Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Synergetics

This page is an archive of the proposed deletion of the article below. Further comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or on a Votes for Undeletion nomination). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was NO CONSENSUS, especially given the merciless rewrite. As pointed out, the earlier revisions are copyvios, and so I will delete them and leave the non-infringing revisions. -Splash^talk 18:14, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Synergetics

This article is total nonsense, probably computer generated. The only true thing here is that synergetics is a field invented by hermann haken. Synergetics is a branch of physics that deals with the self organising properties of matter in thermodynamic gradients. I'm not saying that I disagree with what is in this article, I am saying it is literally nonsense - its a hoax Duracell 15:58, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep I have left a message on the Bucky Fuller page and with some its editors who, hopefully, will be able to clarify the situation. Alf ^melmac 20:31, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Simply needs more wikification. The article currently uses some Fullerisms ("omnihumanity", "comprehensivist", etc.) and Fulleresque prose. I believe it can and should be cleaned up, to describe Fuller's (and Haken's?) synergetics without using Fuller's dense lingo. Harris7 09:46, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
• Delete as per nom. Owen× ☎ 20:48, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Comment please note the nominator's edits to the article here and here. Synergetics is a valid topic needing more eyes, it does not read as "literally nonsense", the syntax is very extended, obfuscated even, but it's not nonsense. The nominator states "probably computer generated": computers like humans and furry aliens, maybe, apologies to any other undisclosed life form editors, but it was not written by the electric, chips and bytes type (mmm... chips). Alf ^melmac 06:44, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

• Delete A large number of scientific publications shows, that Synergetics is the interdisciplinary field started by physicist H. Haken (1969). See the Springer Series in Synergetics - or any other scientific publication on Synergetics (try Google...). 17:07, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
• yes, on second thoughts it is not computer generated. I came accross this because I wanted to link to it from an article I was writing, and pressed for time I only skimmed the synergetics article. But the article seemed to me so bizarrely off the point of what synergetics actually is (and it is not about omni-humanity, nor is it a self-discipline, whatever those things are) that I imagined that some algorithm had plugged in some synergetics terms and people to a random post-modernist bit of text. On a proper reading, it does not seem as bad as I first thought. However, it is still *terrible* and if it remains, people will be miseducated by it, which is bad. Even worse, serious scientists who might be interested in haken's work might gather the impression that it is quasi-philosophical fluff, which it is not. So, delete, and since I work in an institution where most faculty were taught by haken, I will try to put together something better when I can. Here, for completeness, is a course description fro the center for complex systems and brain sciences at Florida Atlantic university:

Synergetics

An introduction to Synergetics, the theory of self-organizing structures, will be given along examples from biology, chemistry and physics. Deterministic and stochastic models will be studied, e.g. Laser equations, Navier-Stokes model, Ginzburg-Landau systems, Fokker-Planck theory, master equation. Prerequisite: Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. ISC 6464

Duracell 17:31, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

• • Thanks for your re-appraisal, Duracell, a better option than deleting maybe to put a fix it/contested information notice on the page until your good self and/or other editors can do a good re-write. What does apply to the usage by Bucky can be severely pruned and included in a seperate section, as it is, as you say, philosophical. We need to de-fluff and un-quasi that bit so at least readers can understand what's going there. I would venture that a true encyclopedic entry would have it's scientific and philosopical values equally well explained. I would need some time to review Bucky's side, as you and others would Haken's. Alf ^melmac 20:27, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

• • • I've had a chat with someone who has been working with Haken for a long time, and it seems that the situation is: synergetics is indeed the study of self-organisation in physical systems. And of course, we can use this theory to study other (related) things such as neural dynamics (which is what I'm starting out in right now). *But*, it is also the case that haken himself, as well as BF, used the concepts they devised to promote a braoder philosophical outlook, as well as specific conceptual applications that go beyond physics, and even beyond experiment. I read a nice article last year actually in which Haken took the notion of an affordance and suggested that there is a (somewhat mysterious) "cognitive gradient" (because the organism *needs* something*), after the manner of a thermodynamic gradient, in which the brain self-organises to detect the affordance. I'm all for this stuff, I really am, I was just a bit shocked by the aparent randomness of the orginal article on here. I go along with the idea of two articles, one for the well defined physics stuff and one for broader "world view" type stuff - and I think both Haken and Buckminster-fuller would agree.Duracell 22:26, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

• Keep Certainly the existing page needs much work. Note that there seem to be two separate uses of the term "synergetics" — perhaps that is why there is an apparent dispute. There may however be connections between them: for example, Gibbs' phase rule is involved with phase transitions at which self-organization may occur. I think there's potential for a very interesting page (or two pages with disambiguation) to come out of this over time if enough people work together. Supporting Alf ^melmac's suggestion, I vote to keep the page, add a cleanup tag, and see what develops. -- JimR 01:12, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

• Delete This article is a complete plagiarism from [1]. Word for word. S.N. Hillbrand 13:37, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
  • Thanks for finding this, S.N. Hillbrand! There is no point Wikipedia carrying the text of Kirby Urner's page (though not copyrighted) when a link will suffice. I've been bold and replaced the article along those lines. -- JimR 23:44, 17 September 2005 (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 an undeletion request). No further edits should be made to this page.