Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Symmetry454


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was no consensus.  Majorly  (o rly?) 12:41, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Symmetry454

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

For consistency I have now added these proposals to be deleted, too: Someone else already proposed the deletion of these: Lately some others have already been removed: Christoph Päper 12:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
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 * I've removed these. This is an AfD which has been running for 9 days already; adding another 7 items to it at this point isn't going to help generate consensus. "Someone else" was me; I was hoping that sufficient consensus could be generated from the first listings to mean that we don't need another train-wreck mass AfD. --Pak21 13:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It somehow proves my point that you listed all these articles for deletion, but separated the discussions, which then have entries that refer to each other. We need a consensus about requirements for a calendar reform proposal to stay as an article on its own, as a note on Calendar reform or not at all. I do not see the essential difference among the ones listed above yet. This goal is hard if not impossible to reach, when the discussion is cluttered this way. Christoph Päper 19:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Pak21 was right to separate these. Each needs to stand, or fall, on their own merits. Some of these I *know* will be able to be improved with better sourcing (such as the World Calendar) and their deletion is wildly premature. Others, perhaps won't. But they are different enough to merit separate discussions. To look at them all and say "they are the same, delete them all" is not doing justice to the AfD process, to Wikipedia, or to these calendar reform concepts. - Nhprman List  20:03, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Original research with no sign of any mention in verifiable sources. Delete --Pak21 18:18, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. I can't find any sources outside of the calendar reform community. --N Shar 19:38, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep, but maybe in a different form. There have been serious attempts to reform the calendar now used worldwide in the early days of the United Nations in continuation of work of its predecessor, the League of Nations, and inside œcumenic organisations (esp. regarding Easter). The UN officially postponed its decision, because no consensus was reached back then. So probably some day they will try again and maybe they will even change something. I think it is encyclopædic to describe the possible alterations of the roman calendar (that were discussed). I consider naming proposals less important (“Newton week” and the like), because the number of possible proposals is limited, therefore you can enumerate them (except for a few exots) and just as a sidenote give originators, proposers or names; also leap rules are not that essential. Among this list there will also be concepts not discussed fifty-odd years ago, but proposed and elaborated since. One thing of particular interest is the compatibility with international standards, esp. ISO 8601, which unlike most older proposals starts the week on Monday and introduces defacto a parallel leap-week calendar. This way Symmetry 454 (among ohers) would deserve mentioning despite being a rather recent proposal, but I am not sure whether it should keep an article of its own. It is one of the better thought-through proposals, though, and not something made up in school one day. It is perhaps not that helpful that its “inventor” started contributing to Wikipedia and this article in particular not that long ago. Anyway this discussion on deletion cannot be limited to Symmetry 454, but would have to effect all calendars that are not recognized by—well, by whom? --Christoph Päper 15:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: the same criterion should be used for calendars that is used for all other articles on Wikipedia: that the article should rely on "reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy", a direct quote from the non-negotiable policy on verifiabily. I see no such sources here, which is why I nominated this article for deletion. --Pak21 15:10, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: My point is that you do not need a source for the trivial idea to divide the ISO week year into four quarters of three months each, which have a length of twice four weeks (or 30 days) and once five weeks (or 31 days) in one of the three possible orders. The question is rather whether this (or each of these six possibilities and all similar ones) needs or deserves an article on its own, just because it is assigned a name/originator or is combined with a certain leap rule. If it does not (and I mildly tend to think so), Symmetry454 and all the other articles on proposed calendar reforms should be deleted, but only after all this information is collected into one article. This is currently done only half-way in Calendar reform, because it can rely on detail articles about the proposals. Note though that any such page would need an active neutral maintainer, because there are people trying to push their preferred proposal or certain requirements a reform needed to fulfill or success. --Christoph Päper 16:27, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The trouble then comes with who gets to say what is a "trivial idea"; for instance, it is clear to me that it is a trivial idea that Pak21 is the cleverest person who has ever lived. Wikipedia solves this problem by requiring third-party sources, of which this (and many of the other calendars linked from Calendar reform) lack. Hence they should be deleted. --Pak21 17:11, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
 * This is discussed in WP:A under the topic “What is not original research?”: "Editors may make straightforward mathematical calculations or logical deductions based on fully attributed data that neither change the significance of the data nor require additional assumptions beyond what is in the source. It should be possible for any reader without specialist knowledge to understand the deductions." This would mean (in my interpretation) it was okay to say there are proponents for a new calendar and describe in which ways the (Gregorian) calendar could be reformed, but it was inappropriate to mention any names of calendar proposals, at least not in an article title. My preferred solution therefore is (still) this: Improve Calendar reform, then delete all the proposals that have never been in official use. (Whether official use includes being under discussion in the UN or some country is another question that should be answered first. Note that I used Symmetry454 as an example in my (premature) petition to the German government to consider adopting a fiscal calendar with months based on the year counting established by the week format of ISO 8601.) Christoph Päper 13:23, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The flaw, of course, is that neither the Symmetry454 proposed calendar nor any other that I'm aware of has ever had "official use." By the very definition of the words, a proposed calendar that was adopted would simply be a nation's new civil calendar. The idea that proposals can never be named seems absurd on its face for an encyclopedia which purports to inform its readers as to the lastest research and thinking within a certain community. I'm coming to believe that no calendar proposal, however notable, however widely discussed off-line and in the scientific community, can ever be listed on Wikipedia unles there are volumes of "publicity." The problem is that calendar reform, like other sciences, aren't usually on the front page of the New York Times or the National Enquirer (a sensationalistic US Tabloid) and "publicity" isn't usually the goal of researchers, it's discussion, usually behind closed doors. The problem with interpreting these guidelines and policies is that we seem to be aiming not for "notability" but "noteriety" here. In other words, what makes the biggest splash in the press and what is most widely known is what makes the cut for inclusion. Everything else is assumed to be made up in someone's basement, and not worthy. The problem is that publicity and noteriety isn't always the best gauge of what the facts are, or what is important for inclusion.  - Nhprman  List  15:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * If the calendar is discussed widely offline in the scientific community, then the results of those discussions should be published somewhere. When someone reads this article, all they will learn is what the calendar proposes, but not why some scientists think it is important, or why other scientists may object the proposal. -Pomte 15:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. No reliable sources; most of the external links are to self-published sources. I'm not convinced it passes muster for notability and verifiability without some citations in the mass media, a scholarly journal, or other independent publication. —C.Fred (talk) 04:37, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep - The Symmetry454 calendar is extensively verifiable with sources outside of WP, and is not a fly-by-night, created-by-a-teen-after-school project. It was designed by a university professor who has done extensive research on calendar design. As he notes on the discussion page of the article, "publicity" alone is not a significant source of verifiability, and, frankly, Wikipedian admins need to stop these little Jihads against truly encyclopedic articles. The idea expressed above that this is a "trivial" calendar concept is an extremely subjective comment.- Nhprman List  15:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: which reliable sources have included information on this calendar? --Pak21 16:00, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: Not that it was all that important for this discussion, but I do not think my comment was that subjective. If you start from the current, rather solar calendar with twelve months and your primary goals for a reform are perpetuality and equal-length quarters, you will soon arrive at the two versions published by Dr. Irv Bromberg, except maybe with a different position of the longer month and maybe with weeks starting at Sunday. I think such proposals belong to the better and more promising, though. His work on leap rules and astronomic influences on calendar design at a whole are another matter entirely. Christoph Päper 13:30, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - It's easy for some to point out how 'easy' or natural it is to come up with a design for a calendar, or a car, or a mathematical formula, but you're right, it's utterly unimportant for this discussion. His computations really are a different matter. This is a unique design, his computations and design are copyrighted, and this is perhaps the most vetted design for calendar reform out there. The fact that it's not verified and notable on the Internet, with easily linkable sources, makes it "non-notable" to WP geekdom, I suppose, but that's a pretty flawed standard. The fact that this AfD was begun as a mass deletion dooms this discussion. The AfD notices from these other articles were removed, since the original "train wreck mass deletion" attempt, above, was abandoned. If someone wants to relist them, that's fine. But this should be the only calendar under discussion at this point. - Nhprman List  18:35, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: You are mistaken about the facts here: this AfD was not "begun as a mass deletion discussion": it started listing one and only one article and continued that way for 7 days. The extra articles were listed for less than half an hour yesterday. Secondly, "the burden of evidence lies with the editor wishing to add or retain the material"; if sources cannot be provided, as is apparently the case here, then an article should be deleted. If this is really "the most vetted design for calendar reform out there", where is the evidence? --Pak21 08:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The fact that much of the evidence isn't contained online, and the discussions are not in a neat little URL that the article can link to, makes these facts and this calenar irrelevent, apparently. That is a fatal flaw of Wikipedia. Standing behind policies in a legalistic fashion, consistently repeating them like a mantra, will perhaps kill these articles, but it's also killing this as an acceptable vehicle for research among those who are serious about this topic. - Nhprman List  15:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Attribution does not require sources to be online. It does, however, require sources. If you or anyone else can provide details of where these alleged sources are to be found, then it would dramatically reduce the likelihood of this article being deleted. --Pak21 16:10, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 *  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so that consensus may be reached  Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, —Doug Bell talk 21:33, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep or at worst, Merge to Leap week calendar. Pak21 has nominated many calandar reform topics as per this AfD Discussion  Two articles have been successfully deleted thus far, and Pak21 has removed all mention of the topics from Calendar reform thereby removing valuable content from a good article, including all external links...In addition, the availability of sub-topics such as Lunisolar calendar, Leap week calendar, & Solar calendar for which these articles would provide strong supplementary material has been completely disregarded.  The sources provided are based on simple calculations and are both non-trivial and respectable as per Wikis guidelines.  In addition, the  articles are well written.  Removing these articles without regard to the value they add if merged to existing subheadings may adhere to the letter of guidelines for individual articles, but degrades wiki in the process. Kind regards, --Greatwalk 13:23, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.