Talk:Norm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This disambiguation page has been improved as part of WikiProject Disambiguation, an attempt to improve and standardize disambiguation pages. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

[edit] Meaning in descriptive set theory

So a couple of times, someone has changed the entry for the DST meaning of norm to something like

which makes no sense. Prewellordering is not an area of knowledge. Now if we want to go strictly by the style manual and have each disambig entry start with the word "norm", I suppose I wouldn't be violently opposed to creating a Norm (descriptive set theory) page. It would just be a redirect to prewellordering, I think, since the other choice would just be a dicdef. Then the entry would look like

  • Norm (descriptive set theory), a map from a set into the ordinals

But while this would hew closer to the style manual, I can't see that it's really any improvement over the existing entry, which is informative and avoids making a redirect into an article where you'd have to search for the term you're looking for. --Trovatore 22:27, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

First of all, there is no style guideline that says every entry must start with "Norm", and redirect pages shouldn't be created for that purpose alone. For cases where a usage doesn't have its own article, as with prewellordering norms, then an article that contains that usage somewhere on the page should be linked to, as is being done through the prewellordering link. On the other hand, descriptive set theory speaks nothing of norms, so linking to it doesn't seem particuarly useful or relevent for helping someone find their specific "norm", which is why I removed its link. If norms do have relevent girth within descriptive set theory, applying to other concepts of the theory and not just prewellordering, then I think mention of prewellordering should be omitted altogether; instead, a definition of "norm" should be provided on the descriptive set theory and only that should be linked to from the disambiguation page. Something like:
In mathematics:
...
With the needlessly specific mention of prewellordering, only one part of DST that happens to use norms, omitted. Of course, I am only speculating here, norm may apply near-exclusively to prewellordering (I'm don't know anything of the subject, as you can tell), in which case prewellordering should be linked to.
You are right that my wording was awkward and made no sense, I only changed it for stylistic reasons (mainly the one wikilink per entry guideline, I also found the parenthesized "See:" at the end weird).—jiy (talk) 21:21, September 6, 2005 (UTC)
Norms are equivalent to prewellorderings; someone who wants to know what a norm is should go to the prewellordering page. Nevertheless there is no subject called "prewellordering"; the context in which "norm" has this meaning is descriptive set theory, and I think that should be mentioned in the entry. --Trovatore 21:28, 6 September 2005 (UTC)