Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 06:24, 11 September 2009

First principles

I found "first principles using the underlying theory" to be vague although it may be out of necessity. Can this be more explicit? ClaudeReigns (talk) 09:40, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think one could clairify this by giving examples. The basic idea is that one should have the attitude of a scientist who investigates something rather than that of a lawyer who argues in favor or against a certain point. Count Iblis (talk) 16:33, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Fringe theories

I like the general thrust of the essay, and hope it can evolve into an accepted guideline before too long. I've just been in a couple of science disputes and need to digest any lessons to be learnt before making a substantial contribution here. But here are my immediate thoughts:

1. The article tells us how to handle an editor who is ignorant on a mainstream topic, as opposed to the out-and-out crackpot. But the scope of writing science articles needs to cover handling fringe subjects and pseudscience crackpots. I like what WP:REDFLAG has to say on the subject. Perhaps we can import some of that stuff.
2. Somewherewhen I saw a suggestion that claims that are near-universally accepted could require a lower level sourcing. What happened to the idea? Was it dropped? It would protect WP against the crackpots who argue that their pet theory -- which has been ignored because no one accepts it -- has not been refuted and therefore merits inclusion.--Michael C. Price 18:13, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with importing useful guidelines from WP:REDFLAG. Now, I don't have a lot of experience dealing with real die hard crackpots, so suggestions on guidelines from you or other editors would be most welcome. Count Iblis (talk) 23:09, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

All science or some science

I have some sympathy with this essay, but it seems to me that it applies much more to physics articles than it does to biology or chemistry articles. That fits with the fact that it is being discussed at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Physics, but I do not think that any other science projects have been notified. One problem with science articles is where the topic is of interest to more than one discipline, in particular in my experience where the two disciplines are physics and chemistry, within the broad area of physical chemistry and chemical physics. The physics editors with their equations and rigour dominate. The articles come to be essentially quite useless to people coming from a chemistry background, let alone the increasing number of people from the life sciences. An example is Entropy which still can not get a generally agreed, simply written, equation-free lede that everybody can understand. I have been pointing this out for years, but I just do not have the time to keep pushing it. Perhaps this essay should say that are equations and symbols are not allowed in the first two paragraphs which must explain what the topic is about and who uses the topic in what is essentially simple english. Sources are a concern but readers will not get to the sources if they can understand a word that is written, --Bduke (Discussion) 04:34, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Banning equations from the start of the lead is an interesting idea. Perhaps that might improve some of the maths articles, which, IMO, are completely incomprehensible to all but experts.

Re: scope I agree that so far this seems slanted more towards the physical sciences and away from the life sciences. Medicine already has WP:MEDRS so I see no problem with us narrowing the scope if appropriate. --Michael C. Price 06:28, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

You are a physicist, so perhaps you do not notice. Take a look at the lede in Entropy (top down to TOC). How do you think a chemist reacts to that when s/he comes across entropy in "Chemistry 1A" and thinks WP might help? There is nothing whatsoever that links to what the lecturer in 1st year or indeed 2nd year chemistry is saying and a set of equations which are incomprehensible and totally unlike anything s/he has come across in class. Also I am saying that the essay is slanted not towards the physical sciences, but to physics. It really does not apply to any article on actual chemicals or to any article on organic or inorganic chemistry. It applies a bit to physical chemistry, but only because they are written like physicists like things and not like chemists like things. I started by career teaching some specialist parts of physical chemistry to students with a good grasp of physics and spent the last 25 years teaching all the physical chemistry the students got in the degree and they had little background in physics. I understand the difference between those situations. WP is not helping the latter group. --Bduke (Discussion) 09:10, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the formula ${\displaystyle dE=TdS-PdV}$ should appear a little higher up. Of course even the first sentence of the lead gives away the physics bias by not mentioning chemistry. Is this a problem with just the entropy article or it a more systemic problem that needs addressing here as well? --Michael C. Price 09:30, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I have been less active with these articles in the last year, partly because I am busy with other things, but partly because I just got fed up with getting agreement on changes that then just drifted back to where they were. It was certainly very common a year ago and I have not seen any improvement. I am even busier now with a trip overseas in a couple of weeks. --Bduke (Discussion) 11:13, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Quick comment about entropy: A major rewrite is underway, There is an agreement to move the equations out of the lead. But we will define entropy in terms of information theoretical concepts. To make sure that the various wiki articles on entropy, heat, work, the second law etc. etc. are consistent with each other (so that we don't get circular definitions), I've been making some small edits to these various other articles. Count Iblis (talk) 13:23, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Just to say that from a non-specialist viewpoint, Bduke's concern is well justified: there seems to be a culture issue where to physicists or information theorists "entropy is defined as the expected amount of information needed to exactly specify the state of the system," which is gibberish to most of us, who find it more relevant to think of entropy as a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of energy and hence its availability to do work. Both the maths and the concept has clearly diversified into other fields, but the original approach and the approach relating to chemistry are also valid. Unfortunately the cultural view that only information theory is valid seems to obscure explanation. Of course as a non-expert this may be my misunderstanding. . dave souza, talk 10:57, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Exactly, we have a bad case all round of undue weight to the way some physicists or information theorists see the world. The views of engineers, chemists and other scienctists and technologists needs to be better addressed. --Bduke (Discussion) 11:19, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps the views of chemists are not represented well because of their dwindling numbers? Lots of chemistry departments are closing down. Re Entropy I think that we should revisit the suggestion of having a more disambigutaion-style approach, and more separate articles for each viewpoint.--Michael C. Price 12:36, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

In most places I know, physics departments are in worse shape than chemistry departments. In most cases where there is an excellent physics department, there is also an excellent chemistry department. Here is Australia, year 12 numbers in physics are less than those in chemistry. However, to comment on my approach, I am a chemical physicist but I have always worked in chemistry departments in universities. I can see and understand the physics point of view, but I spent my career teaching chemists, and I know just how confusing it is to them. Back to this essay, I have to say we are all partly to blame. We should be concentrating on making the lead understandable to a layperson. That should certainly mean removing equations. Far too many science articles are just unintelligible. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that they are written by Ph D students who are so full of their recent knowledge in detail of a small part of a field that they can not write for the layperson. We learn to do that after a Ph D, if we are employed to teach people who do not have our background. --Bduke (Discussion) 21:46, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I was overgeneralising from the UK, but chemistry is in terminal decline here. I have a lot of empathy with your teaching perspective (although I only teach physics and maths), and share your views on the unintelligibility of science articles here. But the maths articles are by far the worst, it seems to me.--Michael C. Price 22:27, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Until recently the entropy article had the "chemist's perspective" preferred by Bduke, but some people complained that it didn't explain things well. Someone (not me) changed the article a few months ago and gave it an information theoretical introduction. Since last week, I've started to do some work on this, but as I wrote above, that also requires one to do some work on the related wiki articles on the second law, temperature, heat, work, etc. etc. The way entropy is used in chemistry and engineering will be mentioned quite high up in the article, also in the lead.

But it is not ok. to define entropy in the way it is done in classical termodynamics and then pretend that it is somehow the fundamental definition of entropy. The classical definition of entropy cannot be used to derive the second law of thermodynamics. In classical thermodynamics all the four laws of thermodynamics are postulated to be true. I have to say that the article on the second law, before I started to edit it a few days ago, was completely misleading in this regard. It now mentions this fact in the lead and it now contains a section in which the second law is derived from first principles for a system described by the microcanonical ensemble (the derivation for the canonical ensemble which is much simpler is yet to come). Count Iblis (talk) 13:43, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

The 2nd law can also be derived from the information perspective. Perhaps we're getting a bit off-topic though. What are the lessons to encapsulate here? --Michael C. Price 22:31, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

See here Count Iblis (talk) 23:21, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

(deindent)There were 3 suggestions made in Count Iblis' link:

• Editors of a wiki article on a scientific subject should be experts in that subject. If you make substantial edits to such a article, you should be absolutely sure that you have completely mastered the subject you are writing about.
• Wikipedians are encouraged to engage in technical discussions on the talk page. Such technical discussions may be used to improve the article.
• Detailed arguments/derivations don't have to be sourced if included to make statements verifiable. In that case they are not included as encyclopedic content whose veracity should be verifiable to non-experts who are not able to understand the derivation/argumentation.

None of these suggestions is reflected in the Misplaced Pages:Scientific standards. This article is perhaps a more suitable forum?

Anyway, the first two suggestions we've already raised. The last one relates to my earlier query about not having to source "obvious" statements, restricted to derivations, proofs etc. I like it, of course. --Michael C. Price 00:33, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

First principles and evidence

One problem in this (which, by the way, I like in principle) is that this essay implies that the science is a first-principles, perfectly-deductive one. A historical science, like geology, doesn't have first principles, but rather a series of observations (OK, I know that the grammar stinks, geology cannot have obesrvations, but whatever). But I don't think that this is entirely inapplicable, because it could be important in geology articles to discuss observations of researchers independent of their conclusions. Of course, combining those observations into some synthesis is best done in peer-reviewed-land, but on Wiki we often need to discuss a variety of conjectures based on an ever-growing body of knowledge. So perhaps this could be expanded to say "first principles and evidence". That way, the empirical could be represented as well as the theoretical. Awickert (talk) 04:03, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Howabout replacing:

discuss this as much as is possible from first principles using the underlying theory.

with:

discuss this as much as is possible from first principles and/or direct evidence.

--Michael C. Price 01:09, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I have some doubts about this "discuss this as much as is possible from first principles" approach. I think it often just leads to unintelligibility. Science evolves over time, and we need to address that historical developement because that is how scientists developed new knowledge. Often much later underlining principles are developed that are often difficult to understand. Starting from that point will ensure most people can not read it in a way that develops understanding. For example, do we discuss properties of chemicals entirely on how they are understood from advanced quantum chemistry or even quantum field theory? I do not think so. That is why I think "entropy" should start from the thing that scientists and technologists understand to have units of Joules per Kelvin, and then move on later to show how the whole concept can be understood from informational entropy. The latter is not the place to start. --Bduke (Discussion) 02:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

The context here is discussion on talk pages, not in the artcles themselves.--Michael C. Price 02:26, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Be bold

An article of this kind will be very useful.

Paragraph No. 1 contains the expression a statement could be invalid under any possible circumstances. I think this should be valid.

Paragraph No. 3 contains the expression Do not simply throw around direct quotes … In this context, throw around is a metaphor and not appropriate in an essay that demands objective language. I suggest something like Use quotations from textbooks and scientific articles to support your stated views, but quotations alone are unlikely to be persuasive.

Paragraph No. 1 also contains the statement To find out, you may need to study carefully the entire source in which the statement is made or look in other sources. This statement is not consistent with WP:BE BOLD and is strongly biased in favor of the original author. Anyone writing an essay on this subject should recognize the competing interests of original authors, and new Users who wish to improve or delete statements. Original authors can be expected to want their statements to stand for a long time, and only be amended or deleted by someone of equal expertise and only after they have done a lot of research. In contrast, Users who want to improve statements, or delete them, want to be free to do so easily and in accordance with WP:BE BOLD. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. No qualifications are required. It isn’t an encyclopedia written by experts.

I believe a more satisfactory solution to this problem can be achieved by writing something like the following:

1. If you find a statement with which you disagree, and the statement is not supported by an in-line citation, you are encouraged to do one of the following:

• add the {{Fact}} tag to the statement
• question the validity of the statement on the Talk page or, if you know who originated the statement, question the originator on his or her User Talk page
• delete the statement on the grounds that it is unsourced material that you consider to be unsound
• delete the statement and replace it with your own statement, preferably also providing an in-line citation to allow independent verification.

2. If you find a statement with which you disagree, and the statement is supported by an in-line citation, you are encouraged to do one of the following:

• add one of the tags shown at Template:Citation needed
• use the Talk page to question the validity of the statement or, if you know who originated the statement, question the originator on his or her User Talk page
• leave the statement unchanged and add your own statement with an in-line citation to allow independent verification, possibly phrasing your statement in terms of An alternative view of this matter is …

3. If a statement with which you disagree is supported by an in-line citation:

• under no circumstances delete the statement and replace it with your own statement without an in-line citation
• under no circumstances amend the statement to change its meaning, orientation or emphasis

4. If you find a paragraph, or major sub-section, or a whole article, with which you disagree a good strategy is to create a User sub-page for yourself and re-create the paragraph, major sub-section or article to match your ideas, your preferences and your in-line citations. You can do this at your leisure and other Users will not interfere with your User sub-page while you are developing your new version. You can then use the Talk page for the original article to alert other interested Users to the existence of your version, ask for their comments, and discuss any suggestions or opposing points of view. When your version has been aired for what appears to be a sufficient time, you can paste your version into the original article.

I look forward to seeing this essay evolve. Dolphin51 (talk) 04:16, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Conflicting with WP:BOLD is not a problem, since many of the problems with edit creep in science articles are due to boldness. Thus guideline is trying to address this problem, not reinforce it. --Michael C. Price 03:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't doubt that edit creep is a problem in science articles in general, but this guideline is not addressing science articles in general, it is addressing science articles in Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages has a policy known as WP:BE BOLD. There is nothing in Misplaced Pages to indicate that WP:BE BOLD is suspended for science articles. This guideline should be worded sufficiently carefully that it does not conflict with any of Misplaced Pages's five pillars or other policies.

Why is conflicting with WP:BE BOLD not a problem? Dolphin51 (talk) 03:33, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Boldness needs tempering with caution. That's the point.--Michael C. Price 04:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Mutliple meanings

I'd like to see added a section suggesting care be taken about multiple meanings. For example, the term centrifugal force is used in three or more ways: see Centrifugal force. However, a lot of turmoil resulted because some editors were familiar with "reactive" centrifugal force and acted on the basis that it was the only meaning, others on the basis that it was always a "fictitious force" due to a rotating reference frame, and still others that it was a "fictitious force" due to one's choice of coordinate system (whether it rotated or not). It turned out that all of these uses are employed, some more in one field than another. However, arguments led to heat and to violations of WP:NPA and soon nobody was listening to anybody else. All this could be avoided if (i) an editor assumes from the outset that multiple meanings are likely to occur, whether or not they are aware of them, and (ii) an editor actually Google searches for meanings proposed by other editors, rather than searching only to back up their own understanding.

Maybe a fundamental goal should be to learn from others, not just instruct. Brews ohare (talk) 21:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Brews ohare's sentiment above. Another facet of this situation is where two or more definitions or explanations are in use by different authors. In some situations it can be isolated to different usage in Europe and North America. I guess we have all seen examples where one User adds one definition, and cites a suitable source, but then takes offence when another User adds a slightly different definition (and cites a different source.) Users should not labour under the misconception that if a high-quality source uses one definition or explanation, all slightly different definitions and explanations must be wrong. Misplaced Pages needs to cover all legitimate definitions and explanations, even if that adds complexity. Dolphin51 (talk) 03:45, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree, too. It's really important to represent clearly the different extant points of view on what a term means. This what I tried to do to break up the arguments between Brews ohare and David Tombe on the centrifugal force article, and what I did on Electromotive force when Brews had inserted text stating that one common interpretation was just mistaken. At the time, he did not act like he believed in this idea, so I'm glad he has come around. Dicklyon (talk) 06:18, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Proposed policy

• Oppose: Good essay, but way too specific and prone to wikilawyering. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 00:48, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose: I agree it's good, as an essay; many constructive ideas here. I fear however that it will too much encourage the kind of incessant argument without any source for backup that we've been trying to deal with at speed of light and other places. The sentiment expressed by Count Iblis at Wikipedia_talk:Scientific_standards/Archive_1#Some_suggestions_based_on_my_experience_with_editing_scientific_wiki_articles includes the idea that a derivation or proof is a satisfactory alternative to WP:V; to me, this is worse than a slippery slope. As my math teacher taught me, "figures never lie, but liers can figure"; I've been in enough arguments involving flawed logic to know that they can't be won by logic; only appealing to WP:V provides a way out. Dicklyon (talk) 06:24, 11 September 2009 (UTC)