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Degenerate bilinear form is unreferenced[edit]

Request for an esteemed colleague from WikiProject Mathematics to please review and find a source for Degenerate bilinear form, which has been tagged as "Unreferenced" since August 2008. Cielquiparle (talk) 09:58, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see this has been fixed; surely though the right title for this topic is Nondegenerate bilinear form? They're the important ones .... 64.26.99.248 (talk) 18:24, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm guessing there is a stupid Wikipedia reason for this bizarre state of affairs. Tito Omburo (talk) 21:35, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The reason is probably history rather than policy. IAC, rather than renaming the article it might be better to merge it into Bilinear form with {{R to section}} in the redirects. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 11:39, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds reasonable. XOR'easter (talk) 00:26, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge Measurable space into Measure space[edit]

This seems sensible, doesn't it? IntGrah (talk) 23:45, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe, maybe not. The benefit of having two separate pages is that it makes it clear that the notions are different. This also allows other pages that reference these concepts to reference specifically the definition they need and thereby to minimize possible confusion. Note also that each of these two pages has "Not to be confused with ..." link at the top, and also shows the contrast with the other notion. But I can see that this could be debated. PatrickR2 (talk) 06:00, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think they should not be merged, since they are different concepts. Note that the Springer EoM also has separate articles for the concepts. Tito Omburo (talk) 12:19, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. I was hoping that one concept would just be described in a sentence in another article, like Weighted graph in Graph, but I see otherwise now. IntGrah (talk) 13:17, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The two concepts are importantly rather different, especially in applications of measure theory (e.g., probability and dynamics). Tito Omburo (talk) 15:05, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Agree w/Tito, Patrick. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 02:04, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Uncited statements at 0#Computer science[edit]

A few statements at 0#Computer science need support from manuals, textbooks, and/or histories. I know math people aren't necessarily computer people, but it seemed a good idea to raise the signal here too. XOR'easter (talk) 02:42, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doi will be added to the Theory and Applications of Categories[edit]

See this blog post. SilverMatsu (talk) 15:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SVG rendering bug is fixed[edit]

I'm happy to announce that MediaWiki has finally updated their SVG rendering library to a less obsolete version, and as a result plenty of bugs were fixed, including the one that sparked a discussion here back in March. Tercer (talk) 20:23, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the good news! —David Eppstein (talk) 20:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Advice on dealing with questionable citations in lead[edit]

I'd like some advice on how to handle a problem which I encounter quite often in articles covering basic topics that are widely used in other fields.

The typical scenario goes like this: A is a central notion that was introduced a while ago and on which there are plenty of old and recent textbooks. A is now used in many fields outside of mathematics, and maybe in a trendy field such as machine learning. Some people keep adding references to recent textbook or articles on A in the lead.

Sometimes the references are research articles published in obscure journals, and in that case this is not really a problem (even though one might need to remove the same reference several times). But in some cases the references are legit — or at least "legit-looking" — textbooks, and then because Wikipedia does not have very clear guidelines regarding citations in the lead, I am not always sure what to do and end up losing time.

Maybe a concrete example will help: Have a look at the recent [as of 11/06/2024] history of the article Markov chain, more specifically at this diff and this one. Here we have two different IPs located in Romania who are actively monitoring the article and who seem extremely upset that a textbook by a Romanian author is not listed first to back-up:

  • the definition of a Markov chain;
  • the assertion that "Markov chains have many applications as statistical models of real-world processes";
  • the fact that Markovian and Markov can be used to refer to something that has the Markov property.

Of course, that makes me think that the person behind these IPs is either the author of said textbook; or someone who really likes this textbook.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell without reading it, this does indeed seem like a legitimate textbook on Markov chains. In fact, by some metrics it even seems to be a popular textbook: despite being fairly recent, it is already cited 900 times. That is of course impressive...But also not very surprising, considering that it has been the first reference of the Wikipedia article on Markov chains for a while.

(in fact, to try to get an idea of whether most people citing that book actually did so to reference specific properties and theorems, or simply to add a citation after their first use of the phrase "Markov chain". I am not going to copy and copy and paste excerpts, so as not to point fingers; but some authors seem to think that Gagniuc invented Markov chains, others that think that he recently discovered the game-changing fact that the rows of a stochastic matrix sum to 1, etc).

So, on the one hand I think that reference should be removed from the lead (and probably from the article altogether), because there are tons and tons of excellent textbooks on Markov chains, and I have some suspicions of self-promotion with this one (not to mention that I have no idea whether it is any good). On the other hand, this seems to be a legitimate reference (again, I have not read it) and so I can't really base myself on any clear Wikipedia policy to do so.

I would of course appreciate if someone could help me with this specific example (especially since it looks like some IP users are ready to engage in edit-warring). But I am mostly asking for general guidance here, because it is a problem I encounter regularly.

Best, Malparti (talk) 23:49, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to agree that these fairly innocuous statements shouldn't be cited in the lead (per the guideline WP:LEADCITE) but instead in the body. The Gagniucs citation is particularly silly as it is used because it cites a 200+ page book without giving a page number. I suggest migrating citations out of the lead into the corresponding places in the body, leaving WP:LEADCITE in your edit summary; if you actually do run into any trouble (your idea about this doesn't seem entirely supported by data) then bringing the issue up here (and perhaps in parallel on the article's talk-page) and seeing if the angry IP pretending to be two different people engages. --JBL (talk) 00:28, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This can also happen more innocently, when some random editor asks for a citation of some claim and then, to clear the citation needed tag, another editor does a search and finds a random citation that matches the claim. Especially in cases where a claim is a basic fact that everyone working in a subject knows but few bother to write down (because it is so basic), or when the terminology has shifted and the texts haven't been updated to match, finding the claim in a standard textbook rather than in a recent research work can sometimes be difficult. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:42, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Uncontroversial statements discussed later in the article don't need any citation in the lead section, and it can be more legible for readers to defer those footnotes until later. (Of course, it can also be fine to include footnotes in the lead, e.g. when linking to the original source where something was first described.) More generally, when trying to support uncontroversial widely known claims, there are often hundreds+ of sources that could be cited. If you have one easily available, I would recommend leaning on popular and widely cited textbooks or survey papers rather than more obscure sources. People shouldn't be trying to use Wikipedia for self promotion via citation spam. –jacobolus (t) 01:55, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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