Talk:Kite (geometry)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Ovinus (talk · contribs) 03:54, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Hopefully some new blood will soon grace WP:GAN#MATH.

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

   B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

   B. All in-line citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines:

   C. It contains no original research:

   D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

   B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

Spotchecks

(20 random of 36, relative to this version)

• [1]: Fine
• [3]: Doesn't talk about the naming of the artificial kite? Just the bird.
  • It's intended as a source for the deepest origin of the word "kite", supposedly based on the sound the bird makes. But I found another source for the connection from the artificial kite to the bird. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:53, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
• [5]: Technically correct, but per above I don't see the point; deltoid curves have much broader appeal than as curves determined by some random quadrilaterals
  • The point is that it's a bad word to use for quadrilaterals because it's too closely related to other things one studies about quadrilaterals. I added a quote from Coxeter explicitly stating that this nomenclature is bad. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:53, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
• [7]: Fine
• [8]: Fine, although the source mostly uses "dart-shaped" or "dart quadrilateral" and only calls it "dart" once. I don't think this statement needs hard sourcing though.
• [9]: Fine
• [11]: AGF
• [13]: Fine
• [15]: Fine, except the source calls it a "partition classification" rather than a "partitional classification". I'd stick to the source here unless it's clear that the latter is the more common name
  • Isn't this a question of grammar rather than a question of terminology? To describe a classification that might be a partition classification or might be a hierarchical classification (or maybe for parallelism it should be hierarchy classification?) we are saying that we are classifying (some adverb). Do you have an adverbial form of "partition" other than "partitionally" that you think we should use? Also, Usiskin and Griffin use "partition" and "hierarchy" not "X classification". A source we are not currently using, a different paper by the same author as the source here, does use all three of "partition" (as a noun, the result of a classification), "partitional" (as an adjective, describing noun-like classifications), and partitionally (as an adverb, describing verb-like acts of classification). —David Eppstein (talk) 05:20, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
    • Fine to me. Ovinus (talk) 17:47, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
• [17]: Good
• [20]: Good
• [22]: Can't access
  • This is Darling? "Pythagoras’s lute. The kite-shaped figure that forms the enclosing shape for a progression of diminishing pentagons and pentagrams, linking the vertices together. The resulting diagram is replete with lines in the golden ratio." —David Eppstein (talk) 01:51, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
    • Y
• [23]: Good
• [25]: Fine, but I'd appreciate a page number (probably page 24?)
  • This is the Crux Math reference? It has a page number. That's what the 241 is. I realize that the Citation Style 1 or Citation Style 2 format for journal citations is cryptic ("VV (NN): PP" instead of "vol. VV, no. NN, pp. PP"), and gratuitously different from magazine citations, but it's the standard style and there's not much I can do about it being that way. It is indeed the 24th page of the linked pdf, but that's not its page number and should not be used in place of the correct page number. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:55, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
    • Whoops, misread the citation. Ovinus (talk) 02:20, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
• [26]: Good
• [27]: Good
• [30]: Good. It's actually open access, so maybe add link to [1]? A very interesting and fairly accessible topic that I'll have to read in full.
• [33]: Fine. Probably an WP:EXPERTSPS.
• [35]: Can't access, but AGF
• [36]: Good

Content

• "an unrelated geometric object sometimes studied in connection with quadrilaterals" – Why is the stuff after "object" relevant if they aren't strongly connected to kites in particular? Ovinus (talk) 03:54, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

  Answered above, but: lots of unrelated things in mathematics have the same names as each other. It's only a problem when they are used in the same context. The "sometimes studied in connection with quadrilaterals" part makes clear that in some cases the context is very close. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:12, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

  Fair enough. It's just that I've never heard of deltoids in such a context; I see nothing relevant in the deltoid curve article and seems like a footnote to the subject. But it's harmless. Ovinus (talk) 23:19, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

• "The quadrilateral with the greatest ratio of perimeter to diameter is a kite" – Suggest clarifying to "a particular kite" or something like that. It's not trivial that this quadrilateral is unique up to similarity. Ovinus (talk) 03:54, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

  I find it curious that you're bothered by this point only in this one sentence, and not for the next sentence about Penrose tiles (which also doesn't say that they are particular kites, only that one is convex and the other concave) or the one after that about polyhedra, all of which require specific shapes rather than just any kite. I would have thought that the fact that only one specific shape of kite was intended would have been implied by the word "The" at the start of the sentence: if it was more than one kite, it wouldn't be the quadrilateral. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:20, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

  Who are we writing this article for? Kites are not an obscure topic; many people learned about them in sixth grade. I'd say a good target is mathematically competent high school juniors. Regardless, even if the target is set a bit higher, the difference between the three cases is their intuitiveness. For the tiling, readers may hover over the "prototiles" link and quickly assume, "Hey, it's saying kites can form tilings. Fair enough." For the polyhedra, most readers have seen polyhedra before, and can imagine some fanciful shape. But for this first one, it requires the understanding that such an optimal quadrilateral is unique, rather than that "all [or some] kites have this property". This is an idea many of them will have never seen before. Ovinus (talk) 23:19, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with your suggestion of likely target audience, except maybe in the dissection, tiling, and billiards sections, which are more advanced. That's why they are later in the article, and also why I was trying to use degrees rather than radians throughout. So if you think this is confusing, I suppose it's likely they would as well. I added some angles to this one to try to make it clearer that they are fixed. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:54, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  Well, as a recently retired high schooler, I have a fairly good idea of what they find confusing. Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

• "These include as special cases the rhombus and the rectangle respectively, and the square, which is a special case of both" Why is this relevant? Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  This paragraph is about the classification of all symmetric quadrilaterals, and how kites fit into that classification. So as context it's helpful to list the other types of symmetric quadrilaterals. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:55, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

• "The right kites have two opposite right angles" How about also say smth like "The sum of their other two angles equals 180°," as this is a useful characterization Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  Added, but it's maybe a little dubious with respect to WP:SYNTH: we have good sourcing for "right kite = kite and cyclic" and for "cyclic = opposite angles supplementary" but not for the obvious inference "right kite = kite and opposite angles supplementary". —David Eppstein (talk) 19:12, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  Meh, WP:CALC Ovinus (talk) 20:02, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

• "actually tricentric, as they also have a third circle externally tangent to the extensions of their sides" is this "tricentic" terminology in wide use? Never heard of it Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  I don't think it's in wide use, but it's from the source used rather than made-up. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:13, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  Hm. From my Google search it seems to be a neologism; there's this article and mirrors, then there's [2] (2015) which is specifically about kites and says, Thus it could also be called a tricentric quadrilateral in comparison to a bicentric quadrilateral, which only has the first two circles, and then the source you have cited. I'd omit the word "tricentric" unless there's evidence of wider use, as it feels like more of a "pun" than something well-established. Ovinus (talk) 20:02, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  It's from the source. Not only that 2015 article, but the book "A Cornucopia of Quadrilaterals" by Alsina and Nelson. Page 76. The one we use as a footnote for this sentence. I don't think an obscure 2015 journal paper would be enough to establish the terminology but this book seems a lot more mainstream to me. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:36, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

• "extending one side of a regular pentagon to a point" Maybe something like "extend two sides ... until they intersect" ? Wasn't sure about the current wording Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  Replaced description of this construction. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:23, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

• Any pictures of ex-tangential circles to a kite? I can make one if need be. Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  We didn't have one, so I drew one and added it. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:55, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  Lovely! Ovinus (talk) 20:02, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  Incidentally, I'd like to add here that for any two disjoint circles in the plane, of different sizes, the four bitangents to the circles form the sides of both a convex kite and a non-convex kite. But I can't find a source for this observation. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:33, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  How pleasing. I wonder what the area of the kites are in terms of $r_{1},r_{2},d$. Ovinus (talk) 04:30, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

• "while the other circle is exterior to the kite and touches the kite on the two edges incident to the concave angle" Couldn't this be subsumed under, or at least described with, the ex-tangential part? That way, the difference between the concave and convex be put first, and then the commonality in this ex-tangential extravaganza be explained. Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I understand your point here. For the convex kites we have one circle touching all four sides and the other touching four extensions. For the concave kites we have two circles each touching two sides and two extensions. Which of those two do you think is the same as the one touching four extensions, and why? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

  Well, the external, second circle of the convex case. But I suppose they're different enough that it's not helpful to discuss them together. 04:30, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

• "One pair of opposite tangent lengths have equal length." Please clarify what "opposite" means in this context" Ovinus (talk) 01:25, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

  Clarified in article text. (It means, at opposite vertices.) —David Eppstein (talk) 01:48, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

• "congruent kite-shaped facets" Any reason to use "facet" rather than "face"? Ovinus (talk) 02:21, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

  "Face" is ambiguous. In more-popular writing about polyhedra in 3d only, it means only the 2-dimensional things. But in more-technical writing about polytopes that may be higher in dimension, it may instead mean all the pieces of boundary: vertices, edges, 2-faces, 3-faces, etc. Even the whole polytope can be a face, for some definitions. Even the empty set can be a face, of dimension −1, in some definitions (needed to make the face lattice be a lattice). "Facets" is unambiguously the ones of dimension one less than the space. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:25, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

  Interesting! But is this not pedantry in an elementary article like this one? (Or, to indulge: If faces are a superset of facets, isn't the statement still true?) Ovinus (talk) 06:04, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

  Fine, changed to face. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:22, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Will continue after the weekend. Ovinus (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

@Ovinus: are you still waiting for me to do something here, or did you just run short of reviewing time? —David Eppstein (talk) 16:10, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't see you responded. Two more questions:

• Are the red links in the table appropriate? Ovinus (talk) 18:03, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
• What citation(s) corresponds to the two tables? Ovinus (talk) 18:03, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

  I was wondering whether you would ask about those. The short answer is that those tables, in the templates {{Deltoidal table}} and {{Trapezohedra}}, are really more like navboxes, used in multiple related articles to connect them to each other, than like an integral part of this one article. I think the redlinks are there to provide a consistent nomenclature rather than just the more telegraphic numeric designations that are visible in the table itself. I didn't edit them at all in preparation for this GA review, and I don't think GA reviews generally concern themselves with the content of navboxes, but I did provide a paragraph of sourced prose before each one explaining what's in the table. So the answer to "what citation(s)" is: the ones in the immediately preceding paragraph. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:40, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

  I disagree that this is just a navbox; this is nontrivial explanatory information about kites and it's transcluded exactly once across mainspace: on this article. I suspect at least some of it can be sourced, though. I can't access the citations preceding the table; if they contain most of the information in the table I would appreciate if you could simply put the citation after the explanatory prose or in the table title (probably the latter). If that information isn't present, it might be in:

• John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, Chaim Goodman-Strass, The Symmetries of Things 2008, ISBN 978-1-56881-220-5 (Chapter 19, The Hyperbolic Archimedean Tessellations)
• "Chapter 10: Regular honeycombs in hyperbolic space". The Beauty of Geometry: Twelve Essays. Dover Publications. 1999. ISBN 0-486-40919-8. LCCN 99035678.

  Perhaps I can get at least one of them myself. (Conway would be nice to have on my shelf, although it's a bit pricey....) If it's ultimately too difficult to source, then that's alright. Ovinus (talk) 18:31, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

  What do you think needs sourcing that is not already sourced in the explanatory paragraph above it? We often do not source claims in images and their captions that repeat claims in article body text.

  You appear to be correct that the first one is used in only one article, but I am surprised about this. This is part of a big series of templates for big tables of images like this, created by Tomruen, that he has spammed indiscriminately across many polyhedron and tiling articles, so that they all contain large volumes of (usually unsourced) information about all of the other vaguely-related polyhedra, rather than being more focused on the topic at hand. In many of the other tables, much of the content is original research. If anyone tries messing with them, he reverts. It is a problem. But in this specific case, I felt that the two tables were relevant-enough to keep, and could be adequately-enough sourced by the text and its sources that I included in the paragraphs above each table. I didn't attempt to modify the tables (for instance, by omitting the Coxeter diagrams) because I didn't want to get into an edit-war with him. But if it really is used only once, and needs modification, we could subst it into inline material and handle it that way. Then the unused template itself could be taken to a deletion discussion.

  The trapezohedron table really is used across multiple articles, though.

  As for The Symmetries of Things, see the linked article. There is a lot of good material in it, but also some reason to use it with caution (particular for terminology and history). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:46, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

  Gotcha. If you think the linked citations sufficiently support the table entries, then that's alright. Maybe subst it and remove the Coxeter diagrams, but leave the configuration, which are more reasonably routine? Ovinus (talk) 22:18, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

  Substed, diagrams removed, and cut down to remove all the empty cells. There's no need to be definitive in listing all hyperbolic tilings (we can't, there are infinitely many) and I think the smaller table size makes the remaining information (especially the pattern of which ones are polyhedra, which ones are Euclidean tilings, and which ones are hyperbolic) easier to pick out. Template taken to TfD but that's not an issue for this GA review. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Great! Ovinus (talk) 01:04, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

• One last thing: What do you think of collapsing the polyhedra/tiling diagrams by default? At least the second one. On narrow screens it's quite annoying because they take up substantial horizontal space. Ovinus (talk) 18:42, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  I prefer not to per MOS:DONTHIDE. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:14, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  I squished the table, substituted, and removed columns past the (conspicuously missing) nonagonal entry. Ovinus (alt) (talk) 20:30, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Ok, I think that's better. I trimmed the row headers, made the images a bit bigger (because they weren't what was controlling the cell width) and centered both tables. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:57, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

  Brilliant. Passing; nice work, and sorry for the couple delays. College apps exist, so it might be a month before I can do another review. Ovinus (talk) 01:58, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

  No problem; real life comes first. And thanks again for the review. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:06, 25 October 2022 (UTC)