Portal talk:Mathematics/Archive2013

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"Show new selections" + "Did you know"

Does anyone know why the "Did you know" logic uses only the current day-of-the-week and the current week-of-the-year? This means that clicking the "Show new selections" button doesn't reveal any new DYKs; to see new ones you have to wait until tomorrow. How about using {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} instead? -- John of Reading (talk) 22:01, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

It's been like that since before I started editing the portal. {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} sounds like a good idea to me ―JuPitEer (talk) 10:14, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
I rather like the scheme used at Portal:Archaeology/Did you know, which randomly picks one of the first 5, one from the second 5, and so on. So the reader sees a very different mix of facts each time. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:22, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Self-affinity

Can someone competent provide some pictures for this article?Lbertolotti (talk) 00:22, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Which article do you need a picture for? --JustBerry (talk) 04:15, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-affinity

General Questions

1. Is there an official WikiProjects Mathematics userbox for user pages?

2. How does one "maintain" the Wikipedia Mathematics Portal? --JustBerry (talk) 04:17, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if it's official but there's a userbox on my user page which I got from somewhere: feel free to copy it. As for your second question: the same as any other page is maintained. If you see a problem or think it can be improved go ahead and edit it, or one of the subpages.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 05:36, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Selected picture

Given that my suggestion to maintain a "queue" of upcoming featured pictures has not prevented "redlinks" from showing up under "Picture of the Month" on the portal page (as can be seen there as I type this), I now suggest converting that feature to a "Selected picture" format (either by week number, or by being randomly chosen). I see that the "Selected article" feature used to be chronologically based, but was converted to a random portal component back in 2007. We should probably do the same with the pictures. Provided no one objects, I'll do this myself at some point... unless someone else beats me to it. - dcljr (talk) 22:59, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I've done a few in the past but neither I nor anyone else seems able to keep on doing it. And there are several years of PotM so many will be ones that readers haven't seen before, unless they've browsed the PotM archives.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 01:16, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
Since it seems like we'll have to move or copy the existing "featured picture" subpages to different titles to be able to use the "random" approach, maybe we should first discuss whether any of the images that have been used in the past should not be used again (maybe a better version exists, or the corresponding topic has too many images for it, etc.). Here's a table summarizing the featured images up to this point (76 by my count, including one image [from May 2006] that was never added to the "official" archive). Obviously, if you want to look through the images themselves and their corresponding text, go to Portal:Mathematics/Featured picture archive instead. I put this here mainly for what can be gleaned by sorting the columns (e.g., how many times certain topics have appeared, how many times different file types have appeared). I'll add my comments/suggestions a little bit later (maybe tomorrow?). In the meantime, if any corrections or additions are necessary, feel free to edit the table... - dcljr (talk) 05:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
Note: The table is initially sorted in reverse chronological order by month pics were most recently featured; re-sort the column to get it by month they were first featured. - dcljr (talk) 23:59, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Some general comments: Too many fractal pics. Only need one Mandelbrot pic (maybe a mosaic showing a "zoom sequence", as shown in the article?). Other duplicate topics should only have one pic for each. The GIFs for Conway's Life (2009-07) and the Sieve of Eratosthenes (2009-03) don't animate when resized. - dcljr (talk) 23:59, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't say there are too many fractal pics. The reason there are so many is because editors have chosen them in the past, and those are the pictures they've found to be most attractive. In maths we are even more limited because the vast majority of maths articles, even good and featured ones, are not good sources of images. Even those that in theory could supply good pictures often lack them as they can't just be photographs or reproductions but need creating by hand with dedicated tools. We end up with the images that editors choose to make and make well, which are disproportionately fractals. More can be seen here Wikipedia:Featured_pictures/Sciences/Mathematics, one of which is today's featured picture.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 00:20, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
I agree that fractals are pretty pictures that are easy to make, but having almost 15% of the images (11 of 76) being related directly to fractals overemphasizes that small area of mathematics, IMHO. I hope you would agree that we don't need five different images just for the Mandelbrot set...? - dcljr (talk) 04:02, 13 September 2012 (UTC) [Actually, one could say there are up to 14 fractal related images, if you want to be more "liberal" in your counting. - dcljr (talk) 20:31, 13 September 2012 (UTC)]
BTW, in case there's any misunderstanding, I'm not saying above that we should have 1 Mandelbrot pic as the only fractal pic... - dcljr (talk) 22:57, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
Oh, and another general comment: we need to go through the "credits" and make sure each one credits the actual creator of the image and/or the uploader (when relevant — see 2012-04, for example), not the user who chose the image. Also, some of the images might have had new versions uploaded over the originals, and a different user might need to be credited because of this. (I don't know if any of the credits are actually wrong, but it's a good idea to check.) - dcljr (talk) 19:11, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
Ugh. Getting the credits "right" is turning out to be harder than I initially thought. I figured it would be easy to tell whom should get the credit for any given image, although it's not necessarily the last uploader. If someone makes a minor change to an image, it should still be credited to the original creator. But if someone makes a "significant" change to an image, then it seems like it should be credited to the latter user. But at what point does a modification become "significant" enough to warrant changing the credit? It's annoying.... - dcljr (talk) 22:50, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
I've made it show a random previous month's picture instead of a red link if there is no picture yet for a month ―JuPitEer (talk) 15:58, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
OK, after a year of inactivity, I'm going to start creating the infrastructure for a random "Selected picture" component based on the standard {{Random portal component}} template (not sure why we needed a "custom version" -- maybe I'll find out as I'm doing this). As with the switch from "Featured article" to "Selected article", I'm leaving the current "Featured picture" infrastructure the way it is. Not sure how long this will take before it's ready to go live... - dcljr (talk) 20:17, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

In other Wikimedia projects

I've been bold and added another component to this portal page, "In other Wikimedia projects". I hope no one's deeply offended by this. I've also simplified the formatting a bit. Not sure why "Topics in mathematics" was floated right when it takes the full page width, anyway. The 'div' element wasn't closed, so I removed it. If this broke anything for anyone, just restore the 'div' tag. - dcljr (talk) 23:07, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

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