The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: no consensus . Defaults to keep as a result. No prejudice against someone who knows anything about math merging it somewhere or moving it to main. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 17:48, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Draft:Distributional calculus (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Page is up for G13 as stale. An editor indicated it was a "promising draft" and to use MfD. Instead of immediately seeking deletion I submitted the page to AfC for evaluation (I'm not qualified to tell if it is wonderful or nonsense) but that was removed by the creator. Can we get a decision on this Draft here? Legacypac (talk) 20:25, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep: I think this is an important topic not well-covered in the mainspace (whence the draft.) Although there is distribution (mathematics), there are more things that can be said that don’t fit into that mainspace article (e.g., examples; a lot more examples can be added to the draft.) Also, I removed the template because it is for an AfC draft. –– Taku (talk) 20:31, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, no reason to duplicate Distribution (mathematics) here. Unlike the present draft, that page defines what it is talking about. —Kusma (t·c) 21:16, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  I admit the draft needs more work but for example, an example in the draft doesn’t appear in the mainspace article and we don’t want to populate the mainspace article with too many of those examples. Just as we have calculus besides limit (mathematics) and many others, the draft has a different scope than the "distribution" article; this make the draft not a fork even though there are some overlaps, which I think are allowed. — Taku (talk) 21:53, 13 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep author says they still want it. I could be convinced to change my !vote if someone pointed out a consensus somewhere regarding this class of drafts by this specific author. VQuakr (talk) 01:15, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Defer to WikiProject Mathematics - this subject is beyond my pay grade, but at a glance it appears that the distribution (mathematics) article is already quite large and seems to cover a wide range of subtopics; it could use to be split into more manageable articles on appropriate groups of these subtopics. It's well beyond my year-and-a-half of engineering school to suggest what those subgroupings ought to be, but distributional calculus seems like a start. Keep, in the meantime. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 21:35, 14 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. While Taku has asserted that there is a difference between the topic here and the distribution (mathematics) article, that difference appears to be non-existent. Where the draft defines what it is about, it says "Distributional calculus can give a rigorous meaning to the formal equations such as: " So the subject of the article is identical with the existing (far better) article distribution (mathematics). The selection of topics in the draft is also suggestive that there is no difference between this draft and the existing article. I don't think we should keep drafts around indefinitely, if the article that they are intended to replace is already light-years ahead of the draft in terms of development. That is simply likely to create more fractious content and needless merge discussions down the road. Useful content can be added to the existing article in the normal way. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:42, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  For clarification, the draft was not meant as a replacement; in my view, distribution (mathematics) is trying to do too much and having complementary articles would address that. (For example, there is the notion of a distribution in algebraic geometry as well) But having said that, I do agree the scope of the draft is probably problemic: that the difference is unclear and so the deletion may not be a bad idea. — Taku (talk) 19:17, 15 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  There seems to be not enough in this draft to distinguish it from the main topic of distribution (mathematics), and so this seems to be aimed at a needless fork of content. There could be a separate article on distributional calculus, but I don't know what that subject would be. Usually we make forks like this if the main article gets too long, and then we might decide what the topic of the fork should be. A draft with an ill-defined topic is just a recipe for a bad article/fork. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:07, 19 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Observing that again we have the same arguments regarding Mathematics drafts created by a particular user. "Effort" was put in some time back to create content that is quite dense and requiring a degree in mathematics to be able to judge if it's even worth keeping. The author of the draft has been engaged on multiple occasions to see if they could finish their work on the many drafts for which no forward progress was made. Multiple overtures to WikiProject Mathematics have been made to see if the project can evaluate or improve the drafts to the point that the draft could be promoted to mainspace. The author, having been made well aware of how to spin off sections of a large article on multiple occasions, has elected instead to not resolve these issues but defend the right to keep these drafts until "some day" when they come back to work on them. Fundamentally this needs to either be kept in the author's own userspace and worked on at their pace or deleted and regular editing in mainspace done to correct the problem. I am not voting on this MFD because it has been observed that I may not be rational with respect to the author of this draft. Hasteur (talk) 02:13, 16 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete As it stands, it's not clear from the text how this should be distinguished from distribution (mathematics). In this particular instance, I think adding to the main article and eventually splitting off if necessary is the better way to go. XOR'easter (talk) 19:40, 20 February 2018 (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 page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.