Talk:Auxiliary fraction

Latest comment: 12 years ago by Stfg in topic GOCEreviewed

Request for expert attention edit

I listed this article for deletion (see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Auxilliary Fractions) but consensus emerged that there is a potential article here, given expert attention.

My concerns are:

  • Zero context; it appears that this is an algorithm used in vedic mathematics, but there is nothing in the article to indicate this
  • As a result, the article is meaningless to a general audience
  • Needs categorisation
  • Insufficient indication as to what task the algorithm is intended to perform
  • No Wikipedia:Lead section; this would be an appropriate place to tackle the above
  • Over-reliance on worked examples; these should only ever be used in an illustrative manner
  • No proof that the algorithm works, or discussion of corner cases

Other concerns, taken from the AfD debate:

  • "...it does not help that the writing is so horrid"
  • "the presentation is horribly arcane... see if it can be translated into some variant of standard English"
  • "This may be a notable topic and even has featured article potential - but who can tell right now?"

Minor issues:

  • Capitalisation - Wikipedia articles use sentence case (this applies to the article name as well as section titles)
  • Plurals - presumably the article title should be in the singular?

I hope these issues can be resolved. –EdC 16:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

I worked on the article for a couple hours today. I hope that the mathematicians can understand it now. It does need an expert to prove A.F. do work by prefixing the remainder to the Q-digit.

Although the Wikiproject's mathematics portal said someone would contribute, no one did. Yes, the article needed a lot of revision. I was surprised at the "interest" it generated. Larry R. Holmgren 20:08, 1 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

I've added a lead section and tried to do some copyedit on the rest - removed the unencyclopedic "we", shortened sub-heads, clarified some passages. But I don't think the cleanup job is complete, so I've left the tags in place. I think the method works - certainly the Type One and Type Two cases make sense - but like most so-called "vedic" mathematics, the method becomes increasingly baroque, and is of little practical use. I doubt that you will see much involvement from Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics, as mental calculation methods are a niche interest. Actually I think this whole article is too close to a "how to" guide to belong comfortably in Wikipedia - if it was nominated on AfD again, I would support its deletion. Gandalf61 12:57, 28 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

GOCEreviewed edit

It's confusing, especially in its treatment of type 3. For numbers ending in 1,3 or 7, it has you convert it to another type. Better to say this in the type 3 section and then use word like "and then apply the procedure for type ...". For numbers ending in 5 or an even digit, the explanation is simply unclear. So I've added "confusing" to the tags, and marked as {{GOCEreviewed}} since it clearly needs substantial rewriting because of other tags too. However, I've removed "peacock" from the tags. It surely isn't promotional. --Stfg (talk) 14:32, 28 February 2012 (UTC)Reply