User talk:VjiaoBlack/sandbox

Jon Greenberger peer review

The information, and sources in this seem good. All the links I clicked on work. From a content balance perspective, it does seem a bot odd that the bulk of the examples space is taken up by more obscure laws, while the more notable "law of large numbers" or "central limit theorem" are just part of a list of other examples. I imagine this is because they already have good writeups on their pages, so its not really necessary to include one here, but it still might be good to highlight their significance in some way. JonGreenberger (talk) 14:27, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Grammatical changes

I'm going to go through your article and give some passages a more encylclopedic tone: speaking in the first / second person is not encyclopedic.

Look in the edit history for things I've changed, as I'm going to copy/paste the affected snippets AlecWild (talk) 05:46, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm also going to change some more informal words (like thusly) if I find them AlecWild (talk) 05:46, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Something about the clause "even forgetting follows Zipf's law.[9]" feels a little off: I think that this should be "forgetfulness" instead, but if you make this clause more explicit in its meaning then "forgetting" may end up being more gramatically correct instead. AlecWild (talk) 06:04, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Suggested Content Changes

The sentence "What distinguishes an empirical statistical law from a formal statistical theorem is the way these patterns simply appear in natural distributions, without a prior theoretical reasoning about the data" is phrased in a confusing way.

I'm not sure if you are trying to say that empirical statistical laws differ from formal theorems insofar as they were discovered without people having previously theorized their existence, or if you are saying that these laws don't necessarily need to have theoretical grounding of any kind. If you're saying both, make it explicit. AlecWild (talk) 06:02, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I'd suggest that you expound upon the clauses "metropolitan populations also follow Zipf's law,[8] and even forgetting follows Zipf's law.[9]" by describing how these things follow Zipf's law. While it's easy to infer that cities' relative populations scale inversely with their relative population rankings, I gain no appreciation of how forgetfulness follows Zipf's law from reading this article. AlecWild (talk) 06:02, 6 May 2017 (UTC)