Talk:Dispersive PDE Wiki

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 16 December 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

[edit] Merge

I'm proposing the old content of this article be merged into the redirect target instead of a redirect, since that article doesnt contain any information on Dispersive PDE Wiki. I'll revert the redirect, and list the merge proposal. -wizzard2k (C•T•D) 05:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re-added a section, 'Dirichlet problems'

This article just popped up on my watch list again after long quiescence. When I first saw this article in 2006, it seemed that people were questioning the sourcing, and asking if the wiki was notable. User:Colliand did go around adding a link to the PDE Wiki itself to a number of Wikipedia articles. While I wasn't sure about notability, I minded that the newly-added links to the PDE Wiki seemed to lack context, or any reason why our own readers should want to follow such an external link. So having a new Wikipedia article created to explain what that Wiki was about seemed like a step forward.

However, there were two weaknesses:

  • The home page of the PDE Wiki itself made no concession to the non-expert reader, so there was no indication of why the subject was interesting, or why it was enjoying a revival,
  • The new Wikipedia article Dispersive PDE Wiki also had little explanatory value. The traditional connection of PDEs to physics was not even hinted at, making us wonder why links should have been added to Schrödinger equation, for example. (The paragraph in this article that explains the connection to physics was also added by me).

The net result was that User:Colliand's addition of links didn't seem to be improving the encyclopedia, and our invitation to the PDE Wiki people to improve our coverage of the topic wasn't having any results either. Prof. Colliand has not been back on Wikipedia since last December.

Others must know this material much better than I, but I tried to add two paragraphs to show how this material might be connected to other topics in partial differential equations. (The one I just restored was the second of the two). If we aren't prepared to fill in the gaps, it's not clear how we are helping our readers. I don't have any strong objection to a merge, but whatever we come up with, IMHO, should leave readers informed as to what the heck a dispersive PDE is, or why a well-posed problem is significant. EdJohnston 19:22, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

  • I'm guessing it was originally removed because while it talks about a specific PDE, it doesn't appear to have any relevance to the topic of the wiki itself. The article is supposed to be about the wiki, not solving PDEs. Maybe you could add some information on how this pertains to the wiki? -wizzard2k (C•T•D) 01:02, 24 May 2007 (UTC)