Pqrstuv

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Allaire reference

I saw you added a reference to a paper by Allaire to Four-color theorem. Curious, I looked up the review and it seems that Allaire was working on a proof simultaneously with Appel et al. Do you know more, and if so, could you please add a bit to the article that is worthwhile in your opinion? I think it is rather odd to have a reference without any idea what the reference is about. Thanks in advance.

By the way, welcome here on Wikipedia; I hope you like it. Seeing that you worked on some articles in graph theory, you might be interested in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics where editors interested in mathematics (including me) hang out. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 01:33, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

• Hi. I am not sure whether you intended for me to reply on your talk page or mine. I guess that's a policy I need to specify on my talk page. Anyhow, I will soon know more about Allaire's proof but right now I only know that it exists and was published independently of the Appel/Haken proof. I sort of agree that the reference is "dangling," in the sense that it doesn't relate to anything in the article, but it looks to me like the References section of the article is actually more a bibliography: It cites relevant documents, but those documents are not necessarily referred to in the body of the article. On this note, I tried yesterday to determine whether Wikipedia has a policy on separating the references section (ie, citations for documents referenced in the article) from the bibliography (ie, citations for documents relevant to the subject but that weren't necessarily cited in the article) but gave up before I found an answer. If it is the case that bibliography can/should be separated from references, then several of the citations should fall into the bibliography category. Aaaanyhow, I am presently writing a paper on the differences between the Appel/Haken proof, the Robertson proof, the Gonthier proof, and the Allaire proof--or at least some subset of of these proofs of size >1 and including Appel/Haken. I hope to add some of this material to the article and with luck, I'll at least know enough about Allaire's proof to say where it fits in historically. —Pqrstuv 20:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello. You can reply wherever you want; most people (and all experienced editors) will place your user talk page on their watchlist when they post something on it, so they will notice when you reply under their question.

Regarding your policy question: I like to separate the documents which are used in writing the article (most of which will be referenced in the article) from the rest. The relevant policy is Wikipedia:Guide to layout#Standard appendices and descriptions. To be more precise, this is a guideline — the difference between policies and guidelines around here is that policies should always be followed while guidelines admit a bit flexibility (see Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines). However, it seems many editors do not bother about the difference between "references" and "further reading / bibliography", and it is not that important to be honest.

I hope you will be able to write something about Allaire's proof later. In the meantime, there is no hurry. See you, Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:27, 27 February 2007 (UTC)