Talk:Plimpton 322

Repeat backdoor merge proposal

Please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Si.427 where (again) a merge has been proposed, and contribute if you have an opinion. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:45, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Front door actually, I linked it back to the discussion here. Merging as an alternative to deletion is a normal option.Selfstudier (talk) 16:58, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

My position, which I have expressed repeatedly in many unrelated AfDs, is that when a merge proposal to a non-nominated article is made at an AfD, then the merge proposal must be announced at the talk page of the merge target. To do otherwise is to risk a conflict between the local consensus of AfD participants to add material to an article and the local consensus of editors of that article not to add that material. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:38, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Inline {{harvtxt}} Must Be Enclosed in <ref> Tags

Per the following excerpt from Template:Harvard citation, I am correct in stating that all instances of {{harvtxt}} MUST be enclosed in <ref> tags, regardless of whether it is part of the article or not:

Also note that inline use of these templates, i.e. use of {{harv}} without <ref>... </ref> tags around it, was deprecated in September 2020.

I understand that editing guidelines may have changed since you last checked the style recommendations on this topic, User:David_Eppstein, but that is no excuse to be rude. This has been depreciated for over three years at this point, so please be respectful, especially when you are provably wrong. Avereo (talk) 00:51, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

That message and that discussion is for inline use of {{harv}} for parenthetical inline references that are not part of the article text. For instance, a footnote is not a grammatical part of the sentence that it footnotes. Neither is a parenthetical inline reference like the one in this sentence (Avereo 2023). In contrast, a different template, {{harvtxt}}, is used to create inline text that is text and not purely a reference There is NO REQUIREMENT that referring to the work of Avereo in 2013 must avoid the exact phrasing "Avereo (2023)" in favor of other phrasings like "In 2023, Avereo", or "the work of Avereo in 2023" or "a 2023 work of Avereo". Such a requirement could only be imposed through Wikipedia's manual of style, not its citation guidelines, because the citation guidelines do not apply to the formatting of text that is not a citation.

You are edit-warring to impose a mistaken idea of how article text should be written based on an RFC that was not about article text. Further that RFC did not prescribe the removal of parenthetical references; it only deprecated them, something very different from forbidding them.

I understand that you feel strongly about this issue, but please stop your bad edits and your bad faith and condescending assumptions about what other editors may understand, especially when you are provably wrong. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:07, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

First of all, I feel like we got off on a bad footing. I am not trying to edit war with you, nor do I think our ideas for the article are incompatible. I apologize if I came off as rude, as that was not my intention. Additionally, I want to emphasize that I am not editing in bad faith, nor did I mean to come off as condescending. In fact, I initially assumed your reversions were also in bad faith, but that assumption was wrong. For that assumption, I apologize. This debacle ultimately stems from a miscommunication in terms of what our visions are for the article, which is why I created this talk post. My goal here is to collaborate with you, and to understand why you're saying what you're saying, while also explaining my position in the process. I don't want to fight with you at all, we just need to communicate our goals clearly and professionally. I ask that you treat me with the same respect I am treating you, because I really do believe we can work this out, and have a higher-quality article because of it. With that said, I'll do my best to respond to your comment so we can get on the same page. Please let me know your thoughts on this, I genuinely care about what you have to say.

That message and that discussion is for inline use of {{harv}} for parenthetical inline references that are not part of the article text. For instance, a footnote is not a grammatical part of the sentence that it footnotes. Neither is a parenthetical inline reference like the one in this sentence (Avereo 2023).

As far as I have been able to find, the most current recommendation is for all uses of both Template:harv and Template:harvtxt to be placed within a <ref> tag, not just in the case of parenthetical inline references. It's very possible I may have missed something, so if you have evidence to the contrary, I would love to see it, but pretty much everything I have found indicates otherwise.

In contrast, a different template, {{harvtxt}}, is used to create inline text that is text and not purely a reference There is NO REQUIREMENT that referring to the work of Avereo in 2013 must avoid the exact phrasing "Avereo (2023)" in favor of other phrasings like "In 2023, Avereo", or "the work of Avereo in 2023" or "a 2023 work of Avereo". Such a requirement could only be imposed through Wikipedia's manual of style, not its citation guidelines, because the citation guidelines do not apply to the formatting of text that is not a citation.

I understand this, which is why I purposefully didn't just slap a <ref> tag on all instances of Template:harvtxt and call it a day. Like you said, that would break the article's flow, which I do not want to do. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the article's wording, the current approach to referencing isn't as clean as the standard CS1+<ref> reference style. I don't think we should remove the text from Template:harvtxt from the article entirely, but it would be beneficial to convert to the more common Wikipedia reference style (and minorly reword where necessary). My preference would be to convert the references to templates like Template:Cite_book and Template:Cite_journal inside <ref> tags, but Template:harv is completely acceptable within a <ref> tag too. Is your concern with the necessity for rewording that a conversion to CS1+<ref> would require, or is there something else causing you to prefer Template:harvtxt without <ref> tags?

You are edit-warring to impose a mistaken idea of how article text should be written based on an RFC that was not about article text. Further that RFC did not prescribe the removal of parenthetical references; it only deprecated them, something very different from forbidding them

While it is not forbidden, I believe it would still be in the best interest of the average reader to convert away from the depreciated reference style to a more current one. My preference would be CS1+<ref>, but I'm open to other suggestions if you have any. Is there a reason you have for wanting to stay on the outdated/depreciated reference style? Avereo (talk) 03:32, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I am not involved regarding this article but am watching from an earlier fuss. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I think the above boils down to an opinion in which case there is no justification for tagging the article, particularly when reverted. Editors are free to contribute to the article but should not pass by to impose their preferences. Either remove your tag or point to a discussion showing that articles like this must be tagged. Did the people in that discussion know what deprecated means? Johnuniq (talk) 04:03, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

OMG I just examined the wording in the tag. It's deprecated not depreciated. Johnuniq (talk) 04:04, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Puzzling attribution claim

I removed the following from the introduction:

• At the same time, one should recall the tablet's author was a scribe, rather than a professional mathematician; it has been suggested that one of his goals may have been to produce examples for school problems.

Explanation: First off, why do we need this sentence that seems to answer an argument that has not been made in the introduction. Second, detailed objections: (a) It seems to mean "only a scribe". How can we know the writer was only a scribe? Was there anyone who wrote a tablet who was not a scribe? (b) Were there any professional mathematicians? I would be surprised if there were. (c) If the writer was only a scribe, the scribe was using a source for the numbers; presumably the source was knowledgeable about mathematics, so the question of who wrote this tablet is not relevant to understanding its significance. (d) There is some reason to believe the table is trigonometric; the introduction should not be dismissing that idea without even mentioning it. Such a matter should be treated in the body, not the introduction. Zaslav (talk) 22:07, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

The sentence in question is a, perhaps too concise, paraphrase of the discussion on page 117 of Robson's 2002 article in the American Mathematical Monthly, which is in the bibliography but, unfortunately, not referenced in this passage. (I think an older version of the Wikipedia article was based almost 100% on Robson's two papers on this topic and was written in such a way that the reader could assume the ideas all came from Robson, so citations were not included everywhere they are needed now that the article contains many other sources.)

About your points: (a) Robson makes clear that scribes in ancient Mesopotamia were highly educated members of an elite, not mere copyists. (b) Robson makes exactly this point. (c) See (a). The scribe is generally assumed to be the same person who produced the numbers. (d) Although sets of numbers like those on Plimpton 322 appear elsewhere in ancient Mesopotamian mathematics, there is no evidence of them being used for trigonometry. Indeed there is no evidence of trigonometry at all in the Mesopotamia of this time period. I would call the suggestions of a trigonometric purpose highly speculative and am not aware of any professional historian supporting a trigonometric interpretation.

About the removed sentence being an answer to an argument that has not been made, I can see your point. Reading between the lines, it seems to me that Robson wrote this as an attack on a particular group of modern mathematicians who wrote on historical topics and who had a tendency to see the mathematics of ancient cultures as the product of kindred spirits. Robson very much wants to argue that the author of Plimpton 322 was not like a modern mathematician and had some other purpose. My personal opinion is that she takes this line of argument much farther than the evidence supports.

Having said all this, I won't miss the sentences you deleted. But in case anyone wants to try to restore a nuanced discussion of these points to the article, I wanted to provide some relevant background. Will Orrick (talk) 02:03, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Daniel Mansfield

Can we acknowledge Daniel Mansfield's work on this [1]? Onanoff (talk) 15:03, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I assume you've read the prior discussion of this, some on this very page? To reopen this question, I think there would need to be some new development that hasn't already been discussed. Will Orrick (talk) 17:26, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

In case you didn't see the archived discussion, there is lots of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plimpton_322/Archive_1 Barryriedsmith (talk) 16:17, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

It might amuse some people here that Mansfield has a later paper on Plimpton

Mansfield, Daniel F. (1 December 2021). "Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles". Foundations of Science. 26 (4): 977–1005. doi:10.1007/s10699-021-09806-0. ISSN 1572-8471.

From that his new theory seems to be the tablet is an investigation into rectangles with regular sides, and "has nothing to do with the modern study of trigonometry" rational or otherwise.--Salix alba (talk): 20:57, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

The Guardian article linked to by Onanoff and the Foundations of Science article are about the same piece of work. And the Foundations article has plenty of discussion of trigonometry and "proto-trigonometr[y]". I don't know where the quoted phrase, "has nothing to do...", comes from. It doesn't seem to be from Mansfield. It also doesn't appear that he's moved too far from the position taken in the paper with Wildberger. Will Orrick (talk) 21:56, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

The quote is from Mansfield conclusion in the Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles paper. --Salix alba (talk): 22:04, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Ok, I somehow missed that. I think it worth quoting the passage in full.

"We conclude that Plimpton 322 is an investigation into rectangles with regular sides. This does seem related to practical mensuration as briefly suggested by de Solla Price (1964) and more fully by Mansfield & Wildberger (2017), however the precise extent remains unknown. It could have been motivated by a particular practical need, or by a purely theoretical interest in geometry. Although it is more likely that the answer lies somewhere between these two extremes. In any case, Plimpton 322 has nothing to do with the modern study of trigonometry developed by Greek astronomers measuring the sky. Instead, this “proto-trigonometric” study of rectangles seems to have originated from the problems faced by Mesopotamian surveyors measuring the ground."

Both the Guardian article and the Foundations article appeared in August 2021 and the Guardian article explicitly states that it is reporting on the Foundations article. The Guardian article takes the point of view that Mansfield and Wildberger earlier proposed that Plimpton 322 was a trigonometric table constructed with some practical purpose in mind and that the Foundations article supports that interpretation by discovering the practical application. If Mansfield has walked away from the trigonometric interpretation, it would be good for him to state that clearly.

It was pointed out by Christine Proust at the time of the 2017 Mansfield and Wildberger paper that Plimpton 3222 can only be seen as trigonometry if you reinterpret "trigonometry" to mean a discipline involving right triangle ratios with no reference to angles, which is not what most people mean by the term. Perhaps the use of "proto-trignometric" is an indirect acknowledgment of that criticism. Will Orrick (talk) 23:17, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

This article is wretchedly bad

It is impenetrable to a generalist newcomer. It does not say anything about the general significance and meaning of Plimpton 322. Cooke (talk) 14:44, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Do you have a concrete suggestion for improvement? Which part do you find impenetrable? What do you think the "general significance and meaning" is that is not being conveyed? I must say I'm not very impressed with the tone of your complaint. –jacobolus (t) 19:03, 13 December 2024 (UTC)