User talk:Lucretius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome!

Hello Lucretius, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  BDAbramson T 03:32, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Your user page

Hi Lucretius, I found you via your edit to Numerology, and I hope you won't be offended if I share my thoughts on your user page.

It's a good idea to remove irrelevant material from articles, and I've done so on occasion myself. In my experience, such removals are much more likely to be tolerated by the rest of the community if I go on to find a more appropriate home for the material. For a pertinent example, one might argue that the material you've tried to remove from Numerology and Fine-structure constant really belongs in a separate article, perhaps Numerology in science or something to that effect. If nothing else, it would avoid duplication of content, which is a Bad Thing. Even if that were your goal, it would still be safer to use Template:Splitsection and wait for a consensus before making the move.

And then again, sometimes, what looks like "unmeaningful observations" and "expression[s] of personal opinion" doesn't need to be deleted or moved at all. Regarding unmeaningful observations, Wikipedia has a tradition of including material not just strictly on the topic of an article but also on that topic's historical understanding and uses. Perhaps Riemann_surface#In_art_and_literature has nothing to do with Riemann surfaces, but the material adds interest to the article. As for personal opinion, it's better to try to fix a section to be WP:NPOV than to remove the section entirely. Again, I've broken this rule myself, and I've been properly chastised and reverted. If you suspect that some material is really just pure opinion beyond redemption, you can request references; a couple of templates are available for this purpose at Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles. Hopefully someone will substantiate the content, and in the meanwhile, readers will know not to trust it.

That's enough for now. Happy editing, Melchoir 20:06, 7 January 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Reply to Melchoir

Thanks Melchoir for the good advice. I agree that collaboration and consensus are vital, and often they act as a form of quality control. However, I'm not yet sure that the ensuing quality is always good. I mean it is possible for some opinionated amateurs to league together simply to protect their contributions or to promote some mutual point of view. I wonder how much 'vote buying' goes on here. I myself am an amateur on all subjects. However I'm not opinionated enough to enter into any edit wars. I edit my own work more ruthlessly than I edit anyone else's and I even edit my comments on discussion pages (provided of course nobody has replied to them first).

By 'unmeaningful observations' I mean unnecessary wording - why write 3 sentences when the same meaning could be condensed into a single sentence? This is particularly important on article pages, which are the only pages most readers ever consult.

I deleted references to Eddington in the Fine-structure constant article and in the Numerology article because I believe he has received a lot of unfair press over the years - 'numerology' is a handle people have put on him in particular though he is not the only mathematical physicist who has sometimes been more mathematical than physicist. He is the only famous physicist to be mentioned in the Numerology article. What need was there to refer to him again in terms of numerology on a page dedicated to the Fine-structure constant? His theory was already dismissed there in terms of a hoax or a spoof.

According to my pocket Oxford dictionary, numerology means 'divination by numbers;study of occult meaning of numbers'. This is not an apt description of Eddington's work and I don't see any good reason, let alone any compelling reason, why the man should be tagged in this manner. There might be an issue here about the standard of scientific debate - is it right to stretch the meaning of a word to include physicists whose work is more mathematical than scientific? This is to condemn their work by innuendo.

I should add that Eddington's theory about the fine structure constant has been disproved experimentally i.e. it has been shown not to be an integer. Is a theory numerological if it is able to be proved or disproved experimentally? I think not. In fact, string theory is a better candidate for 'numerology' since, as far as I know, it is not able to be tested - at least not yet. Even Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity might be called numerology (who would ever have thought the Pythagorean theorem for right angle triangles could have real physical significance outside geometry?). Of course it isn't dismissed as numerology and that's because it has been verified experimentally. Eddington was foremost among the champions of Einstein's theories and possibly he was dazzled by the new mathematical possibilities that Einstein opened up. But he was nothing like an astrologer or a Pythagorean mystic. He was a scientist.

Once again thanks for your advice. You have provided some practical tips that will prove useful if I continue my interest in Wikipedia. Lucretius 11:03, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/u/c/User_talk%7ELucretius_6a80.html"