Talk:Gravity Pipe

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[edit] Flagged for Deletion, Immediately after Creation

Yesterday I noticed that some supercomputing pages cite GRAPE (a supercomputing system used for astrophysics) but link erroneously to GRAPE (an image processing system unrelated to astrophysics). I created this stub article to address the ambiguity.

Since then, already, an admin with 2000+ edits Premeditated Chaos flagged the stub for deletion, on the grounds of "does not meet standards of notability" and "article makes little sense". I'll address these two issues.

[edit] Standards of Notability

The GRAvity PipE supercomputing system, an ongoing project at the University of Tokyo which comprises several generations of supercomputer architectures, is a) referenced by other wiki pages and b) won prizes (an example is cited in the article). This is notable to designers, users, and students of supercomputing, but perhaps not to Script Kiddies.

[edit] Makes Little Sense

I can't address that. The article was intended for people drilling down from articles about supercomputers, looking for more specific information about particular systems. It was not intended to be interesting to browsers whose robots take them to the most recent STUB template, and who have no knowledge or interest in the subject.

I'll clean up the article and make the disambiguation unambiguous. Then I'll put pointers to this discussion page on the talk pages of interested parties (there have been edits by 3 members so far.)

Pete St.John 16:56, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

  • Please don't imply that I am a script kiddie. I find it somewhat insulting (Besides which, it's terribly inaccurate; I've never used the word "warez" in a serious conversation in my life). In terms of notability: being referenced by other pages on Wikipedia does not imply notability. Generally, as per WP:NOTE, a subject must have been written about by multiple, non-trivial sources that are independent of the subject. All you have provided is the GRAPE's website and the listing of one prize that it has won.

Now, in terms of making little sense: Wikipedia is created for the layman, not computer experts. I don't presume that I, as a random bystander, will necessarily understand every detail of an article about supercomputer systems, or deep inguistics, or neurology, or any other specialized subject. But I do presume at least a little bit of explanation - some scrap meat that I can chew on that will at least tell me, "Oh, all right, so this thing calculates the value of pi at seven billion digits a second." The information may be accurate, which is wonderful. But in terms of reaching it and understanding it, straight up, it fails a little - mainly because of its sparsity. The article is only two sentences long, and neither goes very far in explaining things to the reader. ♠PMC♠ 17:37, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

    • I consider Wiki to be for everyone, not only laymen; we are all laymen in some field at least. I wouldn't expect you to appreciate the Triangular Number 666, despite it's length of more than two sentences, any more than you would expect me to appreciate The Number of the Beast, 666 which makes little sense to Number Theorists who aren't versed in applying numerology to Biblical Interpretation. I meant the stub for people (presumed interested in the topic) who drilled down, not to people scanning for recent stubs in arbitrary fields.
    • Also you mention "[only?] one prize that it has won". The Gordon Bell Prize is administered by the Association for Computing Machinery and tracks the cutting edge of Moore's Law. Computers don't get Nobel Prizes, so this is about as notable as a machine can get. I myself got interested in the architecture because of discussion on Beowulf lists, which aren't usefully citable (although they are archived at Beowulf.org.
    • Insults. I'm reluctant to apologize because I fret at having spent hours to address the threat of deletion from someeone who does not care about the topic, but discoved it by scanning with robots. However, I have to acknowledge that you have kept your temper, and I thank you for that. Pete St.John 18:17, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm not altogether sure where you've gotten this notion that I've reached this page with robots. I don't use any 'bots or scripts to surf Wikipedia, just the power of random clicking. (If you're absolutely dying to know, I reached the page through Category:Stubs). In any case, it's not really relevant.
If you consider Wikipedia "to be for everyone," then it should also be readable for everyone. I'm not suggesting you dumb anything down. I'm certainly not suggesting that highly technical subjects be reduced to easily processable little infobites. But someone who has a vague amateur interest in supercomputing, but lacks highly technical training, should still be able to read the article and go, "Ohh, okay. GRAPE computes forces of gravity for astrophysics. I get it now."
In terms of deletion: it's not a personal insult. Please, don't spend hours being concerned about it. PROD tags are easy to add, but just as easy to remove. =) Besides which, I'm willing to admit that I was wrong in tagging this for a delete.
That said, the article needs work. It desperately begs for meat - history, technical details, future plans, etc. Who started it? What are their names? Why did they do it? Why GRAPE? What are the specs of the big shiny beasty that does the calculations? What are they going to calculate in the future? Crunchy details like that are what make excellent articles. I'm going to twiddle the formatting a bit and remove the self-references (see the applicable policy; in essence, Wikipedia should never refer to itself). I found an article on Google with some tidbits, so I'll throw those in. If you have any more, please, fill in the blanks.
Oh...and the name of this article. To make it easier to find (article titles are case-sensitive, so sample article is a different page from Sample Article) I'm going to move it to Gravity Pipe. This title will remain as a redirect. This makes linking easier and more sensible.
And um...yeah, I think that's about it. ^_^ ♠PMC♠ 21:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
You make a good point about the capitalization, "GRAvityPipE" is awkward. I added it back in as an explanation of the acronym (Apple? Really?) but the title is better as "Gravity Pipe". Your use of the word "force" in the above is dead-on, but then you used "strength" in the article, which is just a technical thing that would bug physicists. Technically, in physics, gravity is "Weak" :-) and GRAPE computes forces, not strengths ("strength" does have physical meaning in Materials Science). We may actually be converging on a half-decent article. Thank's for your patience.Pete St.John 17:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reference to Apple; footnotes?

I had flagged the line "GRAPE is a reference to Apple, inc" as "needs citation". Since then, footnotes have been added, e.g. Gravity_Pipe#_note-0, but they don't seem to link to anything. Really, is there a reference to Apple anywhere? It's a cute idea and harmless fun, but "GRAPE" comes from "GRAvity PipE". Pete St.John 17:10, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Answering myself: I finally figured out the problem was that the footnote (citing a source for the "intentional pun") doesn't express on the page because there is no footnotes section. So I added the section (by copying the syntax from a page with working footnotes) and now the links for the footnotes show. They turn out to be a single general-news source (ABC) and the links could use cleaning up (with titles overlaying the raw HTTP) but now I can stop kvetching about the silly pun; we can blame someone else for it. The moral of the story, folks, is that when you take the trouble to produce footnotes (thanks!) check that there is a footnote section for them to appear in. Please use "Show Preview". Thanks. Pete St.John 21:23, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LNS

The recent added LNS material looks interesting and relevant (I'm not familiar with it, tho); however, it's not "nomenclature". So I just split it into its own section "methods". It may be over-emphasizing a particular technique, dunno, am no judge. Pete St.John (talk) 19:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC)