Talk:Von Neumann cardinal assignment

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[edit] Section on "initial ordinal"

The section "Initial ordinal of a cardinal" is also literally on ordinal number. If we really need both, let us make it a template.--Patrick 12:44, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Over a year ago, I copied that section into this article for two reasons: (1) it is relevant to the topic of this article; and (2) I was afraid that the section would be deleted from the other article (which fortunately has not happened yet). A little redundancy never hurt anything (outside cryptology). Making a template would be a mistake. It would use another article to what purpose? Just to make these two a little shorter. And it would complicate everything, and make this text more vulnerable to being deleted or lost. I vote against your idea. JRSpriggs 09:51, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

In general duplication causes forking: improvements may be made to each copy, which means duplication of work, and no copy where all improvements are integrated.--Patrick 10:30, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

But you can tailor each section to its context. It would probably be awkward if the wording had to be exactly identical in two different contexts. JRSpriggs 11:20, 10 June 2007 (UTC)