Talk:George E. P. Box

Untitled

Resolved

I don't have a place or date, but some one should really add the quote:

“All models are wrong, some models are useful” George Box.

Quite a famous one I believe.

Ljung box ?

Resolved

Anyone have a problem incluing a link to the [Ljung-Box] test on this page?

Straha 206th 18:18, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirects

Resolved

George Edward Pelham Box required.

Marriage?

Current text reads:

Box married Joan Fisher, the second of Ronald Fisher's five daughters. In 1978, Joan Fisher Box published a biography of Ronald Fisher, with substantial collaboration of Box.[2] Box married Claire Quist in 1985.

That's two marriages without any mention of a divorce, widowhood, or otherwise what happened to the first marriage. Not being an expert on his life, I don't know how to resolve, but wanted to flag — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:4898:80E8:EE31:0:0:0:2 (talk) 21:27, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Saying "All models are wrong"

George E. P. Box is famous for, among other things, saying that "all models are wrong" and "all models are wrong, but some are useful". Related to that, this article included the following sentence and reference.

Box wrote that "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" in his book on response surface methodology with Norman R. Draper.[*]

[*] Box, George E. P.; Norman R. Draper (1987). Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, p. 424, Wiley. ISBN 0-471-81033-9. (more details at wikiquote)

There is a Wikipedia article about the saying: All models are wrong. As that article details, Box first published the saying in a 1976 paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, which is the most-prestigious statistical journal. The article All models are wrong also gives three other publications in which Box published the saying, including "Box's widely cited book Statistics for Experimenters". Additionally, the article contains substantial discussion of the saying, and many references. (It is worthwhile to read the article.)

The above-quoted sentence mentions only the 1987 book with Draper. Ergo, the above-quoted sentence is misleading: because people reading the sentence will believe that the 1987 book is the first/prime/only instance for Box's saying. Clearly, then, the sentence should be revised.

What should the revised sentence be? Recommendations are welcome.

I do not have a strongly-held opinion on what the sentence should be. I lean toward including no references and instead wikilinking to the article All models are wrong, because that article includes all the references and discussion. Hence, I changed the sentence to this: “Box famously wrote, in various books and papers, that "all models are wrong, but some are useful".”

User:DanielPenfield has repeatedly reverted the article to include the sentence that cites the 1987 book. I attempted to discuss the issue on his talk page, but we did not seem to communicate adequately—and he repeatedly accused me of vandalism etc. Hence, this Request for Comment.

86.178.35.45 (talk) 09:02, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Your claim	My response
because people reading the sentence will believe that the 1987 book is the first/prime/only instance for Box's saying	I believe that you are alone in holding this opinion. And if you truly acting in good faith, you would have either a) added multiple references to primary sources to back up the statement or b) replaced the inline citation with at least one true WP:RS (at least not one from Box himself) that backs up the statement. Instead, you chose to remove the only inline citation while hiding behind your IP address. Also, let me point out that this RFC is the first time you've raised the objection about "first/prime". Everything you've written or reverted until now has focused on "only" which seems to have been predicated on the belief that readers are too simple-minded to understand that one reference ≠ Box claimed "all models are wrong" exactly once.
User:DanielPenfield has repeatedly reverted the article to include the sentence that cites the 1987 book.	Editors are invited to actually view the edit history. The so-called "reverted the article to include the sentence" is marked with the edit summary revert removal of citation—in fact every one of my reverts is marked that way.
I lean toward including no references	Then you should read WP:UNSOURCED and reconsider your position. Also, your four reverts indicates more than just a "lean".
and instead wikilinking to the article All models are wrong, because that article includes all the references and discussion	"WP:V by clicking through" is a novel technique. WP:Inline citation recognizes only two methods of attribution: The inline citation and the general reference. Perhaps you can convince people to include your invention as a third method of WP:Verifiability? Maybe you can generalize it so that WP:V is satisfied if it can be shown that if a reader can click through k articles from the original (for arbitrarily large k) and arrive at an article (somewhere) that contains references relevant to the original statement that the editor hiding behind the IP address feels shouldn't be cited inline?

-- DanielPenfield (talk) 11:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

• Direct quotations are on the WP:MINREF list. You may have any passable source for a direct quotation, but you absolutely must have an inline citation. This is just one of those unpredictable quirks of Wikipedia's sourcing policies, but there's no way around it. Every single direct quotation must be followed by an inline citation to a source, without exception. (Better sources are naturally always welcome.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:36, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

• As a quote, it must have an inline cite -- you are free to decide among you which source to discuss, but it must have the in-line cite. You can in addition add a note, if he said it several different ways that matter and in-line cite all of them. Alanscottwalker (talk) 01:03, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

• It needs to have at least one in-line source. I don't think that, for most people, that the source date in a source footnote would be necessarily be taken as a statement of when he first said it. But if there is a dispute on this, why not just include more sources and info to clarify? North8000 (talk) 03:01, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Much and kind thanks to User:WhatamIdoing, User:Alanscottwalker, User:North8000. I have now included three references for the saying. (I kept a revised wording, because explicitly mentioning only the 1987 book seems inappropriate.) 86.178.35.45 (talk) 08:43, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

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