Talk:Director string

Is this article notable?

Hi, I'm unsure about the notability of this article. Google scholar says the Fernandez-Mackie-Sinot article has 13 citations (7 non-self citations), and the Sinot article has 3 citations (2 non-self). I'm not sure this makes this a notable concept... Is there other justification? (I don't intend any disrespect to user:linas, who took some time to make this article.) Sam (talk) 15:53, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Sam, next time, let me know on my talk page. Director strings are of interest as a means of program normalization for some AI work that I'm involved in, see the opencog project, and particularly the Transformation of Complex Programs page. The goal of creating this page was to provide a simple gloss on the general concept, to provide a simple intro for younger students.

As to notability, beta-reduction is a central step of lambda calculus, and any sort of practical work with lambda calculus, or any sort of program complexity work with lambda calculs, has to deal with beta reduction. So I would think that alone makes in "notable enough". linas (talk) 03:32, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

p.s. Google scholar counts are insanely wrong. If I search for my own name, I see that a number of papers that I've published, some in pre-eminently mainstream journals, which I know have been widely cited, have not yet even been found by google scholar. By contrast, it gives undue and very heavy weight to some random drivel I once put on a web-page, which was apparently cited on someone else's random self-published web-page. Woop-de-doo. Based on this, I would say google scholar is a wholy untrustworthy way to do actual research on citation counts. linas (talk) 03:40, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi Linas, thank you for your messages. I agree that you have made a nice summary of this work. I also agree that the subject is interesting and potentially important. But if I don't think this makes the topic notable for wikipedia. My concern is that, on my own, I can't find "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" (WP:GNG). There is a "requirement for verifiable objective evidence to support a claim of notability" (WP:NOBJ), and so I think there should be a sentence in the opening paragraph explaining why "director strings" are notable, and where there has been "coverage in reliable sources". Something like: "There have recently been some applications in program normalization or artificial intelligence"... but perhaps you are better placed to write this... Sam (talk) 09:14, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

The purpose of these notability guidelines is to keep out crank material and pseudoscience. However, I quite dislike the policy of using these against ordinary, mainstream mathematics. If these notability guidelines were strictly enforced in the sciences, we'd end up gutting the majority of all science and math articles in Wikipedia; of the hundreds of articles I've worked on (at User:Linas/Articles), this would hardly be the least notable. The fact that lambda calculus has been deemed more-or-less irrelevant, and has been dis-owned by the comp-sci research community, does not really mean that we should then go ahead and gut all lambda calculus-related articles in WP. linas (talk) 16:03, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi. I finally got round to bringing this up at WP:NOTABILITY. Perhaps the general policy should be changed. PS: The lambda calculus is not irrelevant or disowned, at least among the people I work with. It is not hard to make the argument that the lambda calculus is notable; there have been books published on the subject. Sam (talk) 21:20, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, there have. I've gotten about half-way into Barendregt's weighty tome. But if you compare the number of Java programmers to the number of lisp programmers, you can see very clearly what's popular, and what's not. linas (talk) 03:15, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, I am leary of the general Wikipedia community, I've been here too long and engaged in too many senseless debates; the appropriate forum for the notability of science articles is on science wikiproject discussion pages; in this case, the suitable forum is probably Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics. linas (talk) 03:46, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

As the article has two peer-reviewed sources at the bottom, it meets our notability requirements. The more useful question, in my mind, is whether this should be a section in Beta reduction rather than a stand-alone article. Beta reduction is currently a redirect but could become a short article itself. This is more of an organizational issue than a notability issue, of course. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:34, 26 September 2008 (UTC)