Talk:Taylor's law

Predatory journals

Agree with Virion. Good journals can have bad papers; bad journals can have good papers. It is important for editors to understand the material that they are editing and to have read the papers that they may be inclined to criticize. Thank you, Virion. My apologies for not knowing how to enter material correctly into talk pages. AppliedMathematics (talk) 10:09, 27 February 2018 (UTC)User AppliedMathematics

I may be able to assist you with the talk page. It is usual to add your entry to the end of the discussion. Colons (:) are used to format indents. They are cumulative. If there are too many it is easier to start a new paragraph. Usually an additional colon is added to the start to cause the indents to follow on. The indent applied to the paragraph and have to be used before every new paragraph.

If there is anything else I can help you with please let me know. Virion123 (talk) 14:24, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

This issue seems to be causing some friction. I and AppliedMathematics have reviewed these articles. They appear to be mathematically sound. Mathematics is not a matter of opinion: it is either correct or incorrect. Justifying the deletion of mathematically correct material because of where it was published seems not to be the correct thing to do here.

Concerning the definition of predatory journals; This appears to originate from beales list. Beale himself has since removed this list and had admitted there were errors on his list. I have raised this point before as I am concerned that it could lead to WP being sued for defamation.

Perhaps it is time to widen this discussion?

Virion123 (talk) 09:56, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps you should review WP:RS or at least look over WP:RSVETTING. As I mentioned in my revert, your review (or any other editor's review) of the article is of no consequence. That is not how things are done on Wikipedia. We require reliable secondary sources and this is particularly important when the publisher of a primary source is suspect.

As to Beale's list. Jeff was forced to take it down by the university lawyers who were concerned about the legal ramifications to the university. As with any such endeavor there are bound to be mistakes made and Jeff frankly admitted this. However that is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, mistakes can be corrected (or at least could have been had the list been allowed to remain). As to WP being sued for defamation, you have got to be kidding! I have long ago stopped being frightened by the bogeymen hiding under the bed. --Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 19:03, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the above. I have read the WP:RS. Its very ambigious and subject to debate. While the recomendation is to use secondary sources there is no absolute bar on using primary ones. Newspapers are quoted as being reliable sources but these are primary sources of data. The WP:RS also comments on factual reporting. A mathematical theorem is a statement of fact. It is proved beyond reasonable doubt. Banning facts because one does not "like" the place they were reported in seems to me anyway a bit odd.

Concerning mistakes. Beale admitted to having made mistakes. The university asked him to remove it. If he really wanted to republish this list he could have done so as a private individual having corrected the mistakes. As far as I know he has not done so. I presume - possibly incorrectly - that he feels that the legal arguments put forward by the universities lawyers may have some merit.

As to WP being sued I am not sure that this is a bogeyman argument. The defense of free speech does not apply to commercial speech. Referring to a publication which states a fact as 'unreliable' seems a bit rum to me. Perhaps this should be discussed at the ANI? Virion123 (talk) 13:58, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Firstly, let me correct a statement I made above. I claimed that the university lawyers forced Jeff Beall to remove his list. This is my view of the situation. The university claims it did not do so. Jeff has remained silent on the issue. This is my university and I don't for a minute believe the official story. It is also claimed that the list will resurface in the near future, with or without Jeff's involvement, on a platform that is more resistant to outside pressures than a state university. My second point concerns the rather naive view of how mathematical facts are obtained as expressed above. I too would like to believe that a published mathematical proof, for all to read, should suffice to establish a fact, but there are just too many counterexamples to justify that sentiment. Subtle flaws in an argument can go undetected for years (look at Kempe's "proof" of the four color theorem as a quick example), so even the best vetting by the mathematical community is not foolproof. The problem with predatory journals is that even the minimal amount of vetting required for publication is not done and this has nothing to do with correctness of the article. In these situations who does the vetting? Are you claiming that anonymous editors of WP should have that responsibility? WP policy on this is quite clear, the answer is no. We must let the mathematical community do the vetting and then we can report on it. WP's statements on reliable sources must cover a wide gamut of possibilities, but when you are talking about technical topics, some of that has to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, newspaper articles may be fine sources for information on current events, but they are abysmal sources for mathematical information–although they may be a good source for public reaction to a mathematical discovery. As editors we do make judgments about the sources of information that we use and not about the information itself, that is left to the sources.--Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 19:52, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you again for the above. I am not a member of the universty in question nor am I a student there. I have no personal knowledge of these matters and do not purport to opine on them. You have stated that the university lawyers forced Dr Beale to remove his list. I presume that you have evidence to back that statement up.

You have also stated that this list will appear again in some new forum. Have you any information where this might be and who will be responsible for its content?

I am aware there are problems with proofs. Kempe published his erronous proof in 1879. The flaw remained undiscovered for 11 years. The proof was published in respected mathematic journal (the American Journal of Mathematics). It was a difficult proof and the flaw was not easy to find. A more recent case might be the Navier–Stokes equations where several solutions have been proposed only to be found to be flawed.

This is where it gets difficult. Kempe's proof would by your logic be accepted. But it was subsequently shown to be wrong.

While I agree with your opinion on the reliability of newspapers and mathematics, I am not so sure about their use for public opinion. The term Yellow journalism springs to mind. This is a compex problem which is why I raised the question. Virion123 (talk) 17:41, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I had thought that I made it clear that I was expressing my opinion on the university's involvement in the removal of Beall's list. This is based on my, over 30 years, experience interacting with those university officials and knowing how they operate. Some of Beall's concerns can be found in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece. As to the list, while several copies of Beall's list can be found on the web, Cabell's International, for whom Jeff had been a consultant, has published a blacklist of predatory journals of its own.

I brought up Kempe's "proof" only to point out that even under the best of circumstances, the vetting process is not perfect. Are you claiming that since the process is not perfect we should not even attempt to do our best at it? That would be a very awkward position to hold. And finally, responding to AppliedMathematics, of course there are bad articles in good journals and good articles in bad journals, anyone with any sensitivity to the topic realizes that. The issue is what do we do about it? How do we filter out only the good articles? The nature of the Wikipedia enterprise makes it impossible to rely on the abilities of its editors to do this (you may not like that fact, but it is a reality). I am an expert in some areas of mathematics and in other venues what I say about those topics is taken as gospel, but here in Wikipedia I do not certify the validity of statements made in those topics. Instead, I use my expertise to locate good sources to validate those statements. This is not what the mathematician in me would like to do, but I resist giving in to those urges in my acceptance of the nature of Wikipedia.--Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 20:09, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. I have published articles in non open and open formats. My spam box is full of invitations to submit articles to op line journals I have never heard of. I have reviewed for both on line and non on line journals. I am more than aware that there are a lot of problems with peer review. Perhaps the most problematic was when a CEO of a major company went public with the results of a study they had done. They tried to replicate the findings of a number of papers. They were unable to duplicate the results in ~40% of the papers. The essence of natural science is the possibility of getting the same result if you do the same experiment. There are of course known weird cases such as the one where tow post grads in chemistry got very different results from the same reaction. That one turned out to to be due to due to a previous unknown catalyst in the glassware of one student. Another more serious problem is where results are simply made up. The European Cardiology Society guidelines on the treatment of one condition were in part based on one set of results. The principal investigator was subsequently shown to have made this material up and was jailed for research grant fraud. The guidelines were not changed for some time after this. Perhaps this was because no one outside of the Netherlands noticed the arrest. Scientific fraud is treated differently depending on your grade at least in the UK. Some doctors in the UK have been disciplined for scientific fraud. The junior authors were suspended while the senior authors were merely cautioned. Blind justice?

At least in mathematics deliberate fraud is unusual. But even there the proof of Kepler's packing problem ([[1]]) isnt quite confirmed. This is not an easy problem. Virion123 (talk) 11:36, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Correction. A proof of Kepler's packing problem was published last year (2017) Virion123 (talk) 14:19, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

I agree. The scientific community has not faced up to this problem and it must do so. However, we have now gotten fairly off-topic for this talk page an if you would like to continue this discussion we can do so on my talk page.--Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 20:49, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

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