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 redirect to Plimpton 322. There is clear consensus that a stand-alone article is not justified, but disagreement exists about the merits of a merge. I am therefore redirecting this to Plimpton 322: Article content is still available from the history and further discussion about merging some material can be done on that article's talk page. Randykitty (talk) 17:21, 15 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Si.427 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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Old Babylonian artifact whose only claim to notability stems from a press release about an academic publication by Daniel Mansfield and the ensuing media coverage. Unfortunately, the press coverage was sensationalistic, full of errors, and and almost devoid of comment from domain experts, leaving little in the way of reliable sources from which to craft an article. Apart from two critical tweets and one quote from a Dutch article, there has been no engagement by the scholarly community with the work. This leaves the original academic paper, but to discern what the paper is claiming and to disentangle that from the erroneous claims attributed to it by the press would require considerable original research, rendering it unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. (The modest attempts made in this direction by a number of editors over the past few months have not converged.) Mansfield's claim that the artifact represents the oldest example of applied geometry, which would confer notability, is not taken seriously by any established experts. Will Orrick (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Will Orrick (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Archaeology-related deletion discussions. Will Orrick (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. Will Orrick (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Iraq-related deletion discussions. Will Orrick (talk) 15:04, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge to Plimpton 322 per the no consensus discussion here. Mansfield's paper discussing Si.427 is entitled "Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles" so Plimpton 322 is where this material logically belongs.Selfstudier (talk) 15:26, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete, no merge. I agree with the nominator about the lack of multiple in-depth reliable independent works about this topic. Even if we consider Mansfield's work as reliable (and clearly in-depth), the media coverage of it is purely based on his institution's press releases and therefore not independent of it. And we have insufficient balancing coverage with in-depth input from other scholars to make a properly WP:NPOV article, witness the edit wars on the article. The merge proposal above is just a backdoor attempt at retaining this bad material elsewhere and should be rejected, as it already was rejected in a more proper merge discussion at Talk:Plimpton 322 (as have many earlier discussions aimed at pushing Mansfield and Wildberger's promotionalism into the Plimpton 322 article). —David Eppstein (talk) 16:49, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Not every academic publication needs to have its own article here, and once you strip away the churnalism, that's about all that's left. Merging "per" a discussion in which everyone but the proposer opposed the merge to some extent just doesn't make sense. (Specifically, one editor wrote Strong oppose and speedy close in bold, a second wrote the explanation for this merge does not make sense, and a third wrote, I see no reason for the proposed merge in the above other than that some previous discussions failed. I'd hardly call that a "no consensus".) I'd be sympathetic to the idea that this article at least gets a less sensationalist view on the topic into the public eye, but even so, there just doesn't appear to be enough documentation to warrant a stand-alone page. Nor is the existing content so amazing that it needs to be preserved by a merge. The paucity of serious academic discussion leads me to doubt that said content would be due in any other article, even if it were rewritten from scratch. XOR'easter (talk) 18:25, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete No evidence of notability in the Early Work section, or in the Controversy section, which is all primary sources. I would argue that the Guardian and Smithsonian Magazine should count as independent sources (as opposed to the press release), but if the claims there aren't supported by the academic community, it's equal parts undue weight and lack of significant reliable independent secondary sources. Danstronger (talk) 18:41, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I'd say the situation is even worse than that. Neither the Smithsonian nor the Guardian stories had even the token quote from an expert "who was not involved in the research". They're functionally indistinguishable from recycled press releases. XOR'easter (talk) 18:55, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, don't merge I agree with User:XOR'easter Doug Weller talk 12:47, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment -- This article is about an object that is probably not independently notable. The issue that may be notable is that it (allegedly) displayed Pythagorean triads a couple of millennia before Pythagoras. Even if the academic is wrong, the claim is notable and would justify the existence of an article. We cannot know whether the Babylonians knew Pythagoras' theorem and its proof, but it is more likely that they had empirically worked out a few triads that provided a right angle. The content of academic articles in peer-reviewed journals is a reliable source, even if others disagree with it. The question of whether journalists subsequently took up the story is neither here nor there, as it is likely to be at the level of "just fancy that". It is not primary research or OR, because it will be based on primary sources. Peterkingiron (talk) 16:19, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sadly, you have been suckered by the hype. The idea that the people of that time and place knew of the principle behind the Pythagorean theorem was already well-established long before this hype-storm. See Robson "Three Old Babylonian Methods...". —David Eppstein (talk) 16:26, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment I don't believe in the unnecessary deletion of significant information, thus the merge suggestion which does not mean that all of the material in the Si.427 article needs to be merged but at a minimum mention of the scholarly paper ought to be. Mansfield's peer reviewed paper is not his first on the subject matter (Plimpton 322) and qualifies him as an expert in this area in his own right independently of any third party. The references to Si.427 in said paper are minor, there isn't even a section heading for it. On a close examination, no criticism of the actual paper exists, the objections are to the secondary sourcing misrepresentations of the paper that appear to have originated with Mansfield's employer, UNSW, rather than Mansfield himself. Much ado about very little as far as I can see.Selfstudier (talk) 11:23, 6 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment There are several high quality sources on Si.427:

1. Scheil, Vincent (1895)
2. Scheil, Vincent (1902)
3. Veenhof, K. (1973) - this one, for instance, has about a page of content about Si.427, providing translating the non-mathematical content of the tablet.
4. KIJK/Laurie Underwater 2021 - quotes an assyriologist Mathieu Ossendrijver

I am personally do not follow the logic dictating that all content about Si.427 should be exterminated and can not be mentioned in any Wikipedia page. Per WP:GNG: If a topic does not meet these criteria but still has some verifiable facts, it might be useful to discuss it within another article. Infinity Knight (talk) 20:08, 6 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The logic, as I see it, is that the noise that has been made about this overwhelms the valid information by a factor of 10000 to 1. If this were an important tablet we might just have to buckle down and fight what would undoubtedly be an ongoing years-long battle to keep the falsehoods out of Wikipedia. But since it doesn't seem to be that important, at least in the eye of the professionals who have commented, it would save valuable editor time not to have an article at all.

Also, it would be odd to have an article based just your first three sources, omitting the Mansfield paper that drew all the attention. But to include Mansfield, we would need an editor who has studied the paper in sufficient depth to be able to be able to summarize its claims without falling prey to all the misrepresentations in the press. With the possible exception of one IP editor, I don't see that any of the contributors to the page so far have done that. (I know I haven't.) It might also be hard to avoid WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. I also think it may be too soon to have an article, as the community of professional historians has not yet seriously weighed in (and may never do so). There are many published claims floating around about early uses of Pythagorean triples (in van der Waerden's books, for example), which we have not seen fit to include in Wikipedia, either because the claim never gained traction in the broader scholarly community, or became discredited as standards of scholarship improved. Will Orrick (talk) 22:58, 6 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Infinity Knight on this claim. The argument against seems rather convoluted to me, why does the fact that coverage has been mostly "noise" count as a factor against rather than for WP:Notability, can anyone point to an official policy to that effect? Most of the good content potential here is precisely clarifying the press coverage (controversy section) and having a good wiki article to dispel any misinformation would be helpful to outsiders. Caleb Stanford (talk) 15:41, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that Wikipedia editors would have to take it upon themselves to debunk the misinformation, since no reliable outside source has done so. I think this would violate policies against original research. This leaves us in a difficult position: either we uncritically repeat material published in newspapers and magazines that we know to be false, or we violate WP:OR. One alternative is to write a bare bones factual article leaving out the controversy entirely. But what's left isn't that notable and it's a near certainty that people would keep trying to reinsert the controversial material anyway. Another is to delete the article entirely, the path I favor. Not every media storm is worth an encyclopedia article. WP:GNG does say that press releases are not independent of the subject. Since almost all of the media articles relied on the press release and did not perform their own research (say by consulting other experts) I'd say this applies here. Also WP:NOTNEWS talks about "enduring notability". Until other scholarly sources pick up on this, I'd say we don't have that here. Will Orrick (talk) 17:52, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

They are arguing merge not keep.Selfstudier (talk) 18:06, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Will Orrick: Understood, thanks for clarifying your point of view. Right, I favor merging, but would also be happy with keep (though it seems I'm in the strong minority there). Caleb Stanford (talk) 18:36, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Very selective merge or redirect to Sippar. I fully agree that this is a POV fork and that the individual artefact isn't notable. The 'controversy' section is particularly silly, trying to spin an everyday event like "scholar writes bad paper outside his field; lazy journalists uncritically repeat its claims" into something worthy of encyclopaedic coverage. That said, I think the title is a plausible search term and there is some decent material in the article. If nothing else, the photos are nice. Sippur is the site where the artefact was find and is a more natural redirect target than Plimpton 322, an apparently unrelated object. – Joe (talk) 15:22, 7 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The only notable thing about the tablet I can see is that the fields are actual rectangles, not generic quadrilaterals, which is seems to be the key fact at the core of Mansfield's claims about Pythagoras. This seems to me to be something that is really about the human geography of Sippar, rather than the development of Babylonian mathematics. I agree that the controversy section is really a fig leaf for the fact the rest of the article is really information about an otherwise relatively unremarkable object, and there is far too much space given to the controversy (imagine if there was a WP page on every object that generated a disagreement due to weak scholarship in archaeology!). I agree that Plimpton 322 is not a good place to put this material, and photos of Si.427 would fit at Sippar#Gallery; one might even make the case that an aside about the rare "exact" rectangular fields could be slipped into Sippar#Archaeology, if given a little context. 115.64.100.121 (talk) 05:26, 8 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Merge to Plimpton 322 and include a selected note in Sippar. IMO the article content contains WP:Notable information, with a few good citations, that would be a loss to entirely get rid of. I don't know why news/press coverage is being completely discounted here, from an outsider perspective that makes the article more notable than if there were only a few academic papers about it. Caleb Stanford (talk) 15:34, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment It seems especially illogical to me to put information about Si.427 at Plimpton 322. The fact that journalists reported exaggerated information about an artifact that was published in a paper primarily about Plimpton 322 would be incredibly tangential to the topic of Plimpton 322. I still don't think information about Si.427 should be anywhere on wikipedia, but if it is it should be at Sippar#archeology. Danstronger (talk) 22:17, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment There is some confusion about this. The hoohah over Si.427 is the result of secondary source churnalism about a paper entitled " "Plimpton 322: A Study of Rectangles" which is mainly a discussion of Plimpton 322 but it includes a novel and not generally accepted theory about it supported by reference to the otherwise not very notable Si.427. That's how the two things are linked. The paper itself is primary source for the new theory but the author may be considered as expert having written about Plimpton 322 previously so his opinion cannot be simply dismissed as that of a crank and no actual criticism of the paper itself exists only of the secondary source hype around Si.427. So the paper itself ought to go to Plimpton 322 because that's what its about and the Si.427 archaeology to Sippar or wherever. The only real issue here is whether in a merge to include any reference to the quite minor "controversy" at Plimpton 322.Selfstudier (talk) 22:42, 10 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that. At present our Si.427 article contains nothing about any new theory of Plimpton 322, and much of what it does contain has no relevance to Plimpton 322, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about a merge. What the merge suggestion is really asking is for some generous-with-their-time editor to create brand new content about Plimpton 322 and add that content to the Plimpton 322 article. Any discussion of such an addition must take place at the Plimpton 322 talk page, not here. (Warning: there will be controversy.)

As for merging some of the existing material into Sippar, I have no expertise there, so I can't comment on whether that would be warranted. But we do want to maintain WP:PROPORTION in that article. For example, I wouldn't guess that Si.427 deserves more space than the Babylonian Map of the World or the early version of the Epic of Gilgamesh found on a tablet at Sippar.

I also don't agree that the controversy is primarily about bad reporting on Mansfield's 2021 Foundations of Science paper on Plimpton 322. Mansfield published another paper in 2020 entirely devoted to Si.427 in Journal of Cuneiform Studies. It is true that the press release and media coverage were occasioned by the publication of the 2021 paper, but much of the content of the UNSW press release and of Mansfield's statements to the press was focused on Si.427 and relates to the 2020 paper, a paper that mentions Plimpton 322 only in passing and contains no new theory about it.

As far as can tell, the new theory that does appear in the 2021 paper is concerned with the arithmetic and computational properties of two of the columns of Plimpton 322. Among existing theories, it seems closest in spirit to Friberg's factor reduced core ideas, but appears to be less predictive. The new theory is presented very briefly and takes up just a paragraph or so in the paper, which is mostly devoted to a literature review at the non-specialist level. The connection with applied geometry and Si.427 is even more brief, taking up at most a sentence or two, and is presented with a lot of hedging, clearly marking the connection as speculative, with no hard evidence to support it. Yet somehow in the press release and interviews with Mansfield, this is portrayed as a firm discovery rather than a speculation, and Si.427 is said to indicate new heights of sophistication in Old Babylonian mathematics, as if numerous more sophisticated artifacts haven't been studied for decades. Although the journalists who reported on this story made some mistakes, I don't think they can be blamed for these misrepresentations.

In summary, Mansfield has a new, rather technical, arithmetic theory about Plimpton 322 about which there is presently no content on Wikipedia and which may be too marginal and too un-vetted for inclusion. At the same time, grandiose claims about the geometric significance of Si.427 were splashed all over the press, but appear to be greatly exaggerated. I don't see how merging the existing Si.427 content into any other existing Wikipedia article helps with any of this. Will Orrick (talk) 17:45, 11 November 2021 (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.