User talk:Mathwriter2718

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Hello! I am somewhat baffled that it looks as though I am the first real person to write to your talk page, but...

You have been assigning "importance" levels to articles, and I spot that, for example, 20 is rated "High", 21-23 are rated "Medium" and 24 is rated "Low". I just wonder what on earth this means, that 20 is two grades above 24? Have you looked closely at these articles? Over recent months User:Radlrb has been adding huge amounts of material, possibly doubling the total volume. Most of if seems to be statements of mathematical truth rather than falsehoods or nonsense, but much of it an incoherent wall of text with no obvious direct relation to the topic in hand. I really do not think the articles are very good at all; you have been working on the Arnold conjecture - an article way beyond me, as I think it would take at least a week for me to work out what a symplectic manifold is. That is fine, because the readership of such an article is going to be high level. But the number articles surely should be aimed at the general readership; they should be largely understandable without any high (medium? low?) mathematical knowledge, although the could and I think should lead to selected high-level results by making some simplified explanation with a link to the article. I'm thinking of examples like 5: quintics are not soluble by radicals. I suppose my concern is that attaching "importance" levels is out of step with articles which I think are utterly inappropriate in conception. Interested in your thoughts... Imaginatorium (talk) 14:12, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings! Yes, you are the first human on my talk page. Welcome! Let me explain what these ratings mean.

These ratings are not ratings of the level of mathematical knowledge needed to understand the articles. They are also not ratings of whether the articles are amazing or whether they suck. They are not even ratings of about how important to society the subject is!!

These ratings are about how important the article is to WikiProject Mathematics, a project that aims to improve mathematics pages on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics). They reflect how important the subject of the article is to the field of mathematics, regardless of the level of mathematical knowledge the article is written at or how well or badly the article is written.

I'll also note that the ratings are extremely disputable and open to being changed. See the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#Number_pages. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 14:28, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See [[1]] for more info about these ratings. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 14:36, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]