Talk:Mathematica (disambiguation)

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Should Mathematica redirect to Wolfram Mathematica?[edit]

@EmausBot, Gestrid, JonMcLoone, Lennart97, Numbermaniac, Pi314m, Reify-tech, and Senator2029: Though there are lots of sound substantive arguments for having Mathematica redirect to this dab page Mathematica (disambiguation), pragmatically, that makes no sense. Yes, the Eames exhibit is fantastic and deserves to be well-known. Yes, the companies have been influential and have more employees than Wolfram does. On the other hand, the two works called Principia Mathematica are rarely called just Mathematica.

But... there are over 500 links to Mathematica, and a quick review shows that essentially all clearly intend to link to Wolfram Mathematica. This means that changing this redirect requires not only updating all those links, but also undertaking an ongoing effort to correct the inevitable new links which will be created. So, reluctantly, I have to conclude that Mathematica should continue to redirect to Wolfram Mathematica. --Macrakis (talk) 14:50, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for starting this discussion. Pageviews show that Wolfram Mathematica dominates among those entries that are commonly referred to as simply Mathematica, and as you mention, the two Principia Mathematica works are indeed unlikely to be referred to as Mathematica. In other words, readers who search for "Mathematica" are by far most likely to be looking for Wolfram Mathematica and that justifies the redirect. The hundreds of links to Mathematica intended for Wolfram Mathematica form an additional clue that it is the primary topic for the term.

However, the fact that these links would need to be corrected if we move the disambiguation page to Mathematica is not in itself a good argument against making that change; we have pretty efficient tools for fixing and monitoring such links, so that wouldn't be a big issue. Lennart97 (talk) 15:03, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My point is that there will be ongoing creation of new links to Mathematica which will almost all be intended for Wolfram Mathematica. Even if we have tools for monitoring and fixing such things, each case requires human judgement, which just adds what we called "toil" at Google (human effort which shouldn't be necessary).

Now what would be neat would be a link-fix tool which actually used some technique (vectorization, ML, whatever) to detect implausible links.... Is there such a thing? --Macrakis (talk) 16:41, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm intimately familiar with this exact type of toil, as I'm active at WP:DPL. My point is that avoidance of toil is not a decisive factor in this type of decision; reader convenience is. Fortunately, in this case editor and reader convenience align :) Lennart97 (talk) 16:51, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]