Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Radix economy (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. RL0919 (talk) 21:46, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Radix economy (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)

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The equation used within the article, which also happens to be the same equation the rest of the article and the tables within it are based around, incorrectly multiplies by b instead of log(b). This leads to the assumption that the leading digit can be 0, which is not typical for human use as the leading digit normally contains less information than the other digits, and results in the conclusion that base e (or in a simplified view, base 3, ternary) has the lowest radix economy. If this issue is corrected, the function decreases instead of having a minimum at e, and the lowest radix economy for human use instead goes to base 2, binary.

Fixing this correction would require a fundamental rewrite to the article. Additionally, the article relies heavily on a single source, with 4 of the 6 citations being from the same book, and it's likely that the sources used in the article repeat the aforementioned error.

Zenphia1 (talk) 20:35, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Mathematics and Computing. Spiderone^{(Talk to Spider)} 20:51, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment The deletion rationale in the nomination sounds like OR — saying that the definition in the article is incorrect and so the article ought to be junked. But if the sources define the concept that way, that's the way it's defined, regardless of whether it's right or wrong for a particular application. And the question of what is "typical for human use" is beside the point if, as appears to be the case, the concept originated in electronic computers, where the leading digit has to be stored even if it is 0. That said, the term radix economy may itself be a mild case of OR. The book from 1950 uses phrases like "The economy to be gained by choice of radix", but not radix economy specifically (AFAICT). The sources that come up in Google Scholar are more recent than the creation of this article; they seem to start around 2012, when the article had been around for six years already and looked like this. XOR'easter (talk) 21:57, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy keep WP:SK3, invalid nomination. The nomination statement makes no effort to address the notability of the topic. Nothing in our article is incorrect; as the article itself says, it is "one of various proposals that have been made to quantify the relative costs of using different radices". The nomination appears to amount to the nominator preferring a different formula. That different formula should go on a different article (and it does, Entropy (information theory)). The preference for which formula to use is irrelevant to whether any particular formula is notable. This one is, with in-depth sourcing in the American Scientist article (which by the way includes some justification for why this formula might be a good choice in some circumstances). The ternary tree source is not so much about this specific formula but also provides a valid justification for this formula (via the fact that for certain tree operations, multiplication by the base and not its logarithm is the correct complexity analysis). More in-depth sourcing (enough to pass GNG together with the American Scientist source) can be found e.g. at Kak, Subhash C. (2021), "The base-e representation of numbers and the power law", Circuits Syst. Signal Process., 40 (1): 490–500, doi:10.1007/S00034-020-01480-0. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:02, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy keep No valid reason to delete, nomination is almost entirely WP:IDONTLIKEIT. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:21, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
• Speedy keep No valid deletion rationale has been advanced, so WP:SK3 applies. The article might have to be renamed and cleaned up if the specific term isn't attested prior to the article creation, but that's a different discussion. XOR'easter (talk) 22:55, 16 June 2024 (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.