Over in the recondite if productive arena of WikiProject Mathematics, fresh eyeballs have been looking over articles in areas that retain a structure imposed up to five years ago, and not much liking what they see. Basically there were POV forks introduced in areas, to calm down edit wars, at a time when the "POV fork" concept was not so well understood. I remember well the relief with which User:Kevin Baas was given a sandbox for his treatment of tensors.
So now it doesn't all look so good any more. This cuts to fundamentals, because mathematicians feel that the topic sentence in an article should serve as a definition. For comparison, I looked at [[quantum field theory]] for a comparison: reads "Quantum field theory (QFT) provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically described by fields or of many-body systems." So it tells you what QFT does, not what it is (unsurprising, with the jury still out). The mathematicians' take is clearly limited to areas where you can say definitely what something is (i.e. the domain of axiomatic definitions). That being said, there seems to be the scope for clarifying how an area that is axiomatic should be organised according to our revered principles of summary style (WP:SS). There are numerous instances, it seems, where we have "menu style" in place of "summary style", i.e. different treatments according to taste. The foundational issue does seem to need addressing, and could cause quite some upheavals (such as we have got out of the habit of living with). It could be that we now accept articles with titles like [[introduction to string theory]], as pedagogic stepping stones. But neutrality means, surely, that treatments that are really "introduction to X from the POV of Y" are out of place, or at least to be seriously deprecated. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
