively focused and accurate. –jacobolus (t) 17:15, 16 December 2023 (UTC)