Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Relative orders of magnitude (length)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Mark Arsten (talk) 18:34, 9 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Relative orders of magnitude (length)

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Unsourced collection of a few pairs of points from Orders of magnitude (length). An unlikely title or concept for anyone to search for, and contains nothing encyclopedic. PROD was removed by original creator. PamD 07:59, 1 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Creator here. Actually I see arguments on both sides of this, and I'm not going to be partisan here. Let me just present the strengths and weaknesses. Since I'm busy outside WP, I'll come back in a bit to see what decision you made.

Strength: I just think that this is a very, very interesting way to present the powers of ten. That's why I started the article. Imagine this list once it's filled in. You scroll to 10^3 in the left column, and immediately see that the ratio of mouse height to sequoia height, the diameter of the moon to that of the sun, and the height of a human to that of the world's tallest building are all the same number, 10^3. (I made up those numbers.) Who could forget the meaning of 10^3 at that point? In my opinion, this will become more apparent once the article has grown some more.

If I recall, PamD has tagged the article as "not encyclopedic" and "unsourced." I would at least phrase that differently. To the extent that these criticisms apply to this article, they also apply to our longstanding article on Orders of magnitude (length). There are no real sources in that article other than authorities for the lengths, which could be done here. The real difference, I think, is that there are a lot of other sources that have attempted to present powers of ten as they've been done in Orders of magnitude (length); by contrast, no other source (to my knowledge) presents orders of magnitude like they're done in this article. But this is not what makes Orders of magnitude (length) encyclopedic, and it does not make this article un-encyclopedic. Wikipedia certainly has a large number of articles which don't have precedent in existing encyclopedias, for example many of our "list" and "outline" articles.

Weakness: One weakness that I admit to (and don't have a good answer to) is that there is no limiting principle on what objects will get compared with which objects. Say that you have the lengths of twenty objects. You do the "handshake problem" and that means (I think) there are 190 relationships -- 190 rows in the table. If the table fills up like this, then the article could become arbitrarily long. Perhaps you could have some arbitrary convention to keep it shorter, which is arguably what we already do at Orders of magnitude (length). The problem is that while adding new measurements makes that article grow linearly, it makes this one grow geometrically. Yet keeping things out of this article would be unsatisfactory because, well, the whole POINT is to learn about as many different relationships between as many different measurements as possible. That's what makes it interesting.
Conclusion: I see imperfections in this article, but to my mind these are not fatal. Nevertheless, more importantly I think this is a good way of displaying the information. So if you ultimately end up deleting this article, that is fine, but then I will appreciate some feedback on where else I can take this on the web to make it happen. It has crossed my mind for example that I might put this into a database and create my own website. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Thanks. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 09:51, 1 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000^(talk) 10:10, 1 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Anything useful could be merged to Orders of magnitude (length), perhaps even a table like User:Agradman suggests at the end of the article. Whilst it is nice, I don't think it warrants its own article.Martin451 (talk) 21:31, 1 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Lists of arbitrary worked examples are inappropriate per WP:NOTTEXTBOOK. Warden (talk) 08:44, 2 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.