Testwiki:Articles for deletion/198 (number) (2nd nomination)

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 no consensus‎__EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__. 198 appears to be right on the hairy edge of the upper limit of sequential integers that deserve an article. It is nearly identical to its neighbor articles, 197 (number) and 199 (number), although it has quite a lot more references (probably owing to its more embattled history at AfD, DRV, and AfC). Keep/delete voters are split right down the middle, numerically speaking. Delete voters at this discussion argue that the number isn't notable enough for its own article, and that the number doesn't have enough significant or interesting properties to write about. Keep voters argue that deleting this article would result in an awkward gap in the number articles from 1-200 (which is obviously not based on any policy, but more of an IAR argument, albeit an arguably valid one), potentially causing issues with navigation templates. Keep voters also implied that, in practice, notability criteria for numbers seems to be inconsistently applied, and applying the same level of scrutiny would likely result in the deletion of many other number articles between 101-200, which would be an outcome that most likely wouldn't find consensus if it were proposed.

This is a difficult discussion to close. While the policy-based arguments favor deletion, there are some convincing IAR arguments that pull it back in the other direction and make it impossible to find a solid consensus here. Some participants suggested a further discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability (numbers) on whether the top end of the range of "automatically notable" integers should be expanded from 101 to 201, and I agree that this would be a useful discussion to have before nominating this article for deletion again. —⁠ScottyWong⁠— 15:18, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

198 (number)

AfDs for this article:

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Template:La – (View log | edits since nomination)

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Nothing has really changed since Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/198 (number) (March 2022) and Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2023 April 9. User:Robert McClenon promoted this from draft space over significant objections from participants in those discussions. There still are not multiple properties of any mathematical significance for this number (companion Pell number might count, but that is only one property and doesn't even have its own separate article), and no in-depth coverage of this number in any reliable sources (its coverage in OEIS is merely as one among many other numbers in several unimportant database entries). The article has been crammed with even more junk trivia factoids than the version from the AfD, saving it from G4 speedy deletion, but that does not make it notable. Note that the draft discussion also debunked the claim that there was ever a consensus for the statement in Wikipedia:WikiProject Numbers that we should automatically include all numbers up to 200. Without in-depth coverage of this specific number in any reliable source, this does not pass WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:40, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:21, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Delete per the nomination, my comment at the previous AfD and my comments during the AfC process [1][2]. XOR'easter (talk) 20:32, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Weak keep Being the only number from 1-200 that didn't have an article, it seems rather sad to not include it. It is far better sourced than many of the others, (I know all about WP:OSE too). It seems to be a net benefit for the encyclopaedia to include it. Theroadislong (talk) 20:39, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  The very first "citation" is to a website that does not include the stated claim (or any other useful content, for that matter). The rest is "this integer appears somewhere in OEIS" level cruft, which is no better than the referencing was in, say, 431 (number), which was turned into a redirect [3]. If we're going by personal feelings of sadness, I'd say that it reads like scraping the bottom of the barrel for bullet points, more like a TV-Tropes-for-Numbers than an exposition of mathematics from which anyone could learn anything, which I find rather less than happy. XOR'easter (talk) 20:48, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Are articles about numbers necessarily required to be "an exposition of mathematics"? Theroadislong (talk) 20:58, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

They're required by policy to not be indiscriminate piles of trivia. XOR'easter (talk) 21:04, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I have now provided a justification for why the first property is true in the article itself. That citation was an accident. Natureader (talk) 00:02, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

That's what we call "Original Research" and is not suitable for Wikipedia. We don't include mathematical facts, even if provable, if there's no written documentation showing that others have discussed them first. XOR'easter (talk) 00:10, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, I have instead found another source. I read in the WikiProject Numbers page that if you can verify it with a pocket calculator, it doesn't need a citation, so I thought it didn't need a citation. Thank you for your explanation. Best, Natureader (talk) 00:22, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Weak Keep per Theroadislong's decision. CastJared (talk) 20:53, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• Delete and restore the previous redirect along with history. Firstly, I agree this article should be deleted for all the reasons already stated. Secondly, this deletion review resulted in the previous incarnation of the page being restored (as a redirect) in order to preserve history. That history now appears to have been lost - I assume the article was unceremoniously deleted to make way for this new draft? I think we must keep the previous history. IIRC the previous incarnation of the article had a sensible Talk page conversation about interestingness and why the article should remain a redirect. It's a pity that the nature of deletion means we now can't refer to that discussion in this discussion. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 21:15, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  Ask User:Robert McClenon where the history went — he performed some complicated sequence of round-robin moves between multiple numbered versions of this title in draft space, some of which have been subsequently deleted as "obviously made in error", in order to clear out the title from article space and move the draft into it. Probably the history went into one of those numbered drafts. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:19, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  • Answer - The history is in Draft:198 (number), right where I put it. That wasn't one of the trivial errors that I made. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:21, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
• 'Comment' - 1. Why do you think that I tagged the draft Template:Tl? But you didn't look at the draft, because you thought reasonably that it was the draft. 2. The next time that I do this, I will put a comment on the talk page of the accepted article telling where the history is. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:27, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  Keeping the history in the draft namespace seems unwise. There is a good chance of it being speedily deleted after 6 months of inactivity. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 06:54, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  I now also think we need to merge talk page history (if that’s even possible) as both old and new articles now have discussions on notability. If deletion prevails and 198 becomes the lowest number without an article, it will become/remain a magnet for reincarnation, and all these discussions need to be kept visible to avoid retreading the same ground. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 07:07, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep - I don't think that the policy of Wikipedia is not for trivia necessarily applies to the details of the noble art and science of number theory. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:21, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

  It's policy. It applies everywhere. Number theory is just as susceptible to oddities, frivolous curiosities, and trivia as any other area of human activity. XOR'easter (talk) 22:42, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

• Delete and restore the previous redirect and history. -- Whpq (talk) 00:43, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
• Keep By that metric of applicability, every mathematical property that is not immediately relevant to an application of Number Theory is frivolous and needs to be thrown out. If we were to truly apply that rule to the articles we currently have, almost no number passes them. Try to tell me 100 has any content if you remove the trivia? It doesn't even have three facts that link to OEIS sequences where it is in the first five terms, which is the metric David Eppstein seems to think determines whether a number should be given an article or not. "But 100 is important because it is too small to not have its own article/significant in base 10." That's completely subjective, i.e. there's a humanistic reason why it should be included in our encyclopedia (we like base 10 and consider that number small). By that standard, there is nothing wrong with including 198, especially since it is otherwise a rather dissatisfying gap in a long list of articles. We're not concerned about space availability, and there's enough content here that it isn't a pointless stub (the primary concern of WP:NUM's guidelines on creation) in comparison to when it was previously deleted. Bass77_talkcontribs 03:25, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  100 has more than half a page in the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers [4]. 198 has no entry. 100 is also very early in the nice sequences OEIS:A011557 and OEIS:A000537 both of which have Wikipedia articles (I'll leave finding them as an exercise), and has a lot of cultural significance. (We have numbers whose notability rests mainly on cultural significance; 117 (number) is an example.) 198 has none of that. Also, see WP:WAX. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:59, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  198 is "very early" in the nice sequences https://oeis.org/A050250 and https://oeis.org/A001078 too, as I mentioned in the draft comments. Why are they not acceptable as interesting? I think at least the first one (nonzero palindromes less than 10^n) should be interesting enough. This and the property of being the first number representable as the sum of four squares in ten different ways (which has an article about the sequence: Jacobi's four-square theorem) were not mentioned in the previous 198 article, as far as I checked. Natureader (talk) 08:17, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Ok, let me explain why I don't think A050250, "Number of nonzero palindromes less than 10^n", is an interesting property. The number of palindromes of length $n$, over an alphabet of any fixed size $\sigma$, is easy to count: ${\sigma }^{\lceil n/2\rceil }$. The number of palindromes of length at most $n$ has a more complicated formula. The number of palindromes of length at most $n$ where for some reason exactly one of the alphabet symbols is forbidden in the first position has an even more complicated formula. Now apply that formula to $\sigma =10$ and $n=3$. There are so many arbitrary choices here that you could make a similar number of arbitrary choices and get any number you liked. There is no mathematical significance to having a palindromic digit representation, and no historical reason (for instance in early numerology) for being interested in decimal palindromes. It's only trivia, of a sort liked by people who like trivia about decimal representations, and not even particularly significant among such things. OEIS lists one published paper counting these numbers [5], not enough to make a case for notability of these counts, and the number 198 appears once in this paper, as a line in a table, not enough for WP:SIGCOV of its role as one of these counts. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:43, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep If we're going to have articles on numbers at all, and it's not immediately clear to me why we should as someone who has never thought about it before, the natural thing to do for a "non-notable" number would be to redirect it to the list of integers between 100-199 as we do with other "non-notable" numbers, but given every other number in the set seems "notable" enough for its own page, the correct "solution" would be to redirect it to a list where it would be the only entry. Therefore, given this isn't a "normal" topic, we "should" probably keep it just out on IAR/organisational concerns. SportingFlyer T·C 16:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Can we maybe add "just one more" to WP:ATA? If we repeatedly applied that principle to numbers we would get infinitely many articles, which is obviously an impossible-to-maintain situation. How about stopping where actual notability runs out, instead? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:20, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  I support the induction of this argument to the ATA hall of fame. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 18:42, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Because it's not a "just one more" argument, and I don't appreciate you trying to classify my argument as such. I have absolutely no idea why 198 (number) is not notable but 135 (number) is. Is it because 135 has more things to disambiguate? Is anyone arguing the page for 135 (number) passes GNG? Why is the mathematical trivia for 197 (number) valid for notability but not the ones at 198 (number)? Whether we have pages for numbers seems completely arbitrary apart from maybe pi because we're not applying rules consistently, and since we're not applying rules consistently, and the correct thing to do would be to redirect to a page that would list all the "non-notable" numbers between 100 and 200, which for whatever reason is exactly one number. The best option would be to delete this, 135, 197, and all of the other numbers which fail GNG and are only sourced to one mathematical encyclopedia, but I don't expect that would be very popular, so we may as well be inclusive. SportingFlyer T·C 18:54, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  WP:WAX. The 135 article in its current state is nearly as bad as the new 198 article. Also "more things to disambiguate" indicates some confusion; these are not disambiguation articles. We have a separate disambiguation article 135 (disambiguation); number articles are not and should not be confused with number disambiguation articles. I don't know if the three line entry for 135 in The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers [6] counts as WP:SIGCOV. The existence of other bad articles does not justify one more bad article. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:34, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Just to be clear, based on your response, you would be open to an AfD on 135 (number) following this AfD, if it were to close as delete? Because what we're trying to figure out at the moment is whether these numbers are "notable" or not. We do have WP:NNUM, but since this is at AfD it's clear WP:NNUM is difficult to apply, if 198 gets deleted but 197 or 135 gets kept for having what amounts to essentially the same article for the lay reader, down to the sourcing, suffering basically the same problem as other recently deprecated SNGs - it's just that NNUM never really needs to be applied at AfD. I think the decision is between deleting a lot more numbers than just 198 or serving readers like myself who aren't computer science professors and who may not necessarily understand why 198 doesn't have an article when every other integer 0-200 does. (Furthermore, if these are not disambiguation articles, then we should probably be cleaning some of them up. 167 (number) is a great example.) SportingFlyer T·C 19:58, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  I have not yet formulated an opinion on the notability of 135. It would take more external research. The current article does not convince me of its notability, but it might be notable through material not yet present in the article, or through some kind of significance that is mentioned in the article but buried among all the cruft there to the point where I have not seen it.

  I have been cleaning many of these up, slowly, with continued friction from some editors who like having them loaded with cruft. It was through attempting to clean these up in 2022, and not finding sufficient material to base an article on, that I initiated the first AfD of 198. I have not yet attempted to clean up 135. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:12, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  Thank you for the explanation - I understand your position a bit more clearly now. I'm not familiar with the history so perhaps this was discussed elsewhere before the first AfD as well, maybe at RfC. My argument is pretty simple but features a number of conditionals: if WP:GNG applies only, then this should be deleted. If WP:NNUM applies only, if it meets NNUM then it should be kept and if it doesn't then it should be deleted. However, as a SNG, NNUM would let us have these articles and have them not need to meet GNG, which is absolutely fine by me - these are a special category of article, but simultaneously, if the argument is all numbers 0-200 meet NNUM except 198, which is what I believe the initial AfD argued, then we should IAR keep this because the difference between 197 and 198 is not sufficiently different enough in practice that someone who's not into mathematics would understand why one has an article and the other does not, and we should instead keep 0-200 as a set of articles that can be on the site. If we're at the point where everything has to pass GNG, though, after the SNG discussions - I've been on a break - then this should probably be instead merged and redirected somewhere, and we can probably start doing that with other articles in the 0-200 range as well. Barring any specific consensus, I would default to keeping the article in a standalone form. SportingFlyer T·C 21:45, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  There's a somewhat-related discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Numbers#Move trivia and disambiguation content out of number articles, but more about what content we should include than which numbers we should include. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:35, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

  It's worth pointing out here that according to WP:NNUM: "For the sake of completeness... it is accepted that every integer between −1 and 101 has its own article even if it is not as interesting as the others." The cutoff point of 101 seems arbitrary, so there's a case to be made that it should be raised to 200 to smooth out the 198 gap. The Midnite Wolf (talk) 21:34, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

  Most number articles are written like WP:TRIVIA anyways. We should have a wider discussion about their purpose. Something like 60 (number) is clearly notable for historical Base 60 reasons alone but it's not really helpful to readers - but that's a conversation for another day. SportingFlyer T·C 22:27, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

• Weak keep – I !voted weak delete last time, but the article does not seem significantly below the standard of similar pages. (Although that sounds like OSE, it does help define the threshold.) Together with the arguments above, we should probably keep 198 to complete our set of 1–200, but it's still marginal. Certes (talk) 21:49, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
• delete per common sense. Article is just a collection of trivial data. Cinadon36 08:32, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
• Delete and restore the previous redirect and history: Does not appear to pass WP:NNUM and reads as a pile of trivia. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:51, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
• Strong Keep - I would support keeping, even if this page only had the links to 197 and 199. If the content is a problem - prune it. But don't reduce navigation for our readers by deleting this page. That doesn't make any logical sense at all. - jc37 20:14, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
• Week keep. From WP:NNUM: "For the sake of completeness... it is accepted that every integer between −1 and 101 has its own article even if it is not as interesting as the others. This avoids having, say, a gap for 38." The cutoff point of 101 here is arbitrary and could easily be changed to 200 or 201. I don't see a reason why a single gap below 200 is less unsatisfying than a gap at 38.The Midnite Wolf (talk) 21:50, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
• delete per nom, the fact that there is a page for 197 or any other number doesn't make this one better. Artem.G (talk) 07:31, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
• Delete it's a bunch of trivia, with no obvious significance. All of the non-notable numbers below 198 should be deleted too imo, just in case someone wants to use the OTHERSTUFFEXISTS or "navigational completeness" arguments (the navigational completeness argument makes no sense here anyway, people don't need a list to know what number comes after 197). AryKun (talk) 13:14, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

  Who benefits from these articles being deleted? Bass77_talkcontribs 22:04, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  It gives us practice patching up all the number navigation templates, List of numbers, etc. to work around a hole in the sequence. Certes (talk) 22:51, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  Furthermore, what makes a number notable? That's really the crux of this entire AfD, but this may not be the best place for that discussion. SportingFlyer T·C 22:55, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  Honestly, I would argue most numbers aren't notable, even below one hundred. I would think only small numbers -1–20, fundamental constants like e, π, and i, and then numbers with some real-world notability or GNG like 100, 1000, the -illions, and googol should have separate articles. AryKun (talk) 01:53, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Template:Resize
Relisting comment: I closed the first AFD as "Delete" but this go-round, I don't see a consensus yet.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:49, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

• Delete a lot of the arguments are above are about OTHERSTUFFEXISTS and "niceness", not whether the actual number is notable outside of a set. The "in mathematics" section is almost entirely just math trivia, no different from an "in pop culture" cruft section about a fictional character, and then the rest of it is just run-of-the-mill trivia combined with a disambiguation. There's not actual sources attesting to passing the GNG here, and I don't think any of these articles that are cited to On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences demonstrate notability. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 18:15, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
• Weak delete and restore redirect, as the keep !votes are largely based on aesthetic arguments without addressing notability. To those wishing to keep the article, I would suggest proposing a change to WP:NNUM so that it includes all numbers up to 201, rather than 101. Based on this discussion, it would probably gain some traction. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:48, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think delete !votes are any better on this front: "crammed with junk trivia factoids", "cruft", "scraping the bottom of the barrel", "some editors who like having them loaded with cruft", "pile of trivia", and "bunch of trivia" sound like aesthetic arguments to me. jp×g 17:04, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Trivia and cruft are relevant to deletion discussions insofar as they describe issues relating to WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:59, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Also, that was a highly selective and misleadingly cherry-picked set of quotations. In particular, the "crammed with junk trivia factoids", taken from my nomination statement, was from a part of the nomination statement explaining why G4 speedy deletion does not apply. The same nomination statement concludes with a clear guideline-based statement directly addressing (the total lack of) WP:GNG-based depth of coverage. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:00, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

• Keep. Note that, contrary to many claims, the contents of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS are not "it is forbidden to make any a posteriori claims whatsoever about consensus". This would be absurd, which is why it is not a policy or guideline. What this link actually goes to is a section of an essay about a specific type of fallacious reasoning where somebody argues for an article to be kept on the sole basis that another (very crappy and unlikely to survive AfD) article exists. It's quite unclear to me how this is supposed to apply to situations in which the "other stuff" is the subject of robust consensus. Here are all of the AfDs for numbers under 200: 1 (joke nom), 7 (joke nom), 9 (keep), 42 (joke nom), 69 (joke nom), 134 (keep), 138 (keep), 155 (keep), 178 (keep), 198 (delete). Here, other stuff does not exist as a random coincidence, but rather because people repeatedly agreed that it should exist. Even apart from that, I don't think that saying something is "cruft" or "junk trivia factoids" is a good deletion rationale (indeed, there is a section in the same essay named after this: WP:IDONTLIKEIT). As for the merits of the article: there are indeed OEIS citations, but there are also other citations (like the Brazilian emergency phone number, the dollar-coin ridges, and the NumberADay ref). It is not the greatest article in the world, but it seems basically fine to me. jp×g 17:04, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

The AfD's for 134, 138, and 155 were a decade and a half ago. It's reasonable to question whether that amounts to a meaningful example to follow now. The article for 178 made a better case for its existence on straight-up mathematical properties than this one (it got two "keep" !votes and one "weak keep", from editors who in this discussion have come down as "weak keep", "delete" and "delete" respectively). XOR'easter (talk) 16:08, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

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.