User talk:David Eppstein

Hi, and welcome to my User Talk page! For new discussions, I prefer you add your comments at the very bottom and use a section heading (e.g., by using the "New section" tab at the top of this page). I will respond on this page unless specifically requested otherwise. For discussions concerning specific Wikipedia articles, please include a link to the article, and also a link to any specific edits you wish to discuss. (You can find links for edits by using the "compare selected revisions" button on the history tab for any article.)

Timeline of statistics

There is this History of statistics article but I propose that we (you) start a new Timeline of statistics article based on this article by Anirban DasGupta, which seems much more informative than any book by Stephen Stigler. If you know DasGupta in person I wonder if you would be able to convince him to release the article in a Wiki-appropiate license so that we can directly use it. Solomon7968 10:28, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

While you are at it would you be able to start a new article on Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze. See the discussion here and the mathematicians listed here in Claude J's sandbox. Solomon7968 13:14, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Copyright infringement

Hi, David! :) I am really sorry for bothering you, but I recently made my first Wikipedia page, which was completely removed because of Unambiguous copyright infringement. I tried to edit text to avoid direct copy and paste from other sources, but now I am not sure which parts are edited and which aren't. How can I check whether some text is copyright violation? I always tried to google in quotation marks "Test sentence test test" and if there are some results - the text exists and I cannot put it on Wikipedia. If not - I can use it and put it in the article. My question is - how to check for copyright infringement? Thank you for the info :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mtrkv (talk • contribs) 12:00, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

https://tools.wmflabs.org/copyvios/ can be helpful. But if you wrote it (or copied it, or copied it but then changed a few words) you should know already how you did it. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:32, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

I had to do a seminar on the subject, and some parts were copy/paste and a little bit of editing :) I don't remember what parts are modified and what aren't, because it was a mess of a seminar. Thank you for the link, I'll check what I'm allowed to put in the wiki article :) And thank you for quick answer! :D — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mtrkv (talk • contribs) 08:48, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

÷ vs ×

Hi there,

I've very new to Wikipedia editing and discussion, so bear with me and explain if I do things wrong.

Regarding https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Obelus&oldid=prev&diff=877266009 note that my inserted text is indeed about what the symbol stands for rather than the actual mathematical concept, and comes right after the text about encoding:

A monadic × symbol is used by the APL programming language to denote the reciprocal function.

Now compare to the text for the × symbol, a text I didn't write:

A monadic × symbol is used by the APL programming language to denote the sign function.

Imho, what I wrote is completely parallel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by A.Brudz (talk • contribs) 20:39, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Sure, but it was also completely misplaced, because it has nothing to do with the obelus symbol, the subject of the article. Instead it is about a different symbol with a vaguely related meaning. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:44, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

DYK for Lola Álvarez Bravo

On 9 January 2019, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Lola Álvarez Bravo, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo was described by Alfonso Michel as Mexico's most important painter? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Lola Álvarez Bravo. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Lola Álvarez Bravo), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:03, 9 January 2019 (UTC)

Friendship paradox

You just reverted an entire article because you didn't like one sentence in the lead? As for the rest of it, there was no "removal", article was actually expanded based partly on sources you provided. Removing whole paragraphs without comment or participating in talk page cleanup discussion is definitely edit warring. You may want to read WP:EW and WP:EDITCONSENSUS. Cleaned up wording and put the rest back since you did not bother to explain your edits. You can always try to use the talk page. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 20:22, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Apparently you have difficulty reading as well as writing. I disliked your whole style of writing and provided a particularly egregious example of your bad writing to explain why. Here's another: "In a 2001 paper Stanford University researchers Ezra Zuckerman and John Jost described how they conducted a survey and compared the predicted number of friends and friends of friends in the friendship paradox to the to the number of friends people thought they had in relation to the number of friends their friends had". Can you please diagram that sentence for me? It's just unreadable. And misplaced; you put it at the end of the article and removed the punch line. You just turned it into a bare description of someone's research with no explanation of how it connects with the topic of the article. Perhaps that is consistent with your arguments on talk where you show no understanding of how it connects and argue that because it is just someone's primary research it should be omitted. In short, you have missed the point and your rewrite turns the article into text that misses the point in exactly the same way. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Notice of Edit warring noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion involving you at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring regarding a possible violation of Wikipedia's policy on edit warring. Thank you. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 01:09, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Notice of No Original Research Noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 03:22, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

@Fountains of Bryn Mawr: Please provide an explanation for why, as part of this discussion, you undid an edit on my talk page from several days ago in which I archived three months of old discussions, and cluttered up my talk page with nearly 70kbytes of unwanted material, in the process also removing several other editors' contributions here. I guess my imagination must be deficient because the only explanations I can come up with involve either pure vandalism or incompetence. I eagerly await your explanation, because it is surely more creative and interesting than that. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:46, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Fountains keeps cutting himself with Hanlon's razor. EEng 11:41, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

" you undid an edit on my talk page from several days ago in which I archived three months of old discussions", my bad, I had an old version of the page up when I edited. Went to fix it but you already did. Fountains of Bryn Mawr (talk) 13:17, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Friendship Paradox

I don't disagree with you at all. I just wanted to avoid a back and forth via edits and get something he recommends so that multiple editors can point out these issues. Squatch347 (talk) 17:30, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of De Bruijn–Erdős theorem (graph theory)

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article De Bruijn–Erdős theorem (graph theory) you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Bryanrutherford0 -- Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 19:01, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diligence
	For your review of an article for GA. It did not pass your review but you gave constructive advice to improve it and improved my knowledge as an editor. Akrasia25 (talk) 13:10, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Daniel Medina

Hola David , es Daniel Medina quien escribe , a quien refiere esta pagina , he tratado de actualizarla y veo que no lo he hecho muy bien , que me recomendarías para evitar futuros problemas , tanto las imagenes como los textos son referentes a mi obra . saludos y gracias Daniel medina balbas (talk) 01:58, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

I do not read Spanish. But, in general, to avoid problems on Wikipedia, you should be editing topics based on published sources rather than personal knowledge, and particularly you should avoid editing an article about yourself. If there are inaccuracies in the article that you think should be corrected, you should use the article's talk page to request changes. But you should not consider the contents of the article to be under your control. The article is supposed to state (in plain English, not artspeak) what can be documented about you, not what you think about yourself. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:02, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

The approximate hyperbolic paraboloid known as Pringles

Hello David.

You're quite right, the quotes ("scare" quotes you call them) could be misinterpreted, they are clumsily inappropriate to indicate a product name.

You mention this as being "For instance, on top of what I already said…" With respect, I dealt with what you already said in the immediately subsequent edit summary. It seems that that edit summary was either not read or not understood. Although suspecting the former, good faith obliges me to assume the latter and therefore to expand the summary.

Firstly I think we can dispense with this can't we? "your phrasing comes across as more likely to mean English chips (French fries)..." I answered this. I said: "The difference between the phrasing of the two versions has no bearing at all on what kind of chip is implied", and I linked for good measure. If I'm missing a point then please bring it to bear.

I edited this passage:

The widely sold fried snack food Pringles potato chips resemble a truncated hyperbolic paraboloid. The distinctive shape of these chips allows them to be stacked in sturdy tubular containers, fulfilling a design goal that they break less easily than other types of chip.

thus:

The widely sold fried snack "Pringles" resemble a truncated hyperbolic paraboloid. Their distinctive shape allows them to be stacked in sturdy tubular containers, fulfilling a design goal that they break less easily than chips.

As (twice) stated I removed references to Pringles being ‪"food", "potato", or "chips"‬ for two reasons: firstly that the terms in context are contentious, and secondly for being superfluous. You reverted, saying "…claiming that Pringles are *not* potato chips is definitely contentious…"

True, but irrelevant. Why address a claim that wasn't made? The point, I thought clearly stated, is that the status of Pringles as food, as potato, and as chips, are all (verifiably, from the linked Wikipedia Pringles article) contentious, the implication being that as such this article should not take a stand either way. From that article:

"...originally known as "Pringles Newfangled Potato Chips", but other snack manufacturers objected, saying Pringles failed to meet the definition of a potato "chip". The US Food and Drug Administration weighed in on the matter, and in 1975, they ruled Pringles could only use the word "chip" in their product name within the following phrase: "potato chips made from dried potatoes". Faced with such an unpalatable appellation, Pringles eventually opted to rename their product potato "crisps" instead of chips. This later led to other issues in the United Kingdom, where the term potato "crisps" refers to the product Americans call potato "chips".

In July 2008 in the London High Court, P&G lawyers successfully argued that Pringles were not crisps (even though labelled "Potato Crisps" on the container) as the potato content was only 42% and their shape, P&G stated, "is not found in nature". This ruling, against a United Kingdom VAT and Duties Tribunal decision to the contrary, exempted Pringles from the then 17.5% VAT for potato crisps and potato-derived snacks. In May 2009, the Court of Appeal reversed the earlier decision. A spokesman for P&G stated it had been paying the VAT proactively and owed no back taxes."

Elsewhere in the article the base Pringles product is less than half potato content. Think about how much potato is an actual potato chip/crisp. Other varieties are based on rice, on wheat bran, on black beans, on barley. Corn Pringles, and rice Pringles have been available. All of which is…fine, obviously. But not potato. And not relevant to its shape, yet revealing as to why Pringles owners have had legal difficulties calling Pringles "potato chips". Their advertising campaigns differentiate between potato chips and Pringles. Search "food" on the Pringles article. Note the ten instances, and note that the only one of substance is the link to The New York Times opinion piece: Are Pringles "real food"? (which I recommend). If Pringles themselves cannot or find it convenient not to describe their product as food or potato chips how can it be right for Wikipedia to advance those assertions?

So far so contentious. As per the second point - of superfluity - point one simply doesn't matter. Not only is it undesirable to define Pringles in the precise terms given, it is redundant to define Pringles in any precise terms beyond "The widely sold fried snack "Pringles"". They are very well known. And wikilinked. And pictured.

You're clearly a prolific, erudite, and committed Wikipedian, not a Pringles shill. It's actually a bit of nonsense, isn't it? I'll admit I'm no fan of this fried snack, but that's not of consequence. The apparently peremptory and unthinking manner of your reverts riled me I admit, but here I'm motivated by the sublime mystical transcendence of mathematics; of geometry; of topology. Speaking of which, that "crisps/french fries" twaddle - how likely is it to be confused for fries when the whole point is that its shape compares to a hyperbolic paraboloid? Who is going to be reading this and thinking "oh yes, those famously elongated cuboids, that's what's meant here."? Come on. We're talking about the shape of the blimmin' thing. They are very, very famous. They manage very well without unconscious cheerleading habituation of their dubious not-even-claimed qualities in a tangentially relevant and *otherwise scientifically rigorous* article. If there is a life-form this side of Mars unfamiliar with Pringles, the link is right there, and a picture just below. They may or not be potato, or food, or chips, or lip-smacking meaty wafers or whatever. What they are, and what is relevant, is that they are an approximate hyperbolic paraboloid [fried snack] that stacks. See link for more info if you're really more interested in junk food than mathematical shapes.

I hope you won't be offended if I suggest that considered reflection precludes a third reversion of the edit. Cheers! Captainllama (talk) 17:34, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

So, you appear to think (1) we should avoid calling Pringles potato chips, (2) we should reinforce that by changing a comparison against other types of potato chip to one that is directly against all chips, pushing the opinion that Pringles are not chips, (3) it is appropriate to use the bare word "chip" rather than "potato chip", confusing our British readers (for whom this word means a French fry) in violation of MOS:COMMONALITY, (4) it's appropriate to reinstate your edits and post long unreadable screeds here rather than discussing them ON THE ARTICLE TALK PAGE BEFORE REPEATING THEM as WP:BRD suggests, and (5) in the course of that screed asserting that Pringles are not even food. Now after all that, why should I take your position seriously? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:33, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

February 2019 at Women in Red

February 2019, Volume 5, Issue 2, Numbers 107-111 Happy February from Women in Red! Please join us for these virtual editathons. February events: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/109|Social Workers]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/110|Black Women]] February geofocus: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/111|Ancient World]] Continuing initiatives: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/107|Suffrage]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/108|#1day1woman2019]] Help us plan our future events: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Ideas|Ideas Cafe]] Join the conversations on our talkpage: Socialites Twitter - Forgotten African American Suffragists Women in Red image uploads to Commons Image attribution: Johntex (CC BY-SA 3.0) Subscription options: [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Outreach/List|English language opt-in]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Outreach/International list|International opt-in]] [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Outreach/Opt-out|Unsubscribe]] --Rosiestep (talk) 20:09, 26 January 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

YBC 7289 photo

I saw your good article candidate YBC 7289. The photo is very small (20kB) and I thought the article would benefit from a bigger one, so I looked for a little bit if I could find one. I found much better ones on the YBC website. Have you pursued this to see if they could be uploaded to Commons? Theodor Langhorne Franklin (talk) 21:04, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

I have not, but there is no evidence on that record that they have released it with a compatible open access license. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:11, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

I reached out to and was given permission from the Yale library. I uploaded the images to Commons Category:YBC_7289. The Yale library said they were releasing them into the public domain, so I filed an OTRS ticket. I informed them how to reach out to the OTRS team. Theodor Langhorne Franklin (talk) 18:16, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts! I've added the images to the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:41, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Accidental click

I was viewing the AfD because a related article is up for deletion. I accidentally clicked delsort because it popped up at the last minute as I was trying to leave the page. SL93 (talk) 23:42, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I realized that was the case when I looked at your edit summary on the AfD itself. Thanks for the explanation. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:04, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

FYI

I just created the article List of Wiley book series. Of them Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics (redlink) is probably of interest to you. BTW I am still waiting for you to reply to my above comment, see the top of your talk page. Solomon7968 12:58, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Automatic notability

Hello, You contested two WP:PRODs, Janusz Malik and Rajko Lotrič. While PRODS can be contested for any reason I was perplexed at the rationale that apparently you think all Olympic athletes are "automatically" notable and became blown away that you are an Admin. On the first, the edit summary was "competed at 1984 Olympics; Olympians are automatically notable" and the second; "competed at Calgary Olympics; Olympians are automatically notable".

As an Admin I would think that all aspects of notability would be considered and not a blanket criterion that discounts other policies and guidelines or that a "presumption" of notability is an argument for inclusion possibly using only NOLYMPICS. Notability is a guideline and neither of the last two trump Neutral point of view, Verifiability, What Wikipedia is not, and Biographies of living persons. A subject participating in one event would seem better covered under that event than an unsourced permanent pseudo biographical stub, not benefiting Wikipedia from ignoring various policies.

"Automatic", inherent, or intrinsic notability, is not something I would expect from any knowledgeable editor, let along an Admin, and especially concerning a subject that placed third in a 1984 event with no other apparent notability and sourcing. Otr500 (talk) 19:11, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

It is easily verifiable that the athletes I unprodded were Olympians, so all your longwinded waffle about verifiability is for nothing. Also see WP:BEFORE — You are supposed to verify that notability cannot be established from additional sources before you try deleting the articles, rather than using the poor current state of an article as an excuse to initiate deletion proceedings. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:29, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks but I did do a before and "still" only see your "automatic" notability exemption, apparently for anyone performing in the Olympics regardless of actual notability by sources, as the only possible evidence. Still your right to contest though. Otr500 (talk) 22:21, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Apparently you don't understand what WP:BEFORE means. It means you need to look around at the obvious places for where you might find sources that are not already in the article that would support a claim of notability. One of the most obvious places to look, in these cases, would be at the Polish Wikipedia articles for Malik, which is more detailed and well-footnoted. That doesn't work so well for Lotric, but a Google search for his name again finds plenty of sources. Since you said you didn't find anything at all, obviously you didn't even try those most cursory of checks. So what did you try? —David Eppstein (talk) 22:32, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Cycle detection

Hi, I seem to have noticed a mistake in the Cycle detection section of Cycle (graph theory). The problematic sentence is:

In an undirected graph, finding any already visited vertex will indicate a back edge.

It is clear that this sentence is only true for directed graphs, and false for undirected ones. Consider the following undirected acyclic graph:

   1 -- 2

Let's start the exploration at node 1. We mark node 1 as visited, then look at its neighbors. Node 2 is unvisited, so we mark node 1 as its parent and push it onto the stack.

We now explore node 2, mark it as visited, and look at its neighbors. We find an already visited node (node 1), but this does not indicate a back edge, since node 1 is the parent of the current node.

You can easily convince yourself that finding an already visited node in a directed graph does indeed indicate a back edge, regardless of the parent relationship (consider the directed cyclic graph 1 -> 2; 2 -> 1).

I have tried correcting the mistake by changing "an undirected" to "a directed", but you keep reverting my edits. Best regards, Naim42 (talk) 20:52, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

It is false that already-visited vertices in directed graphs are always back edges. They could alternatively be forward edges or cross edges, neither of which form cycles. It is, however, true that the first *non-parent* already-visited vertex that you find in an undirected depth-first search will be a back edge (you will later discover the same edge as a forward edge) and that in undirected graphs all *non-parent* already-visited vertices come from cycle-producing edges. So while it is true that you have found a problem with the current wording, your attempted fix makes it much worse. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:01, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. Naim42 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:21, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Page restoration

Hey DE, could you please restore EDGAR Online and its talk page, which you just deleted via PROD? Sorry I missed the PROD, but I do think there will not be great difficulty demonstrating notability for this company, because it was a publicly listed company and we have WP:LISTED. Thanks! UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Ok, done. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:25, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Can you restore Talk:EDGAR Online? — BillHPike (talk, contribs) 22:50, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

It's just project banners, but sure, done. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:24, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Question

I ended up on this page from a link at an Apple community forum help page, and wasn't sure if it should be made a redirect, deleted or left alone. ^{Atsme✍🏻📧} 02:48, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

You mean Gecko (software without the close paren, or Gecko (software) with it? Leave both alone, I think. We can't create redirects to handle every other site's failure to parse punctuation in urls. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:34, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Well, that's strange because when you click on this link it shows up as an unassessed article, and that's what confused me. ^{Atsme✍🏻📧} 17:59, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Maybe when you click it. When I click it I get to a page that tells me it doesn't exist, asks whether I really meant the version with the close paren, and gives me a link to create a new page with that title. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:02, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps it requires a special talent to get it to work incorrectly.^{Atsme✍🏻📧} 19:27, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

I only captured the "unassessed article" portion. Below that is exactly what you described. Just wondered how unsuspecting readers would process the info. I'm thinking they would simply click on the correct wikilink. All the same, I figured it wouldn't hurt to double-check with someone far more knowledgeable about this stuff than I, so thanks for putting my mind at ease. ^{Atsme✍🏻📧} 19:27, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Cluster Analysis

Hi David, the copyright concerns in the Cluster Analysis page appeared only in the Evaluation section section since the commit 02:40, 4 February 2019‎ Glokc (talk | contribs)‎ . . (74,220 bytes) +6,890‎ . . (Benchmarking frameworks and evaluation toolkits for the clustering algorithms added) but you removed all my extensions and refinements for the article. Can you please recover all refinements made before that commit?

And as for the copy-pasted content in the Evaluation section then I will solve this issue with the paper authors and let you know soon. --Glokc (talk) 04:48, 11 February 2019 (UTC)