The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Mathimagics]

Has anybody visited Mathematics of Sudoku recently?

Somebody has done a very severe edit!

Much of the details of grid counts for various grid sizes has been removed, and all references to this forum seem to have disappeared as well.

The number of references, previously 60 to 80 (?), is now just 22.

[Mathimagics]

The last entry in the "Talk" page explains much:

This article has been tagged as relying too much on self published sources since September of 2021, but nothing much has changed. This is a final notice that I intend to start cutting everything based on self published sources, forum posts, and so on soon. If you're reading this and can improve the sourcing with citations to journal articles or books from academic publishers, please do so. If not, this article will be getting shorter. MrOllie (talk) 18:48, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

I have carried out the cuts. Do not restore any of this content without citations that meet WP:RS - that means no forum posts. MrOllie (talk) 17:04, 22 August 2022

So the reasons are clear, but the consequences seem to be severe. If references can only be to journals/books, where to from here?

[StrmCkr]

that's lame, clearly they don't know that much on Sudoku & variants comes from unpublicated work confirmed by others on these vary forums and others forums many whom are published mathematicians etc ! just not all the work is formal.

[Pat]

old version

[m_b_metcalf]

that's lame, clearly they don't know that much on Sudoku & variants comes from unpublicated work confirmed by others on these vary forums and others forums many whom are published mathematicians etc ! just not all the work is formal.

I disagree. Wikipedia has clearly stated guidelines about verifiable sources. It is perfectly legitimate for it to maintain its own standards. Why should sudoku be the only exception? If there are interesting results that are of wider interest, they should be published as a book or in a reliable journal and then referenced. That's the way science works and knowledge made available for posterity.

Wrt the case in point, surely, after years of work, it's not impossible to go the last mile and get an article together? At least one of you is an English-mother tongue professional mathematician.

Regards,

Mike

[dobrichev]

Hi Mike,

Do you mean that the way the science works stricly excludes all kind of original research?

Now seriously.

If you read the guidelines you will find that wikipedia is strongly against topics entirely based on original research. For all other cases, in the same guidelines, you will find described exceptions.

The actual problem is that everybody can update wikipedia content, including people with different culture, different educational degree, and different motivation.

In our case, a vandal removed content following the rule "search the references for keyword forum, post a warning in talk page, and finally erase the references".
My motivational interpretation of the above is "Do article editions, strictly follow (your own understanding of) guidelines, content is of second importance. Stay happy with your contributions".

The wikipedia guidelines recommend replacing the questionable references with more reliable. It was not done.
Guidelines also reccomend removal of the content, not only the references. The vandal, in several places, removed only the reference but no content, this making the article worse - with unreferenced content which is worse than with poorly referenced content.

Almost all of the articles in wikipedia have problems with references to the so-called reliable sources.
Note how much attention is paid to the political newspapers - If some president or prime minister hasn't say something, then it is not considered as a fact.
Surely for sudoku, like for many other articles, the research results will never be in a reliable newspaper or science journal. And all wikipedia readers and contributors well understand that. Articles with problematic references will ever exist, else the project will die.

What can be done?
Some experienced editors gave good directions how to avoid the edit wars. I can't give reference, but in general the guide was to wait for several weeks - for such period of time most vandals are losing interest but the serious contibutors don't.

Being against publishing your own work in a wikipedia article, I found 4 editors who did this in our case.
One is the arcticle creator, which contibution, according to my reading of wikipedia guidelines, fits in

Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.[8] Exercise caution when using such sources: if the information in question is suitable for inclusion, someone else will probably have published it in independent, reliable sources

One aggresively replaced existing SVG images by bitmaps, adding much images and references to his own website.
One cited his self-published paper.
One added several large tables, which to me are 100% original research. After I made these tables collapsed by default, I can live with their existance.

I am encouraging all forum contributors to restore the wikipedia content, possibly in ever better form.


About making a publication - I agree, but if it was easy it would have been done already.

BR,
Mladen

[m_b_metcalf]

Mladen,
I seem to have stirred up a hornets' nest. I don't necessarily disagree with you. I've had my own disputes with Wikepedia's enforcers (and usually lost). My point is that there are two considerations:

1) Are the rules of the game fair and reasonable?

2) Are those rules enforced in a fair and reasonable way?

My comment was directed at point 2), not point 1). It's their game and their enforcers . (Please don't use the term vandakls as there are real vandals there!)

About making a publication - I agree, but if it was easy it would have been done already.

I know. Been there, done that.

HTH

Regards,

Mike

[dobrichev]

A bit offtopic, but can you guess who did this wikipedia edition?

[Mathimagics]

It seems to be someone who is rather keen on templates ...

[P.O.]

keen on templates i am certainly, but not me in case you were wondering, no backtracking in my algorithm nor bit vectors either.

[dobrichev]

OK, nice that the edition isn't yours.

The same article emblematically collected so called original research above the acceptable threshold, and was truncated similarly to Math article. Truncation was discussed in talk page. What followed is adding some nonsense for several years. Possibly with one exception. The final result is seen.