Talk:Mathematical sociology

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I am responding to the claim that the article "needs cleanup" and that it somehow may fail to meet the criterion of "importance."

As a newcomer who prepared the lengthy addition to the opening paragraph previously found there, I took great care in setting up the article and included a good many substantial references to the major works in the area. If some specific indications can be provided here as to what "cleanup" is still needed, I will be happy to undertake the task.

As to the "importance": This field has been in development since the 1950s but really took off in the 1960s. It is a recognized specialty area within sociology with its own section of the American Sociological Association (and I recently added an external link to the web page of that section). The section has about 200 members and, in addition, there are numerous scholars in countries such as Germany and Japan that contribute to this area. It is connected to major research programs in the field, such as rational choice theory, affect control theory, exchange network theory, expectation states theory, organizational ecology, among others. The first main paragraph indicated in the table of contents provides a reasonable, if short, statement of why researchers draw upon mathematics in doing sociological theorizing and research. Again, if a more specific statement can be made to back up the claim for lack of importance, this would provide some basis for adding or revising the current entry to satisfy the critic.

• I edited the article... I didn't add the cleanup tag, but I suspect it was added because this was not written as an encyclopedia article... it was an essay. I took out the first paragraph, which didn't succinctly explain the concept, and the editorialized comments at the end as they were not suitable for an encyclopedia article. A note to the author: Please try and remember that you need to write for a general audience. The average person who happened across this article would have been completely lost in your first paragraph and essentially would have no idea just exactly what Mathematical Sociology is. I realize that I over-simplified it a bit, but the concept of an encyclopedia is to give the reader a basis to understand the general concept, then move on to more indepth coverage of the topic. I also cleaned up the formatting a bit.--Isotope23 19:28, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

• I appreciate your work on the article. As a newcomer, I hesitated about dropping the opening paragraph written by someone else but I agree that your new opening, partly drawn from my earlier effort, is better. Dropping the comments is OK with me too. So where are we? Is there still an issue of importance? Who decides? Tom Fararo 20:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Feel free to boldly edit this article Tom. You can even change my opening paragraph if you, as a subject expert, can say it better or more correctly. The whole idea of Wikipedia is that you are free to edit any article as long as the information you add is verifiable. As for the importance tag, I don't think there is any hard rule on removing tags if you thing importance has been demonstrated, though generally speaking it is courtesy to contact ther person who added the tag and give them a chance to read over the changes and concur that the tag has been removed. It's also however a courtesy for editors to explain on the article talk page why they are tagging an article in the first place. Since this was never done, it's sort of a judgement call. I think the article now demonstrates the notability of the subject so I'm going to go ahead and remove the tag. If the originator disagrees he can always add it back. The article could still probably use some further explanation of the concept though.--Isotope23 13:40, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

• I am not sure that Isotope23 removed the tag at the start of the article, which seems to be in pretty good shape so far as I can see. If not, I would need some further guidance as to what else needs to be done. Tom Fararo 13:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)