User talk:CBM/Archive 14

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Hello, CBM. You have new messages at RobHar's talk page.
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Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/Guideline has been marked as part of the Manual of Style

Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/Guideline (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as part of the Manual of Style. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 02:00, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Help with History of Logic?

Hi Carl. The article History of logic is going through an FAC here The nominating editor has asked me for help (see User talk:Paul August#Logic after WW2). Unfortunately I don't really know much about this. I told him I would ask you (and Trovatore) for help. I will also post a general request for help at the mathematics project. Paul August ☎ 15:45, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Sure, I left a longish comment there about mathematical logic. It may be that the article is more interested in philosophical logic, but hopefully the info I left will be helpful. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:11, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Paul August ☎ 21:02, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Post WWII

Hi I have extended this section [1] in line with your ideas. Would you have a look? Thanks. From the other side (talk) 16:54, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

The future of proof

[2] Yow, this mentions Hewitt. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 10:46, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Hewitt is a respected researcher in computer science; if Scott wanted to quote someone about paraconsistency, that seems reasonable. The only issue with the article on Goedel's theorems is that they are not about paraconsistent logic. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:54, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Re your comments on the history of logic FAC, you said "So for the general subject of "logic", the article is slanted much too much towards older works and towards philosophy." I think that is actually accurate for an article focusing on logic rather than "mathematical logic". Of course mathematical logic is wonderful, but there is a plenty of interest in "logic" by philosophers unrelated to mathematics. Also, that is just one section in a longer article, so it can't mention every possible thing. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:11, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether to post that or not. Maybe you're right. My school had a graduate program in logic that was jointly operated by the math and philosophy departments but it seems to me that its members mostly did mathematical logic, leading me to guess (but I don't know) that philosophical logic these days is mostly the same thing as mathematical logic but with less emphasis on applications to other areas of math.

Btw, do you think the PCP theorem is interesting as a topic in the intersection of proof theory and philosophy? (Alasdair Urquhart: "It's a striking fact to me that some of the most interesting recent extensions of the concept of proof, such as that of a probabilistically checkable proof, have come from outside the proof theory community. These are not proofs in the classical Hilbert sense, of course, but from a foundational point of view, if you define 'proof' as something that convinces you, then they really do seem to be proofs in that sense."[3]). I'm wondering whether to propose mentioning it for the logic article. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 11:45, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

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FYI on reference desk

I've moved the reference desk talk page header from it's old location in talk namespace to Wikipedia:Reference desk/talk header. I'm just notifying you because your watched articles subpage links to the old header location. --Ludwigs2 04:31, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:48, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot

Hi, the bot doesn't seem to have updated Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Cornwall-related articles by quality for a couple of months. DuncanHill (talk) 12:47, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

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Bot framework

Hey CBM, :)
Hope you're having safe travels! When you get back, I was wondering if you'd want to work on the same repository as me for the bot framework that you made (and I have messed with ;) )? The Tool Server team still hasn't been able to get around to my requests for an account & I've made enough changes to the API.pm that I was getting uncomfortable not having a specific SVN repo for it.

I've started a repository over heya: http://svn.seancolombo.com/perlmediawikiapi (and trac and a wiki, etc.). Would u like me to set up an account for you or would you rather I just try to follow your project's repo and occasionally merge your changes into mine (and vice-versa if you so desire)?

Hope your trip goes well ^^
-SColombo (talk) 17:32, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Awesome! Thanks for bumping the JIRA issue :) it'll be much more preferable to just use the original repository. I've added my info & hopefully they'll add the account soon. If I recall, I've added purging, deletes, and listing all templates on a page - as soon as the account stuff gets ironed out I'll start merging.

-SColombo (talk) 17:27, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Scottish Islands

It appears User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Scottish Islands was mistakenly updated by WP 1.0 bot. Finavon (talk) 08:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Classification of mathematics articles

I can see how using the traditional category system can be lot of work because membership in a subcategory may or may not mean implicit membership in the parent category. But perhaps we can combine the advantages of both approaches by using hidden categories:

E.g. for Algebra, we could have something like Category:WPM algebra, a new hidden category. We would normally only apply this category to other categories, not to individual articles. Every (immediate) member of a category in this Category:WPM algebra would be considered an Algebra article. This category would probably contain Category:Algebra and all its immediate subcategories. But it would be an individual decision for each, and for sub-subcategories such as Category:Computer algebra systems or Category:Variable (computer programming) we would decide explicitly whether to include them or not.

We could also consider hidden categories of the form Category:WPM not algebra. For any category in Category:WPM algebra we would put those subcategories which we don't want into Category:WPM not algebra. Then it would be trivial to check the resulting structure for consistency and completeness.

By the way, instead of hidden categories we could also simply apply the field parameter to project banners on category pages and run a bot that adds the field to the project banners of immediate category members. Hans Adler 12:52, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Source for perceived refutation of logicism

Hi Carl,

there's a bit of a flap on mathematics about the assertion that the Goedel theorems showed that mathematics could not be reduced to logic. At least one editor who doesn't think that happened is much more confident than his understanding of the topic justifies, which is rather irritating, but I think he was correct that the sentence as phrased was too strong. He removed it entirely; I restored a softened version of it. But even the softened version should really be sourced. I was wondering if you had any such sources. The Gödel's incompleteness theorems article sources it to a rather obscure article by Hellmann that I don't have; surely there's something more appropriate in some standard text. --Trovatore (talk) 09:09, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

The issue with logicism is more fundamental than Goedel's theorem. For example, the "logical nature" of the axiom of infinity has always been in doubt. I can certainly find some references next week when I am back at my office. I think this article [4] in the Stanford Encyclopedia may be useful in the meantime, although I don't think we should use the SEP as a reference ourselves. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:24, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, but it wasn't absurd on its face, before Goedel, that you might have been able to get all of arithmetic without needing the axiom of infinity. --Trovatore (talk) 20:51, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Since arithmetic has a categorical finite second-order axiomatization, in second-order logic you can get all of arithmetic without any axioms, if you are willing to preface the conjunction of the Peano axioms onto each statement you are interested in. But the logicist program was to reduce all of mathematics to logic, I thought, not just arithmetic. I think I remember looking up the Hellman reference before; I may have it back in my office. I don't remember exactly what point he made about this. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:18, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Well, the long-term goal might have been all of math, but plenty of logicist writings focus on arithmetic; it was the natural first place to start. I'm speculating a bit but I'm not sure they would have considered it a satisfactory solution either to prepend the conjunction of the axioms, or to go to second-order logic, as the logicality of second-order logic is also controversial.

Though I have never seen this written down anywhere, my reconstruction of what might have been a satisfactory outcome for them would have been something like this: Given any statement of arithmetic (or, more ambitiously, any mathematical statement at all), translate it in a meaning-preserving way into a statement of first-order predicate calculus (with uninterpreted symbols), in such a way that the translation of any arithmetical statement is either a validity or the negation of a validity in FOPC. For example the equation 0+0=0 might be translated into

\forall x\lnot P(x)\land \forall x\lnot Q(x)\land \forall x\lnot (P(x)\land Q(x))

\Rightarrow

\forall x\lnot (P(x)\lor Q(x))

and I think it's reasonable to claim that this translation preserves meaning. I think I can probably translate any quantifier-free statement of arithmetic similarly. How you get quantifiers I have no idea, but it's not absurd on its face that there might be a way.

Then the relevance of Goedel is that he showed arithmetical truth is not

\Sigma _{1}^{0}

; given that the validities of FOPC are

\Sigma _{1}^{0}

, while we haven't refuted that there could be a meaning-preserving translation, we've at least shown that no such translation can be effective, which would probably make it less satisfactory to the logicist aspirations. --Trovatore (talk) 18:44, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Wittgenstein, I believe, invoked an unbounded OR (or was it an unbounded AND?). But is this invoking an implicit axiom of infinity? Bill Wvbailey (talk) 00:47, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, not really following. --Trovatore (talk) 00:50, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm far from my books so I can't verify this chapter and verse, but I remember being intrigued by Wittgenstein's notion of the "existential operator" being (if necessary) nothing more than an unbounded OR over the domain of discourse, of this sort: "It is true that: Either 'a' is true OR 'b' is true OR 'c'is true or 'd' or 'e' or . . . ad infinitum if necessary" where 'a', 'b', 'c' are the particular elements in the universe of discourse. In other words, the "existential operator" is nothing more than an abbreviation, a writing-convenience, a symbol that can be dispensed with. And as the "for all" operator is derived from the existential operator and NOT, it can be eliminated as well. But this seems to invoke a tacit notion of "unboundedness". If I've misunderstood your question about "how to get quantifiers", sorry to have intruded. BillWvbailey (talk) 05:08, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

It's pretty common to think of the existential quantifier as a generalized OR and the universal as a generalized AND. Some older literature even used notation such as

\bigwedge _{x}\phi (x)

where we would use

\forall x\,\phi (x)

.

This still has relevance today in terms of truth values. If you think about it, the truth value of

A\lor B

is the least upper bound of the truth values of A and B, and the truth value for

A\land B

is the greatest lower bound of the truth values on A and B. These rules hold in Boolean-valued and Heyting-valued semantics as well. Now, relative to a domain D, the truth value of

\exists x\,\phi (x)

is the least upper bound of the truth values of the set

\{\phi (d):d\in D\}

, and the truth value of

\forall x\phi (x)

is the greatest lower bound of the truth values of those formulas. Since least upper bounds in lattice theory are traditionally denoted with the

\lor

operator, and greatest lower bounds are traditionally denoted with the

\land

operator, this gives a more concrete sense in which the existential quantifier is like

\lor

and the universal quantifier is like

\land

. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:10, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Re Trovatore: I thought that the start of logicism was either Frege's system or Principia Mathematica, each of which went far past arithmetic? Of course one could restrict to arithmetic, but I have the sense things were more fuzzy back then. Also see the footnote on page 3 of this paper [5], which gives a mixed appraisal of the role of Goedel's theorems in the death of logicism, and probably has some useful references. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:10, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Euler

Yep, that was an AWB flagged change. LilHelpa (talk) 01:21, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

I really appreciate your doing the notification. Thanks. LilHelpa (talk) 10:53, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

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Error with bot

This bot closed a Peer review that hadn't even been opened yet! Wikipedia:Peer review/Nobel Prize/archive1. Not sure why it would do that... --Esuzu (talk • contribs) 10:23, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

According to User:PeerReviewBot/Logs/Archive, the article Nobel Prize is on FAC. The bot archives peer reviews when a FAC is opened. You can discuss this further with the Peer Review project; it was a criterion that they asked me to add to the bot when it was developed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:19, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Ah, well it just was on FAC but it had been closed. Must have been some lag in between I guess. --Esuzu (talk • contribs) 22:22, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know why, but the bot's debugging logs definitely show that the article was listed as being in the FAC category at the time. Thanks for letting me know this happened; I will keep an eye out and investigate more if it seems like a pattern. — Carl (CBM · talk) 23:48, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Bot framework

Any chance you can work your magic again to get the JIRA issue some more love?
Thanks! :)
-SColombo (talk) 18:45, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Possible PR bot error?

Hi Carl, PeerReviewBot did not recognize the PR templates on the talk pages of four articles in its most recent run through. I checked and did not see a problem with any of them, but did not fix them by hand as I figured you might need to see them first. User:PeerReviewBot/Logs/Archive. Thanks as always for all of your help with PR, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 10:33, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikiproject renamed

Hi, SilkTork moved Wikipedia:Essay Categorization and/or Classification and all associated pages to Wikipedia:WikiProject Essays. Don't know if the move will affect the bot. Just wanted to let you know. Thanks! ɳorɑfʈ^Talk! 15:27, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

It will not matter as long as the category names are not changed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:33, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

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References

Hi! Thanks for your tip on how to find references quickly if they exist and when they don't have an inline reference.

In this case I reckon the anonymous IP, who has made almost no edits, is more likely to check the article he has changed than his talk page. This may anyway different if he doesn't have a static IP. So this is the only practical place to give him my minimal tip.

Personally I find it helpful if the references are mentioned where they apply, as it means I don't need to look through a list at the end of the articles to see whether or not the reference exists. I think this is the preferred method these days. Stephen B Streater (talk) 10:23, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Belgrade

Hello, Carl. Hope you are good? Can you please see this wiki project (Wikipedia:WikiProject Belgrade) and tell me why Importance don't working in the table? Should i create new template? All best, --Tadija^taking 12:38, 8 April 2010 (UTC) I got it! :) Thanks anyway! :) --Tadija^taking 12:41, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

The Serbia template seems to be set up so that you need to use the Belgrade-importance parameter to set an importance for the Belgrade project. If you look at a page such as Talk:University of Belgrade Faculty of Law , it is in Category:Unknown-importance Belgrade articles. That category is what the bot sees. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:54, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Bot framework

They finally approved me, but I agree it would be best to just go third-party in case someone else joins up. I have SVN as a feature of my DreamHost account so we could use a repo there, google code, or somewhere else... I have no particular preference: whatever works best for you. Let me know if you have a particular leaning. (and thank you for the login patch!)
-SColombo (talk) 00:11, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

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Mediawiki:Bot

Hi Carl,

I realized recently that Mediawiki/API.pm and MediaWiki/API.pm are actually different things, with the former being your package. I am just curious, is there a reason for why there are two such packages instead of one? I am also wondering why the names are so similar (I thought for a while that the former was just a misspelling of the latter package). Just wondering. You can reply here. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:23, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The reason is that some version of that name is natural for a perl module. I published mine first, as I remember, and the author of the one that is on cpan asked me about merging with his, but his was too bare-bones and I wanted to include a lot of helper functions. I don't remember if we agreed about error-checking either. Since our approaches differed, we kept the modules separate. Since I was already using the name for mine, I didn't bother renaming it. I realize it's confusing, but I am not ready to rename mine yet or try to merge it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Good points. But long term something must be done one way or another to avoid the confusion. Merging would be the most preferable, perhaps. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:46, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot

And a comment unrelated to the above. The User:WP 1.0 bot page points to the source code in the svn repository here. Now that the "2G" bot has been the default for a long time, perhaps the directories in there could be renamed so that the user is led to the current source code rather than to the code of the older bot no longer in use. The User:WP 1.0 bot page itself could perhaps need a bit of overhaul given that the 2G bot has been the default for a while as well. Just some minor remarks. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:31, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I would like to avoid renaming the directories, since it may break links, and since I would have to fix up all the repositories I have checked out in various places. But I edited the README of the older code to explain that it is no longer the active version. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:36, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Just as above, I understand the difficulty, and I believe you understand the confusion this may cause. Whether it is worth doing the work to avoid the confusion, that's the question. :) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:47, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Thinking about it, I could rename the old directory to wp10.1g – then it might be more obvious that the two directories are parallel. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:13, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

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Please vote for Ordinal scale

I noticed that you made a contribution to the article Ordinal scale. I agree that it ”should be translated into English‘’ as stated by User:Kdammers. I nominated the article as a candidate for the Article Creation and Improvement Drive. Would you please vote for it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Collaboration_and_Improvement_Drive

Your vote would be especially meaningful since you focus on editing articles about mathematical logic. Perhaps you could encourage others to vote for this article as well.

Feel free to respond on my talk page.

We have until April 23, 2010 to get 4 votes. Thank you very much for your help! Tucoxn (talk) 07:36, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Request for ambox

Can you please create the template ambox on http://pa.wikipedia.org. Serjatt (talk) 14:32, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Reverting that IP's edits...

I know of a script that can be helpful in that regard... add

importScript('User:John254/mass rollback.js');

to your monobook,js, then click the "rollback all" tab. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 02:57, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I need to look at the page names to try to avoid rolling back talk page edits or user space edits. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:58, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Well you can set the namespace dropdown list to "(Article)" to avoid that problem. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 03:00, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes. A secondary problem is that some of the edits are to other things. I think that the problematic ones are the ones with no edit summary; I am skipping the ones that do have an edit summary that indicates some other purpose for editing. The issue is just the mass changing of one template to another; any other sort of edit is OK. It won't take very long to rollback the ones with no edit summary via tabs. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:02, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Well one doesn't have to do them all at once... (In fact I'd recommend against doing anything over 25, unless you want to freeze your browser) I'm going through and doing them in batches of 10, hovering over each diff link so that popups can take a look before I do it. The Thing // Talk // Contribs 03:16, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I think they are all done now. Thanks for helping. I did warn the IP not to make these changes several days ago. Maybe they were misinformed somewhere else that they should orphan the template. It sucks to have to rollback so much, but hopefully the IP will see that we need to wait for the RFD to close before making massive changes. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:19, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks a lot like this guy was using some kind of unauthorized bot to do this... The Thing // Talk // Contribs 03:20, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I can't tell if it was a bot; the edit rate is in the hazy middle range where it could be done by hand or by a slow bot. So without evidence to the contrary I would not call it a bot. But it is certainly a massive change made while an RFD is open. I left a note for the IP a few days ago to not make this sort of edit; today I left a more specific block warning and rolled back the edits. The goal, in my mind, is to let the RFD run its natural course. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah it is in a bit of a gray area. He did make an AWB feature request, so I'm wondering if he got the source code and modified it in a way as to be able to use it without having to log in and be approved to use it. Also I'm happy to help. One of the reasons I noticed this was that the reverts per minute that Huggle was reporting was extremely high for this time of the evening here, about 24-25 rpm, when it's normally about 9-10 rpm... The Thing // Talk // Contribs 03:31, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I think AWB already does this; at least several AWB bots like SmackBot already replace redirects for templates, but they are only supposed to do so when they are making other edits to the article. Making edits just to bypass redirects has always been a "no-no" for using AWB. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:33, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Well I'm talking about using AWB as an IP, which normally isn't possible. In addition, he isn't on the checkpage. appended Boy, people seem to be jumping the gun on this... The Thing // Talk // Contribs 03:38, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I saw the second person only because the edit showed up on my watchlist. The general AWB rule against making only formatting changes is not as well known as it should be. I dropped a note already. It doesn't look like a lot of edits so I was not planning to do any rollbacks at the moment. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:45, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Unexplained Revert

[6]

Why?174.3.123.220 (talk) 22:27, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Have you looked at your user talk page, User talk:174.3.123.220? — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:29, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Just did. Also, I've come to your talk page to confirm that the rfd has been closed, and I will resume the edits.174.3.123.220 (talk) 00:23, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Please don't; I have left more detailed comments on your user talk page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:26, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

You just said the reason they were inappropriate was because of when they were done. They were done while the redirect was being discussed.174.3.123.220 (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

The rfd was a discussion about the redirect, not about changing the articles with otheruses4 to about.174.3.123.220 (talk) 00:57, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Uncalled for

[7]

This reverted a good edit regarding WP:bolding.174.3.123.220 (talk) 04:06, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Offensive material has been marked as a guideline

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Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 38 has been marked as part of the Manual of Style

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Wikipedia:Words to watch has been marked as part of the Manual of Style

Opening post-script file of Murawski

Hi Carl, yeah could you open this for me? Neither of my computers can figure out how to open a postscript file. I would have thought that my full-version Acrobat could do it, but it choked. My email is pierab@aol.com. Thanks, BillWvbailey (talk) 14:14, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

About the Turing completeness article

Thank You for the Welcome! My concern is that that article is too long to cite too few references, thats why i put the tag. Unfortenately i know very little about the subject to add or modify something. Gecg (talk) 16:19, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

The article is pretty bad, and it looks like there was an edit war between Likebox and another editor a while back. Sigh. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 02:59, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style

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Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)/IPA vs. other pronunciation symbols is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style

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Barnstar!

		The WikiProject U.S. Roads Contributor Barnstar
		On behalf of the U.S. Roads WikiProject, we confer this award in appreciation of your work to create the process necessary to update our WikiWork table through the use of WP1.0bot. Imzadi 1979 → 20:24, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Words to watch is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style

Wikipedia:Days of the year has been marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/US Guideline has been marked as part of the Manual of Style

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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Songs#Straw poll regarding assessing as stub based on pagesize of article

You had previously commented on this discussion; if possible, please weigh-in at the above straw poll. –xeno^talk 15:31, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arthropods articles by quality log: bug?

I think this must be a bug: WP 1.0 bot reports updates to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Arthropods article assessments at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Arthropods articles by quality log#April 28, 2010 (all of them changes from B-class to C-class), although no such changes have occurred. In the case of Talk:Trombiculidae, there have been no changes since January, and all the projects list it as B-class. The others are Talk:Tick, Talk:American lobster, Talk:Coconut crab, Talk:Crayfish and Talk:Mantis shrimp, in each of which there is at least a different project which has assessed the article as C-class, but none of those talk pages has even been edited in the relevant 24 hours, let alone reassessed. What's going on? --Stemonitis (talk) 05:10, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Update: I noticed that the talk pages in question weren't appearing in Category:B-Class Arthropods articles (although they weren't in Category:C-Class Arthropods articles either), and after performing null edits, they now reappear. I guess WP 1.0 Bot uses the category listings, so it's not really your fault, but do you have any idea why those articles failed to show up in the category, and why WP 1.0 Bot thought they were C-class? They hadn't been edited, and the banner template hadn't been changed, as far as I can see. --Stemonitis (talk) 05:48, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Correct. It seems that, for whatever reason, virtually all projects were affected. GregorB (talk) 13:57, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

It was WPBannerMeta, apparently fixed now. GregorB (talk) 14:00, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

No articles?

See this it says we went from 19k to 0 articles. — Rlevse • Talk • 00:59, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

[8] shows something similar for one of the USRD subprojects. Imzadi 1979 → 01:05, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Something to do with the toolserver admins; I'm looking into it. Thank you for the prompt note. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:29, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I believe I know the cause, but I need to wait for toolserver database maintenance to finish before I can upload fixed tables. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:42, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

There was (pre-announced) database maintenance last night. I thought that, if the database server went down, my bot would simply stop running. Instead, the bot kept running without any data. The ratings info in the database was always correct; the tables that showed no articles were mistaken. I had the bot upload the tables again last night once the database was back up, which restored the correct information. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:35, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt explanations and corrections. Some of us start to take automated tasks that work well for granted. Then comes the day that they don't work, and we're afraid the sky is falling or something equally overdramatic. Thanks for maintaining such a useful tool. Imzadi 1979 → 10:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

On Goedel's Conjecture

Would you be kind enough to comment and criticise my short article on On Goedel's Conjecture? Thank you MACherianMACherian (talk) 18:40, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

You mean the one on your userpage. I left a comment there. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 02:22, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/FAQ has been marked as a policy

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/FAQ has been marked as a policy

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courtesy notification

I don't have any opinion on the issue, but you got reverted by the same IP you reverted at [9] Figured it was more likely to be on my watchlist than yours. :) Orderinchaos 21:59, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it; the whole situation there is very strange. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Refs

There are 12 million registered users on WP and only one has complained about it. Rich Farmbrough, 13:13, 3 May 2010 (UTC).

P.S. I assume you have read the references before rearranging them back?

You may wish to look at this article to establish if the repetition of reference 1 means that it is to be emphasised, or that it is acting as a supporter for reference 2, in which chase the second cluster, should be changed to be consistent to 2,1,2. Rich Farmbrough, 16:43, 3 May 2010 (UTC).

Indeed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Mean signed difference

Thanks for your comment re my addition of {{maths rating}} to the above. I came across the article whilst on new page patrol. It had no talk page, so as well as adding the expert tag, I attempted to place a Maths project banner to the talk page, but the resultant text instructed me to add maths rating instead. If I had not done so, I cannot see how it could have appeared in the list you referred to as the article was uncategorised. Cheers. –– Jezhotwells (talk) 00:43, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style

Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 02:00, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Reply

The main reason it recurs is that it is not a coding error (therefore the developers are not likely to remove it from AWB). It has had only good effects. Rich Farmbrough, 11:43, 4 May 2010 (UTC).

Reopen sockpuppet investigation?

Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/CarlHewitt. --Trovatore (talk) 01:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I don't care about talk page stuff, as long as it doesn't escalate to edit warring over articles. In this case I think that just getting someone to semiprotect the incompleteness theorems article would be enough. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

That would also be fine. But I think I have heard that semiprotection is not usually considered appropriate for a dispute with a single editor. If that's correct, then we're in the somewhat awkward position that it's almost obviously a single editor, but that fact has not been proved. --Trovatore (talk) 03:29, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I posted a note to WP:AE a while back. In this case, there is an arbcom decision that specifically allows semiprotection. However, I think it's better to avoid doing it myself. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:30, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think there's exactly anything to investigate, though logging the incident someplace might be good for something. This is part of why I'm so unfriendly to Hewitt. This shows that Hewitt's approach to the incompleteness theorem article is similar to what he previously did with physics. We are nothing but a SEO tool from his point of view. He has also managed to tilt a lot of WP's computer science pages to presenting his own version of history. Fixing that would take a massive cleanup campaign which I just don't see happening. Blecch. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 02:13, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I opened an SPI after seeing some of the socks still active and trying to mess with other articles. This is older but still disgusting. I'd really like to urge more vigorous enforcement against Hewitt, perhaps at WP:ARA, unless you have serious objections. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 06:00, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I am not sure what else can be done. The IP ranges in California will be very highly used, and Hewitt is not a major issue, so no sort of massive IP block would be warranted. The bigger difficulty is having enough knowledgeable people to protect pages or revert changes. I can follow the logic articles, but for the CS articles it's a little more dicey. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm thinking of asking for a community ban against Hewitt, of the "Willy on Wheels, revert and block on sight" variety. Right now there's an intricate restriction against self-promoting editing with mild remedies like article semi-protection. What we're doing now is ineffective and a lot of our CS articles are now plagued with something like an Alma problem because of Hewitt. I'm interested in functional programming and its history, and I feel like I can't believe what I read about it in Wikipedia due to this (as if I could before, but you know what I mean). Bah. 69.228.170.24 (talk) 06:09, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

We broke one of WP 1.0 Bot's missions

Specifically, User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Custom/Essays-1. We've changed the category name from "importance" to "impact" which zeroed out the table created above. Is this fixable? ɳorɑfʈ^Talk! 15:45, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes; you just need to put the "impact" categories into Category:Wikipedia essays articles by importance. I did that, and fixed one other thing, and now the table is correct.

The other thing was caused by this edit [10]. You really should assign all of the essays to be "NA" quality, as they were before. The new template will not break the bot, but it will cause the quality rating to show up as "NotA-Class" in various places, because no quality assessment has been assigned to the essays. This will make people confused. When you change the template back, it will make the table temporarily incorrect while the categories populate. Once the essays have the NA-Class quality category again, I will need to fix the table one more time, back to NA-Class quality from NotA-Class quality. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:03, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd be happy to fix that, but I don't speak the code language. Is all I have to do is to stick |class=NA back into it somewhere? If so, where? ɳorɑfʈ^Talk! 18:07, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I'll see if I can do it in a way that is minimally disruptive to the table. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:16, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Saw your edits. It was a valiant effort. ɳorɑfʈ^Talk! 06:49, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Invisible Barnstar
		I hereby award you this Invisible Barnstar, for your behind-the-scenes contributions to Wikipedia:WikiProject Essays. You've gone out of your way to make sure our WikiProject functions the best way it can, and completes its mission of bringing order to Wikipedia Essays. We thank you. ɳorɑfʈ^Talk! 12:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of policies has been marked as a policy

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Wikipedia:Words to avoid is no longer marked as part of the Manual of Style

FLT and set theory

This is from FOM archive so you may have seen it already, but if not, it might interest you.[11] 69.228.170.24 (talk) 08:58, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

X has no longer been marked as part of the MoS

I intend to remove Category:Wikipedia style guidelines from all the pages as they are now better sorted in Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style. Can you change your bot to monitor this category and its children ? Gnevin (talk) 12:58, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I have simply disabled the bot from checking MOS categories for now. I will change it later once the "new" category structure is settled. You should also contact User:Dank, who follows the style categories. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:52, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

OK thanks . Will let you know when the queue has caught up and I've informed Dank of this discussion Gnevin (talk) 21:22, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

The old category is now empty. Gnevin (talk) 21:43, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Summary style no longer marked as a guideline

Wikipedia:Summary style (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change (more information). -- VeblenBot (talk) 02:00, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Natural language processing.

You might like to consider whether this should be categorised as an inverse problem. Rich Farmbrough, 00:09, 10 May 2010 (UTC).

I have no idea what you are talking about. I am in the process of writing an ANI notice at the moment and will contact you when it is finished. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:10, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

It is an interesting question and an important one. The correct answer might improve Wikipedia. You have some familiarity, I thought with mathematics, if not inverse problems in particular. Rich Farmbrough, 00:33, 10 May 2010 (UTC).

Wikipedia:WikiProject Numismatics/Style no longer marked as a guideline

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A random thought

I noticed your mass reverting going on. Not sure if you're using a tool to do this or what, but since it seems to be, quite literally, massive, might I suggest that you revert as a bot? (I assume there's a good reason for these reverts and won't get into that, I'm just trying to read the recent changes) --Shirik (Questions or Comments?) 02:08, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I was not sure how much it would flood the recent changes. I'll try to reduce the rate, by doing them in smaller chunks. I'll also add the "bot" parameter, which I wasn't aware of. Thanks for pointing it out. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:10, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Hewitt ANI, thanks

I'm clueless about the methodology, so I appreciate the attention. Thanks, Bill Wvbailey (talk) 02:57, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Make love not war?

Trashing Prof. Hewitt is harming Wikipedia's reputation. Why don't you read his ArXiv publication and make peace? ~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.65.169.225 (talk) 00:45, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Could you point out any edit in which I have "trashed" Hewitt? — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:55, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Public domain has been marked as a guideline

Unification (and Nominal terms (computer science))

It looks like we have an expert editor, User:DPMulligan, willing to work in that area. But, he seems rather new to Wikipedia, so he might need some help with style etc., so the articles don't read like research papers. Maybe you can help? Pcap ping 21:18, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I have been traveling for a few days. I will contact him this weekend and see if I can be of any help. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:37, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

a whitespace nit in a lot of transcluded pages

Hi. Please see this edit where I removed a newline before a noinclude. This fixes an extra bit of white space in any transcluding pages. I see that the pages is maintained by your bot, so expect that this will be overwritten. I also believe that there will be a lot of instances of this issue. Should this result in a slight tweak to your bot code? If not, whatever other similar pages should be tweaked, too. Cheers, Jack Merridew 20:16, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Actually, the bot only updates User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Serial killer-related. So your change will not be overwritten. If other people use layouts in which they need to remove the whitespace, I am happy for them to do it. But I am afraid that changing all those pages might break as many layouts as it fixes, so I will leave it to the individual projects. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:36, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Toolserver query assistance

Could you run a query on the toolserver to find all AfD discussions for bilateral relations? These are all named along the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Country X–Contry Y relations pattern. I'm guessing the rule should be that the word "relations" appears in the title, an that it contain an ndash or -. The maintenance of Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Bilateral relations was manual and haphazard until today. There didn't keep any archives of the closed discussions. At some point they've even stopped using the list and resorted to plain old talk page canvassing to notify interested parties, which resulted in a giant bruhaha on ANI this week. Thanks. Pcap ping 12:15, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Here are the 481 pages that match /Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.*relations$/. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:49, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Re

Thanks, could you also find those at 2nd, 3rd nomination? The termination should be /Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.*relations.*nomination\)/, I think. Pcap ping 13:05, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

No problem. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:09, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Re2

Thanks. I nearly crashed Wikipedia with 500 huge transclusions on a page. Obviously the delsort wasn't designed for a huge glut of closed discussions. I hope User:The wubbot can handle it. Pcap ping 14:09, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

User:WP 1.0 bot

Hopefully I set this up correctly, and the bot will come through soon? Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 18:02, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

I use the web interface at http://toolserver.org/~enwp10 to run the bot on your project, and everything seems fine. I transcluded User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Prem Rawat to the "statistics" page by hand. The bot will update the log and the table once per day (so you should see a log update within 24 hours). Let me know if you run into any issues, and good luck with the wikiproject. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:17, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Reflist

The reflist run is completely different I don't run that using the hacked version of AWB you insisted on. Rich Farmbrough, 12:10, 20 May 2010 (UTC).

Sanity and common sense. Rich Farmbrough, 12:15, 20 May 2010 (UTC).

Because it is simply the right thing to do. No one has EVER complained about an actual re-arrangement. I do respect your reasoning that it could be a problem, but the fact is that it turns out, empirically, that it is not a problem. Moreover you don't seem to realise that I have gone to considerable lengths to accommodate you, to the extent of setting up a Csharp environment and having to re-sync and recompile the source, which means maintaining multiple versions of the software, sensible and brain-dead. And introduced a build number into the date maint tags, which is slightly insane. Moreover I didn't restart the reflist run, only the maint tags run, which is not affected. Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 20 May 2010 (UTC).

OK, cool. Rich Farmbrough, 12:40, 20 May 2010 (UTC).

Pythagoras's Theorem

Carl, Thanks for your message on my talk page. The essence of my argument is that Pythagoras's theorem is a special 3D case of the Lagrange identity. The Lagrange identity itself can hold in any dimensions. Seven dimensions is a special case which gives a semblance of Pythagoras's theorem, but no other dimensions, apart from 3 or 7, even give a semblance of Pythagoras's theorem.

It seems to me that the root of our disagreement is the fact that you believe Pythagoras's theorem to be a 2D affair. The problem with that is that a 2D space without the existence of a third dimension is as dificult to imagine as a 4D space. In our 3D world, every 2D plane has a perpendicular direction in the third dimension, and every rotation has a spin axis that has a direction which is perpendicular to the plane of rotation. Angle is a measure of the 'degree of rotation'. If we go into a purely 2D world, we cannot even imagine what things would be like. If we extrapolate Pythagoras's theorem into 'n' dimensions generally, on the basis that it is always a 2D affair, then we are playing around with spaces which we don't comprehend and we can neither prove nor disprove Pythagoras's theorem in those spaces. The extrapolation to 'n' dimensions merely becomes a definition.

The areal/geometric interpretation in 3D hence gives way to a metric interpretation in 'n'D. The two concepts cease to be the same thing. David Tombe (talk) 19:27, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Ordinarily, angle measure is defined as the percentage of arc length of a circle that is cut off by the angle (possibly multiplied by 2π or 360 to correct the units). This does not require a third dimension in any way. I don't believe many mathematicians have difficulty imagining the Euclidean plane without a third dimension (nor do most calculus students). Nor do we have any difficulty proving the Pythagorean theorem for arbitrary inner product spaces. Although you are always free to believe what you like, the article will reflect the mainstream understanding.

Independent of this, I have been taught that our world is (at least) 4-dimensional, but as far as experimental evidence has shown the Pythagorean theorem holds anyway. So if I rotate my finger in a plane while keeping time constant, my finger is rotating around a 2-dimensional subspace of the universe. It's just a quirk of three-dimensional space that each rotation has a line as an axis. In 2D space, a rotation is around a point, while in n-dimensional space a rotation is around an (n−2)-dimensional subspace. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:04, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Carl, Your statement,

It's just a quirk of three-dimensional space that each rotation has a line as an axis.

is the keypoint in the entire issue. Pythagoras's theorem may well only apply to a 2D triangle, but it applies in a 3D space. Whether or not Pythagoras's theorem would apply in a 2D space or a 4D space is sheer conjecture.

The Lagrange identity makes it quite clear that Pythagoras's theorem is a special 3D case. It's all very well to talk about 'inner product spaces'. But when you import a concept such as Pythagoras's theorem, which contains the outer product intrinsically, you cannot cut the outer product out. The outer product will still be there. The conclusion is that either Pythagoras's theorem does not fit inside an 'n' dimensional inner product space, due to its intrinsic outer product, or else we have to change the interpretation of Pythagoras's theorem in an 'n' dimensional inner product space.

The situation, as per the sources, seems to be the latter. Pythagoras's theorem applies in an 'n' dimensional inner product space, but the interpretation shifts from 'areal' to 'metric'. The terminologies also change, such as from 'perpendicular' to 'orthogonal'.

That, in my opinion, was the purpose of contrasting the 'areal' interpration with the 'metric' interpretation' in the article. David Tombe (talk) 10:21, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

(1) "Whether or not Pythagoras's theorem would apply in a 2D space or a 4D space is sheer conjecture." – it has been proved that the Pythagorean theorem holds in

\mathbb {R} ^{n}

for all n >1.

(2) "The terminologies also change, such as from 'perpendicular' to 'orthogonal'." – in the context of

\mathbb {R} ^{n}

there is no need to change the terminology.

As I keep pointing out, there is nothing about the Pythagorean theorem that uses the cross product "intrinsically". Even in the special case of 3D, the only "intrinsic" relation is that both the cross product and the Pythagorean theorem are related to length. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:47, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Carl, I could simplify the argument to the singular fact that Pythagoras's theorem is the special 3D case of Lagrange's identity. What would you say to that argument? David Tombe (talk) 15:20, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

It's wrong. The Pythagorean theorem was proved, as a theorem about the two-dimensional plane, long before the idea of analytic geometry existed, and without any appeal to a third dimension. The generalization to three-dimensional space is exactly the same as the generalization to n-dimensional space for n > 2. So there is no reason to view the Pythagorean theorem as particularly being about 3D space (and, indeed, I have never seen a mathematics text that does treat the 3D case differently than the n dimensional case).

The fact that the Pythagorean theorem turns out to be equivalent to some other identity in the particular case of three dimensions is amusing but not particularly relevant. There are many examples in mathematics where two things turn out to be equivalent in special cases. For example, the determinant of a 3x3 matrix with rows a, b, and c can be computed as

a\cdot (b\times c)

but this does not mean that only 3x3 matrices have determinants. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:26, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Carl, You have acknowledged that the three dimensional case of the Lagrange identity is Pythagoras's theorem. Yet you say that this fact is 'amusing', rather than 'relevant'.

You see, even without using the Lagrange identity, I could see that Pythagoras's theorem is a theorem about a 2D triangle in a 3D space. I could always see that as soon as 'angle' is involved, then we are into the realms of axes of rotation that are lines which are perpendicular to the plane of the triangle. I could always see that Pythagoras's theorem was a theorem which requires the third dimension even though the triangle itself sits in a 2D plane. Pythagoras's theorem leads to the Pythagoras trigonomentric identity. That in turn introduces both sine and cosine, which in turn introduce outer and inner product and hence demonstrate that Pythagoros's theorem is the special 3D case of the Lagrange identity.

At any rate, we don't even need to get into the argument about whether or not Pythagoras's theorem intrinsically contains an outer product or not, or whether that outer product is required to be left outside the door when Pythagoras's theorem gets invited into an inner product space.

The argument comes down simply to the fact that Pythagoras's theorem is the 3D version of the Lagrange identity. If you think that that is merely an amusing fact, then we will simply have to agree to disagree.

Every debate has to end sooner or later. And I think that we can correctly sum this debate up as follows.

On the issue of the fact that Pythaogoras's theorem can be shown to be the 3D case of the Lagrange identity,

(1) One party maintained that this is evidence that Pythagoras's theorem is strictly a 3D affair, while

(2) The other party maintained that this is merely amusing but without any relevance.

It will have to be left to readers to make up their own mind on this matter. David Tombe (talk) 09:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

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About 1 min block comment

See here. Ncmvocalist (talk) 04:40, 23 May 2010 (UTC)