Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Introduction to M-theory (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 keep‎ without prejudice against renomination if the guideline should change. My personal view is that having two articles on the same subject is a rabbit hole we should not go down; but there's no arguing with the fact that the TECHNICAL guideline as present allows for it, and those arguing to keep maintain that this article fulfils the purpose described in that guideline. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:49, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Introduction to M-theory[edit]

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Seems like some early days of Wikipedia artifact, well intended perhaps but from today's perspective - bad idea. They (they, because It seems we have an entire set of "Introduction to..." articles, although they are not even categorized) fail WP:GNG, they are effective dupes (WP:CONTENTFORK) of proper articles (here, M-theory), are inherently problematic (who decides what belongs to the "Introduction"?) and sound like something that could belong to Simple English Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wikiversity but not here. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:15, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:15, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - seems like a WP:REDUNDANTFORK which may have been normal in the past but seems hard to justify in 2023. JMWt (talk) 13:23, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep An article that is less technical is not redundant. Two articles on the same subject at the same level of technicality would be, but that's not the situation here. Any questions about what should go in which page can be resolved by ordinary editing; deletion is not necessary. An "introduction to..." article belongs on the encyclopedia project if it is written encyclopedically, rather than in the style of a textbook. Again, any excessively textbookish parts can be resolved through ordinary editing without removing the whole page. The guideline on making technical articles understandable advises us to create these pages when the circumstances are appropriate. Should we deprecate that guideline now? XOR'easter (talk) 18:18, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Good question. I think we should, because right now we have a policy contradiction with the one I and @JMWt linked, and common sense as well. We don't want forks. See also what @OwenX wrote below. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:32, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
There's no contradiction with WP:CONTENTFORK, because "Introduction to..." articles are not POV forks. They're spinoffs. (Even if a particular "Introduction to..." wasn't created by copying text out of another page, the upshot is the same.) The statement below that WP:TECHNICAL is not about creating a fork for readers of different technical levels is literally untrue as a matter of fact. It explicitly suggests doing so when topics are unavoidably technical but, at the same time, of significant interest to non-technical readers. It provides advice on when to try and when not to try doing this, but it definitely puts the possibility on the table as legitimate in principle. As to whether "common sense" weighs against "Introduction to..." articles, well, all I can say is that they seem pretty common-sensical to me. XOR'easter (talk) 16:43, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It is unfortunately true that the 'introduction to' articles get 1–2 orders of magnitude less traffic than the main articles about the same topics. If the 'introduction to' articles are going to stick around indefinitely, I wonder if there's a more visible way we can cross-link between them so that readers are more likely to notice both variants. –jacobolus (t) 21:32, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Creating introductory articles for highly technical subjects like M-theory is part of our guideline Wikipedia:Make_technical_articles_understandable. We have featured articles like Introduction to general relativity and former featured articles like Introduction to evolution in the "Introductions" space. So deletion on vague general grounds like "we don't do this in 2023" would actually need an RFC on the whole class of such articles; AfD is not the venue for adjudicating such broad policy issues. Assuming the continued existence of this class of articles, I don't see any particular issues with this article that warrant deletion; the references show multiple reliable sources suitable for a summary discussion at the non-specialist level. The article could use better citing and improved prose, but these are matters of ordinary editing. Hence, keep. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 18:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete while I find "Introduction to " articles good for the community I find this one lacking and more of a WP:REDUNDANTFORK. Introduction articles should be based on textbook or other educational content that also tries to teach this topic, but this article sources are just popular news articles. This problem could be improved with time, but my experience on how students/laypeople tend to get overexcited of this topic without first covering the math or physics required makes me think that the title hurts more than help. --ReyHahn (talk) 19:21, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep Not a dupe given the level difference; editors decide what belongs in an "introduction", like they decide all content questions; not a topic suitable for the other venues. Johnjbarton (talk) 19:59, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - meets policies and guidelines. Introductory articles are allowed even encouraged for complex topics that require advanced technical training.

I can understand Introduction to M-theory but not M-theory. For some perspective, I have a B.S. in a technical field plus postgraduate coursework. I enjoy reading non-mathematical physics books for laymen. I know my hadrons and leptons. Special relativity is not a problem but I don't do tensors so general relativity is murky.

Does this mean:

People like me should not read stuff about M-theory?
Our Introduction to M-theory article is defective because intelligent non-physicists can understand it?
Our M-theory article is defective because it is too comprehensive?
Wikipedia is doing a good job presenting complex technical information at different levels.

I'd argue #4.

I'll also note that the Simple English Wikipedia is not written for stupid people but rather for non-English speakers. Furthermore, sending this article off to Simple English Wikipedia Wikibooks, or Wikiversity means few people will read it since few people know about those 3 projects.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 21:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sidenote: nobody reads Simple English Wikipedia... it's about as useless as those "Introduction to..." articles. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:28, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW - Simple English turns out to already have an article -- M-theory.

--A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 03:59, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And this article could be a cross wiki redirect there. Problem solved. It may even result in a few more views for Simple, which would not be a bad thing (it is a nice idea that is just effectively invisible). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:33, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Explaining a topic in "simple English" is not the same as explaining a topic at an introductory level of scientific understanding. XOR'easter (talk) 16:26, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The simple english article simple:M-theory is written in a weird mishsmash and I can't figure out who the intended audience is or what the intended goals are. Parts of it read like condescending to a young child, but other parts are filled with jargon. My takeaways from the article are:

the standard model involves 20 unexplained numbers but string theory has only 1
string theory has 6 "basic directions" curled up in a spiral but this is just a mathematical trick that has nothing to do with the world
M-theory is "vague" and "not pinned down"
"by taking a Type IIA string theory that has a size R and changing the radius to 1/R the result will end up being what is equivalent to a Type IIB theory of size R" (whatever that is supposed to mean is not at all explained)
"M" might stand for any of Matrix, Magic, Muffin, Mystery, Mother or Membrane.

I don't think it's an appropriate place to send readers of either of the articles under discussion here. –jacobolus (t) 06:23, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Adding to the above, there is a reasonable basis for the aforementioned editing guideline: the first pillar notes Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias. This topic is one where an article in a specialized encyclopedia is going to differ substantially from one in a general encyclopedia, and the "introduction to" approach seems like a reasonable implementation. —siro χ o 05:40, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
For the sake of thought and discussion, I'm going to rebut the !keep votes. This isn't just about your !vote, just that it was a convenient place to reply..

The format you describe isn't one used in the vast majority of en.wiki, even where complex ideas are described. Usually we aim for the main page on a topic to introduce it and then we use various daughter pages to explain further if the sections get too complicated.

In this case I accept that the format is old and merging with M-theory is going to be a difficult task, however I don't think the argument that "this topic is one where an article in a specialized encyclopedia is going to differ substantially from one in a general encyclopedia" holds much water.

To assess notability we normally need substantial independent reliable sources. There are of course going to be books which cover aspects of this topic and which could be used, but we don't normally take the existence of a textbook called "introduction to.." to be a RS of notability for a page called "introduction to.." JMWt (talk) 08:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In reply to this: Usually we aim for the main page on a topic to introduce it and then we use various daughter pages to explain further if the sections get too complicated. OK, but that ends up being the same thing as what's happening here, apart from possibly a choice of article title. M-theory has a lengthy "Background" section. So, by the practice you describe, we could have a {{main}} tag at the top of it and link to a more complete backgrounder on M-theory, titled Background to M-theory or Motivations for M-theory or something like that. The contents of such a page would be pretty much what would go in an Introduction to M-theory. In short, what you describe is not actually inconsistent with what we've got.
The notability of M-theory is established by the wealth of technical literature on the subject. Introducing the subject is just part of writing about it; we don't need references with the exact title "Introduction to M-theory" to warrant an article called that. XOR'easter (talk) 16:34, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand your last sentence. We don't need this page at all as you've admitted. So if we are not going to use the notability criteria to determine keep/delete, what are we going to use? JMWt (talk) 17:34, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have not "admitted" that we don't need this page. I am saying that it is an aspect of a notable topic, and an "Introduction to..." (or "Background to...", "Motivation for...", etc.) article is morally no different from spinning out a long "History" section into a "History of..." article. XOR'easter (talk) 20:58, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Arguing about "notability" seems completely off topic to me; the topic is self evidently notable, and judging by the number of pop science books mentioning/discussing it, is of nontrivial interest to both physicists and a more general lay audience. The issue here is one of organization: specifically, what inter- and intra-article organization of explanations and technical details is the best compromise for helping the full range of plausible wikipedia audiences to learn what they are trying to learn / answer the questions they want to answer. Any arguments pushing for the merger/elimination of this article should be describing concretely how an article M-theory can be rewritten to be made accessible to a much wider audience without ballooning in size or becoming harder to read for a more specialized audience.

The most convincing case would be made by someone actually doing that work in a sandbox someplace, e.g. in user space, and then explaining why they think their unified version is better for most audiences than the current split version. Even if it were decided to keep 2 versions, that effort could probably help make both articles more accessible and/or complete, so wouldn't be a waste, but it would take significant work reading sources, synthesizing material, figuring out explanations, drawing diagrams, etc., i.e. the real work of writing an encyclopedia. I personally think this proposal is too hand-wavy and flimsy to consider seriously until that work has been attempted, or at least put into some kind of concrete form with someone volunteering to dedicate time for it. The original rationale presented here: "well intended perhaps but from today's perspective - bad idea", "effective dupes of proper articles", "inherently problematic", "sound like something that could belong to Simple English Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wikiversity but not here" amounts to more or less a string of cheap insults and WP:IDONTLIKEITs, without even a cursory attempt made to engage with the subject or any details. –jacobolus (t) 19:28, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The articles are not redundant, they have very different audiences. --hroest 20:26, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. WP:TECHNICAL is all about making the article have a wider audience, not about creating a fork for readers of different technical levels. If M-theory is too technical for many readers, let's improve it. Owen× ☎ 00:01, 8 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. I have started Wikipedia_talk:Make_technical_articles_understandable#Should_the_section_on_"Introduction_to"_articles_be_deprecated_(removed)?, where another editor now mentioned this ongoing AfD, so I am linking the discussion back as well. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:32, 9 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The material in this article seems useful to a broad audience, and is not redundant with the material in M-theory. However, reading both I still feel there's quite a lot of missing background and several other aspects of the M-theory article which are not accessible to a lay audience, and which are not covered here. This article could possibly be extended with further material. For example, the concept of "duality" is not mentioned in the "introduction" article, and neither article linked to string duality, which is a more accessible overview than either S-duality or T-duality. –jacobolus (t) 19:17, 9 November 2023 (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.