Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations

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. Sandstein 12:16, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations

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The underlying theory, introduced in [1][2] is legitimate research that failed to capture the interest of the scientific community. I don't want to argue about notability, though, because the main problem is that the article as it currently exists is nonsensical drivel, almost qualifying for WP:G1. It has languished under maintenance tags for more than 10 years and nobody competent appeared to fix it. Even if it were notable, the only way forward would be WP:TNT. Tercer (talk) 23:50, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The page seems to have maybe five sentences at best of real content and a bunch of publications and non-peer-reviewed stuff. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:29, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This definitely does not qualify for WP:G1 now. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 16:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Delete" - agree, this article is a mess, that is most likely unrecoverable. --Bduke (talk) 05:26, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, per nomination. There is nothing recoverable here. These are deep and vast equations and WP has maybe 500 maybe 1000 existing articles exploring all their various aspects and how they inter-relate and flow into one another. This article as written is garbled and appears to make interpretive errors. (and yes, the arxiv papers do look interesting, but this article does not describe those papers.) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:09, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. The article can be recovered and restarted. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 09:27, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@AnotherEditor144: That is true regardless of whether the current content is kept or deleted. --JBL (talk) 15:34, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@JayBeeEll: There is still useful content. Throw away all of the bad stuff, and the good stuff remains. Sure, it will be a stub, but that is okay. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 15:40, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@AnotherEditor144: The article is more likely to survive this AfD if you do that (remove the bad stuff) so that it is easier to tell that what remains is in fact legitimate (i.e., supported by multiple independent reliable sources). --JBL (talk) 15:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@JayBeeEll:

Doing... AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 15:49, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@JayBeeEll: This will probably be

On hold for me. Can you consider working on it? I [3] an uncited paragraph, among other things AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 15:58, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If this AfD fails, then rewrite the article. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 16:34, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Here's a couple of books on the subject: The Many Faces of Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein Equations;Orbiting The Moons Of Pluto: Complex Solutions To The Einstein, Maxwell, Schrodinger And Dirac Equations. No doubt this could be done better but this is Wikipedia and you get what you pay for. Our policy WP:IMPERFECT explicitly welcomes such half-baked work. Even the professional physicists are still working on a theory of everything as that's currently incomplete and imperfect too. So it goes. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:15, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrew Davidson: Those books have some of the same words in their title as this article; all of those words are the names of famous physicists, plus the word "equation". Do you have any reason beyond that to believe that they are on the same topic as the article in question? (Please note that an affirmative answer here would have to relate in some way to what is actually written in the article, not just to its title.) --JBL (talk) 15:33, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrew Davidson and JayBeeEll: I agree with Andrew. This subject is a work in progress, but it is still useful. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 15:43, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@AnotherEditor144: I asked Andrew a question. Your comment is not an answer to my question. Do you have an answer to my question? --JBL (talk) 15:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@JayBeeEll: No, but the other thread you commented on "@AnotherEditor144: The article is more likely to survive this AfD if you do that (remove the bad stuff) so that it is easier to tell that what remains is in fact legitimate (i.e., supported by multiple independent reliable sources). --JBL (talk) 15:46, 14 February 2021 (UTC)" is good. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 15:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@JayBeeEll: I've checked the books, and neither is actually about the subject. @Andrew Davidson: come on, what the hell are you doing?! Tercer (talk) 09:49, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 14:12, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Coolabahapple (talk) 14:12, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep WP:G1 explicitly does not cover poor writing. You can start an article from scratch without deleting it - see WP:TNTTNT. SailingInABathTub (talk) 15:49, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 16:29, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with the article is not poor writing, but rather that the content is incoherent rambling (and I'm not claiming it falls under WP:G1 anyway). There's nothing worth salvaging. Also note that the article has been like this for 10 years, and nobody showed up to fix it. I don't think it is ever going to happen. Tercer (talk) 17:21, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Tercer: Maybe this AfD will give people a reason to improve it. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 08:21, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You have been replying to every single comment in this AfD, so you must deeply care about the subject. Fix the article yourself then if you want to save it, "maybe somebody will do it" is not good enough. Tercer (talk) 09:45, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Opinion is increasingly turning against a deletion. This is not a consensus yet (only 75% of !votes are Keep), but it might be soon. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 16:31, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Additionally, I think the WP:TNT reasoning has backfired. See WP:TNTTNT. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 16:33, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Might not quite be G1, but the page is definitely deep into TNT territorry. Nothing worth saving here. Nsk92 (talk) 16:41, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there is! I am Doing..., and remember WP:TNTTNT. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 08:18, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect to classical field theory (or one of various other valid targets) in absence of salvageable content. Of course it's a thing [4] (leaving aside the usual half-assed Davidson Google Books Oracle); but as noted, this is a complex topic that is being done a disservice by this hodge-podge skim treatment of some buzzwords off the top. I really don't know much about this area, but what I understand tells me that any reader who finds this article will be going away in greater confusion than they arrived. We do not keep crappy material around indefinitely; such topics are better off as redirects until an editor writes something actually useful. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 04:27, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Elmidae and Nsk92: Then someone will clean it up. Remember this every time you do something like this. AnotherEditor144^{talk contribs} 08:20, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect you will find out in short order that relentless badgering of every single comment is not a way to get taken seriously in any discussion on WP. Neither is trying to play essays off against each other. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I went through your Google Scholar results, and there are plenty of false positives and trivial mentions. It would be helpful if you could find a single WP:SECONDARY source in order to establish notability. Tercer (talk) 10:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Tercer: Sure, plenty of partial matches, but to my understanding we are served here by anything that deals with "Einstein-Maxwell-Dirac theory" (and the related equations); and that one we will find covered in most specialized textbooks, e.g Symmetries in Fundamental Physics, and many of these Scholar hits. It's certainly a thing that people might search for. - In any case, I'd rather the search came up blank than with this article, so deletion would be my second choice. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 15:39, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. It doesn't seem to deal with Finster et al.'s work specifically, but the book does mention related approaches to quantum gravity such as Einstein-Yang-Mills theory and Einstein-Dirac-Yang-Mills-Higgs theory, which would probably be a better basis for an article anyway. Tercer (talk) 16:30, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, the article doesn't even say what these equations are. There are a few papers by Finster/Smoller/Yau on these equations, but the article makes no coherent argument why these equations are generally notable. If this is kept, everything but maybe the first sentence should be removed. —Kusma (t·c) 12:00, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There doesn't seem to be any doubt about which equations are meant but, in any case, article indicates by links that the equations in question are:

Andrew🐉(talk) 17:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am assuming that the article "Einstein-Maxwell-Dirac equations" should deal with the Einstein-Maxwell-Dirac equations, which are distinct from the Einstein equations, the Maxwell equations, the Dirac equation or the Einstein-Maxwell equations. If you look into some of Finster et al.'s papers, you can find out what the EMD equations are, but the present Wikipedia article gives no hint whatsoever (other than the educated guess "a suitable combination of other equations", but how these should be combined is exactly the question here). —Kusma (t·c) 20:28, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly. --JBL (talk) 20:44, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, this is a good illustration of how the bag-of-words approach to judging notability fails for technical topics. XOR'easter (talk) 15:54, 20 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete basically in recognition of the fact that it's been broken for a decade. The commonality of the names in the physics literature will naturally lead to a heap of false positives in Google Books and Scholar results. (What's more illuminating is looking to see how much attention the original publications have gotten; for example 46 citations in 22 years, including self-citations and non-peer-reviewed material, is very low for the subject area. This aligns with the nominator's statement that the topic is legitimate research that failed to capture the interest of the scientific community.) This is the kind of topic that would better be written about in an article on the problem it is attempting to solve or the general question its inventors were trying to illuminate. However, the current text is so poor, rambling about various supposed features of the theory rather than defining it and resorting to PowerPoint-style bullets halfway through, that there would be nothing to merge. XOR'easter (talk) 20:31, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: Umm, no, this is in TNT territory. May be notable but will need a comprehensive rewrite. Java Hurricane 01:54, 16 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete I agree there is nothing to salvage here, and it really doesn't help that this has been the case for a whole decade. Lennart97 (talk) 15:50, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, blow it up and start again. D🐶ggy54321 ^{(let's chat!)} 16:49, 17 February 2021 (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.