Talk:Cantor's first set theory article: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:14, 19 February 2016

Revision as of 17:49, 19 February 2016

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* Concerning the example: "We wouldn't put the article about ''Gone With the Wind'' at [[Margaret Mitchell's most famous novel]], say." For me, [[Margaret Mitchell's most famous novel]] doesn't work because of '''Recognizability'''. I've seen the movie ''Gone With the Wind'' so I would recognize it. However, I've never read the book so I wouldn't recognize the author's name. In the case of '''''On a Property of the Collection of All Real Algebraic Numbers''''': many (most?) mathematicians and students of mathematics would not recognize this title, but nearly all of them would recognize the author's name in '''Georg Cantor's first set theory article'''. They would also recognize the area of "set theory" and a good number could tell you his first article's most significant result: the uncountability of the set of real numbers. These are two of the problems with the proposed title: (1) It fails the [[WP:TITLE]] '''Recognizability''' characteristic: "The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize." (2) The title is unexpected and confusing since it doesn't mention the theorem the article is well-known for. (By the way, [[Margaret Mitchell's most famous novel]] is not an acceptable Wikipedia title because it uses the peacock word "famous"--see [[WP:PEACOCK]]).

* Concerning Wikipedia article content: I regard there as being two approaches to article content: A narrow article that only talks about what is in the math article versus a more comprehensive article that does this and puts it into historical context. In mathematics and the sciences, it is often of interest to understand what led to an article and what an article has led to. In the case of Gödel's article, the Wikipedia article "Gödel's incompleteness theorems" is the comprehensive article and ''On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems'' is the narrow article (it only contains publication info, outline of the paper, and a section on translations of the paper). I was thinking of having the same division with current Wikipedia article title being the more comprehensive article and another Wikipedia article (whose title would be the title of Cantor's article) that would be very narrow. It was a compromise measure I was proposing, but it obviously got nowhere and I only confused people. I take it that everyone wants just one Wikipedia article (which I think is the best way to go). --[[User:RJGray|RJGray]] ([[User talk:RJGray|talk]]) 17:12, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

::I really don't think there's a choice here. If the article is about the paper, which I think it should be, then it should be named after the paper. --[[User:Trovatore|Trovatore]] ([[User talk:Trovatore|talk]]) 17:49, 19 February 2016 (UTC)