Talk:Negligible
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Perhaps the page should have been called 'Negligibilty'...
What I had in mind was that authors could write things like 'Provided the whatever is negligible, then ...' --Nigelj 15:50, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Further expansion?
The following headings have been suggested for further expansion of the article:
== Examples in electrical engineering ==
== Examples in mechanical engineering ==
== Examples in civil engineering ==
== Examples in chemical engineering ==
[edit] Why the move??
This page is clearly about all kinds of mathematical, scientific and engineering uses of a term. However, it was recently 'moved' to ~ (English) to make room for a new page that only contains a line and a half of text, plus an unexplained formula. No articles in WP link to this new page.
A function
is negligible, if for every positive integer c and all sufficiently large x’s (i.e., there exists an Nc > 0, for all x > Nc),
Even if this makes some kind of sense to those few people on the planet who don't need to be told what N, R, c and x refer to, why on earth were these few lines not just added to the bottom of existing article under some new subheading? (e.g. Complexity theory?) I shall move it all back and do so very soon unless some good reason comes to light. --Nigelj 20:42, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
- Nearly two months have gone by and no-one has disputed this suggestion, so I've put the formal templates in place (I can't get the "discuss parameter" to behave - sorry guys). I'll do the merge myself in a few days if no-one has anything to say. --Nigelj 23:01, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
- Sorry, I didn't check this item until just now. I created the "negligible (complexity theory)" item and did the "move". The word "negligible" is a very common term. It is likely that "negligible (in field A)" and "negligible (in field B)" are irrelevant to each other. They are connected to each other by sheer coincidence because of a commonly used term. Here "negligibility" is fundamental to some branches of complexity theory, such as cryptography. The meaning is very different from those used in other fields. I think that the better way to handle this issue would be like this:
- 1. Keep the "negligible (complexity theory)" record, and use <onlyinclude>contents</onlyinclude> tags in the record to identify the main contents.
- 2. Move "negligible (english)" back to "negligible", create a "Definition in complexity theory" section and use {{:negligible (complexity theory)}} to include the proper contents from the "negligible (complexity theory)" record.
- This way, "negligible" is restored to the original state, and "negligible (complexity theory)" is also separated from other irrelevant "siblings". Hope this will serve everybody's needs. --Jiejunkong 00:00, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
- Sorry, I didn't check this item until just now. I created the "negligible (complexity theory)" item and did the "move". The word "negligible" is a very common term. It is likely that "negligible (in field A)" and "negligible (in field B)" are irrelevant to each other. They are connected to each other by sheer coincidence because of a commonly used term. Here "negligibility" is fundamental to some branches of complexity theory, such as cryptography. The meaning is very different from those used in other fields. I think that the better way to handle this issue would be like this:
[edit] Requested move
See also above discussion.
- Support a move to negligible but entire article should become a disambiguation page: split it into the individual articles on the various encyclopedic usages (as negligible (mathematics) already is) and move the rest to Wiktionary. — AjaxSmack 00:43, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] It's got more complicated
We now have four related pages:
I still say we only need one: Negligible. It's clear that the page that someone has renamed to Negligible (English) is in fact about engineering uses of the term, including technical and numerical examples, rather than being an English-dictionary-style definition of an everyday word. I particularly like the sentence in the allegedly "completely different" Negligible (mathematics) article that says, "In complexity-based modern cryptography, a security scheme is provably secure if the probability of security failure ... is negligible..." That doesn't sound too different to me.
The other irritating thing about this extremely protracted slow-motion argument here is that while it's been going on, other editors have been systematically removing all my carefully-crafted code examples from several of Wikipedia's software technology articles on the basis that they were 'too technical' and 'of no interest to the general readers that Wikipedia is intended for'. If I could be bothered to get involved with the great and the good somewhere like the Village Pump or wherever, I think we could quickly get all the mathematical formulae removed from Negligible (mathematics) and be left with not much more than the sentence above, then merge the two articles and be done with it.
C'mon guys, loosen up. --Nigelj 20:27, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
- While not exactly the job of WP:RM admin, I moved this article to Negligible, killed the dab pages, and let the mathemathics one stand on its own, with a notice in Wikipedia:Summary Style. Duja► 10:43, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
