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Nomination of GRSI model for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article GRSI model is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/GRSI model until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

The discussion is over. "The result was merge‎ to Alternatives to general relativity.". JRSpriggs (talk) 02:01, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Request to merge "megasonic cleaning" into "ultrasonic cleaning"?

I recently joined Wikipedia and my first suggested edit was to Megasonic cleaning. My guess is that this article would belong better as a subsection of the article on Ultrasonic cleaning. The help article Help:Introduction_to_talk_pages/All suggested that I draw some attention to it, since the article is a bit obscure.

Creating a page on ground-based GW detection

Hello everyone, as part of my ongoing work on bringing the Virgo interferometer to FA level (any review there is still helpful!), I have decided, in accordance to some comments I received, to create a new article dedicated to ground-based detection of gravitational waves using large interferometers. One of the motivation is that the Virgo interferometer article has become pretty heavy, and that a lot of its content overlaps with the LIGO and KAGRA articles (science case, general principle, data analysis). There is also a Gravitational-wave observatory article, but it encompasses other, very different detection methods such as resonant mass antennas or PTA.

I have already made a lot of progress on this article, which you can find in Draft:Ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave detection; a lot of content is taken over from Virgo interferometer (most of it was already written by me), which I plan to modify in order to link to the new article (in a WP:SPLIT fashion). I also plan to make similar changes to the other relevant articles.

As far as to the actual article I think it is currently good enough to put in the main namespace (although there is of course room for improvement, and any review/suggestion is welcome); there is an issue however, which is the name of the article. As you can see, the tentative name is quite long, and perhaps hard too read; what is your opinion of that ? For context:

• "Ground-based" because we are specifically excluding space-based projects such as LISA, which use pretty different techniques and probe different sources
• "Interferometric" because we talk about interferometer detectors, and exclude resonant mass antenna or PTA
• "gravitational-wave detection" because this is what we are talking about
• The article encompasses mostly the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA detectors, but also smaller detectors such as GEO 600 to a lesser degree.

Any ideas on how to shorten that ? Thuiop (talk) 15:55, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Drop "Ground-based" and include a summary paragraph on LISA outlining the differences. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:09, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Issue is, the differences are massive. Only the very core idea of using interferometry is the same, but the mechanics behind it are very different (LISA has no mirrors for instance, the interferometry is done using complex numerical techniques) and the type of sources it can observe is also very different (with only a bit of overlap), meaning that analysis techniques are also different. It makes more sense to have the differences between the two outlined in Gravitational-wave observatory, which is a broader article which does not go in-depth about the different techniques. There could probably be a "Space-based ..." article, but LISA being the only really relevant project for now it is probably better to have everything about space-based GW detection in the LISA article. Thuiop (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Combine this paragraph with the sentence you used above and use that as the summary paragraph. I think a direct discussion of LISA belong in your article in any case. The section Gravitational-wave observatory has less information than you have already posted here.

The 'ground' is least important aspect of the topic. If you want advice to cut it down, cut there. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:51, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

If more information should be added, it should be in Gravitational-wave observatory (which I may do at some point). I reiterate : space-based and ground-based observatories have very little in common apart from the fact that they both use interferometry. The article is already 87000 bytes large, and adding the relevant information on space-based observatories could easily double the size of the article, as well as diluting the message. I don't think there really is a point in expending the scope of the article here; my concern is how to make that scope clear without being too verbose. I will keep thinking about it but will go with the current title if I do not find a solution. Thuiop (talk) 13:04, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, space-based and ground-based have little in common, and don't belong mixed together in the same article, However, merging common content from Virgo, Kagra, current generation LIGO and next 1-2 versions of LIGO, and then the 2 or 4 additional future proposals (India...) would be excellent. I've found myself toggling over the various articles, with my eyes glazing over when there's repeated content, and then working hard to figure out what's new/different/changed. A one-stop-shop overview of ground systems w/short summaries of how they differ would be great. Thank you! 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:17, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Well, it is done. I took the name Ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave search in the end, for lack of a better one. Thuiop (talk) 20:53, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the initiative. I think the article is both useful and is already in a pretty good state. I don't have a useful suggestion for shortening the title, though. I don't think it's inordinate long. Tercer (talk) 20:32, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Biographical importance ratings?

The physics project template counts the number of articles ranked by importance, and quality. Here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Quality Control There are currently 700+ articles with unassesed priority (marked "???"). Clicking through, almost all of these are biographies. I suspect that no one particularly wants to tackle this, because of the unpleasantness of tagging someone's biography as "unimportant". That, plus the true difficulty of actually assigning a relative ranking -- you have to be very cross-disciplinary to be able to assess such comparisons. And that's just within physics, never mind something like "my biologist is more important than your physicist" or god help us, "our TV anchor is more notable than your physicist". Thus, I'm wondering if perhaps there might be better to avoid this issue entirely? I'm thinking of allowing the template to have an "importance=biographical" value. Or maybe there is some better way to do this? FWIW, Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics has exactly this same issue with unrated articles. (I'll cross-post there shortly.) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 00:10, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps if you shared what purpose you have in mind for the importance maybe we can have an opinion. ??? seems like a fine category to me. You can probably search for importance ??? and bio=yes if you want. Johnjbarton (talk) 00:39, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

This is not up to me; this would have to be a community decision. About 700 physics articles would be affected. An equal number of math articles, or maybe more. I'm not sure, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the article ranking process? In that case, please take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Quality Control and read what it says there. Study the table that appears at the top of that page, and you will see a column labelled "???" and a row labelled "unassessed". The unassesed row is easy to deal with, but the "???" column can only be emptied out by adding "importance=top/high/mid/low" to the article. A ranking of "importance=biography" would result in an error. Tagging with "bio=yes" would also result in a template error. This is because of some wikipedia-wide decision made about ten years ago, where a number of parameters were stripped from templates for many WP projects. So it can't "just be done", assorted people have to alter (1) the template (2) the bot that performs nightly summaries. A different alternative would be to just strip out WP physics from all these articles, and just dump the whole thing into the lap of WP biography, and let them deal with it. But I doubt that most of the rest of WPPhys would find that to be an appealing solution. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 03:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

If you do nothing, then 700 articles would not be affected. So my vote is do nothing. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Just noting the current count in Category:Unknown-importance physics articles (452). I think our table is a little out of date. Primefac (talk) 15:31, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

I notified Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography and so maybe a subject-matter expert will provide clarity. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 03:57, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

This is the right place for your point, I do not think that a "subject-matter expert" in WT:BIO is the right approach -- members of this project should be doing this for everything except GA, FA, and A (of course). Perhaps it would be wise to suggest that only people with some established history (e.g. 3000+ edits or something else) do the rankings. Is there a physics "ranking team" as suggested at WP:ASSESS? Ldm1954 (talk) 04:18, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

No formal team. Few are interested in doing this, and approx zero who engage in biographies. Which is why I asked. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:23, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

As someone who does a lot of assessments for WP:AST, I think it just comes down to "people not doing it" rather than any sort of unpleasantness surrounding the actual giving of the ranking. I'm basing this next statement on the AST importance scale since PHYS doesn't have one, but someone like Michael Abraham (rabbi) would be "low" because he has published physics articles but is not necessarily making significant contributions in the field. Primefac (talk) 11:22, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

I was keeping up with the unranked articles for a while, and even got us down to inbox zero for a bit. Then someone tagged three hundred articles as "physics" in one go and I gave up.

The vast majority of physics bios ARE low importance, because being a fellow of the APS or equivalent is sufficient to establish notability, but there's a huge gap between "notable enough for a Wikipedia article" and "Mid-importance". PianoDan (talk) 14:33, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Proposal to merge stationary action principle into action principles

Please weigh in on Talk:Action_principles#Merge_proposal.

Note that this merge is related to older discussions principle of least action. The effect of the merge would be to change that redirect to point to action principles. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:50, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Sun FAR

I have nominated Sun for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. 750h+ 01:22, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

Virgo interferometer FAC

Hello everyone, I have submitted the Virgo interferometer article to FAC recently, and it has not attracted too much attention yet (perhaps due to the technicality ?). I would be happy if anyone was willing to take a look; you can find the candidacy page here. Thanks! Thuiop (talk) 07:17, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Academic notability

Hi everyone! I usually write articles on physics topics, but I've been thinking about starting to write a bit more about people as well. For this reason I'm trying to get a feel for crierion 1 on Wikipedia:Notability (academics). What exactly qualifies as "highly cited". I've asked this question in the Teahouse, but I think its better to ask here since this community would have a better feel towards this physics niche case. The cases presented here are not obviously super stars since I'm also interested in what the lower bound is on this criterion.

For example, consider the following Professors at the University of Oxford:

• Andrei Olegovich Starinets: He has a MASSIVE impact on AdS/CFT hydrodynamics with his top cited papers have 2.9k, 1.7k, 1.6k, 1.2k citations each, which is pretty insane, so I'm baffled how he doesn't already have a page.
• Subir Sarkar: Cosmologist who is now Emiratus Professor at Oxford with a non-collaboration paper with 1.3k citations. His impact is however more due to his fundamental contributions to various collaborations such as IceCube and the Particle Theory Group and his most cited papers are from there. This is exemplified by the fact that his retirement had the department hold a 2-day conference called Subirfest https://subirfest.web.ox.ac.uk/home.
• John March-Russell: Discovered the axiverse (1.8k citations) (this is a very big thing due to the increadible popularity of axions to string theory), and has another important paper on FIMP thermal freeze with 1.1k citations.
• Joseph P. Conlon: He discovered the Large Volume Scenario with over 1k citations (this is the second most important mechanism for stabilising moduli in string theory, with the first most famous one being KKLT. These mechanisms are genuinely vital in constructing realistic string theory models and so are super important and comes up in standard string theory textbooks for example) and is a prominent string phenomenologists.

I'm not necessarily aiming to create articles for all (or even most or any) of them, cause, well, effort. But understanding if they are all indeed notable would help me in the future. Any thoughts? Thanks!!! OpenScience709 (talk) 10:06, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

In my personal opinion, the notability criteria adopted for biographies is far below common sense. A large number of citations is a sign that the work itself is notable and we should invest articles about that work. The citations do not make the author notable. A notable author will have a biography written by someone other than a wikipedia editor, eg a historian or a scientist writing about history. The remaining criteria are even weaker, leading to many many Wikipedia vanity "resumes". I don't think these are interesting or knowledge, sorry. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:28, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I can agree with the sentiment that "The citations do not make the author notable" per se. But the issue with making the bar so high that every wikipedia biography needs to have a whole biography by a historian or scientist writing about history may be too strict. Mainly because these biographies usually only come about when someone retires, or when they die (or later), despite them being notable for a while beforehand. There is utility in these more contemporary figures which are notable in their respective fields, but no one yet bothered to write their history (since its still being written). On the other hand, using Wikipedia as "vanity resumes" is indeed annoying. Exactly why I'm trying to figure out the bar for genuine notability. OpenScience709 (talk) 00:17, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Just to be clear: I am not advocating that the bar be changed (see Don Quixote). Rather I am suggesting a way to make choices on which articles to invest in. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:06, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

It's really not possible to say anything based on citation counts alone, without at the very least comparing to typical profiles for the field. XOR'easter (talk) 02:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Typical medium dynamical cluster approximation

This discussion may be of interest to the community here. XOR'easter (talk) 02:18, 8 June 2024 (UTC)