Talk:Blackstone's Card Trick Without Cards

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[edit] Wikipedia is not a how-to guide

The majority of this article's body is essentially a how-to guide, explaining how to perform the trick. This information would be appropriate for a card-trick how-to wiki, but not for Wikipedia. If anyone knows of said card-trick wiki, please move the information there, and it would be perfectly acceptable for you to post an external link there in the "See Also" section. Until then, the article should be edited to reflect the notability or history of the trick - what famous magicians have used it? On what television shows has it had a prominent place? If the trick is not notable, it fails Wikipedia's notability guideline, and should be deleted altogether. PaladinWhite 14:48, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

It may be worth bringing this up on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Magic. Historically, many wikipedians have treated attempts at removing magical methods as vandalism, but it's usually discussed from the exposure perspective and not from the howto guide perspective.

As far as notability goes, this particular trick was a favorite of Harry Blackstone, Sr., one of the most famous magicians of all time. It is also representative of a large and very popular class of magic tricks where a spectator does some arithmetic and gives the magician the result, and the magician is able to divine something because of some special algebraic properties of the arithmetic the spectator performed. Kleg 16:58, 11 May 2007 (UTC)