Talk:Boubaker Polynomials

Calorimetry

In the request for deletion of this resource,[1] the following was alleged:

Another [objection to the resource] is good sense: how going from B_2(x) = x^2+2 to B_3(x) = x^3+x good somehow be used into cryogenics, which is the first mentioned application field? There no physical science at all in this sequence.

Boubakr polynomials are not "physical science," they are mathematics. However, mathematics may be applied in many fields. In this case, there is a citation to a book, Cryogenics: Theory, Processes and Applications. The book table of contents is as shown, at [2]. The chapter title: "Cryogenics Vessels Thermal Profilng Using the Boubaker Polynomials Expansion Scheme Investigation;pp. 149-163 (Da Hong Zhang, South China University, Guangzhou , P.R. China)

That's more than enough to show an application. However, "thermal profiling" is an aspect of calorimetry, and apparently there is also application there as well.[3]. w:WP:RS. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:32, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Error?

Something is wrong! The recursion relation does not match the stated series.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 14:28, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

(Later retracted when user:Abd found my mistake. My erroneous analysis is now hidden:

Hide an incorrect mathematical argument
The Boubaker polynomials are also defined in general mode through the formula: ${\begin{aligned}B_{0}(x)&=1,\\B_{1}(x)&=x,\\B_{2}(x)&=x^{2}+2,\\B_{m}(x)&=xB_{m-1}(x)-B_{m-2}(x)\quad {\text{for }}m>2.\end{aligned}}$ Let m = 2 B_2 = xB_1 - B_0 = x(x) - 1 = x^2 - 1 NOT x^2 + 2

OK, now I am confused. The error is traced to this seemingly serious article:

http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/~gvm/radovi/ASCA-1050-1053.pdf

I will revert this article to "research", place the link in the article and make it an article about quality control and the use of Google to ascertain the truty.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 15:42, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

This was an easy mistake to make. Boubakr polynomials begin with explicitly defined polynomials for B_0, B_1, and B_2. The recursion relationship then defines B_3, etc, recursively. If you look at the source linked above, it gives the recursive formula, followed by the explicit definitions that are necessary for using the formula: where B0(x) = 1, B1(x) = x, B2(x) = x2 +2. You cannot use the formula with m=2, as you did. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:49, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for saying it was an easy mistake to make :-) --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 16:41, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

I added the link to http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/~gvm/radovi/ASCA-1050-1053.pdf, which is currently reference 2. It looked pretty clear. Now I am done!--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 17:16, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

removal of DR tag and replacement of OR tag with "under construction"

[4] removed the deletion request tag, which should not be done if the DR is open, even though it is snowing Keep. That edit also replaced the OR template with an under construction template.

The page is actually not under construction, though some of us are now working on it. It stands, useful, as-is. What appeared to be an error was noted. It was not an error, it was a misunderstanding of the definition of a Boubakr polynomial, as explained above. The page is technically original research, as what amounts to a list of sources on Boubaker polynomials. While it is possible to remove that tag, my general comment is that such a tag is safer and less disruptive than attempting to guarantee that all aspects of the page are solidly sourced, not merely being links to another wiki (and there are some of those) or links to publications by Boubakr, etc. I am restoring the original research tag as harmless.

Once Upon a a Time, in a wiki far away, there was a proposal for Wikiversity:Peer review. It was not understood by the ancients just how difficult and complex a process this would be. It is possible, but not yet practical. There is no peer review process on Wikipedia, but a fuzzy and unreliable "community review" process, that often works, or sort-of-works, but is not maintained. (Featured articles and Good articles are reviewed, but not necessarily by competent experts. Sometimes, yes, sometimes, no.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:11, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

I vote that we remove all templates, but that is just my opinion! I fully agree that it is not research.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 16:43, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

I vote to keep {{original research}} because it's not academic, taught nowhere, and probably published by the original author himself. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 18:06, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Who is the original author?--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 18:33, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

He probably means Boubaker, with the idea that it was Boubaker who created this article. We don't know that, but it is irrelevant.

Here the practical import of "original research" on Wikversity: we may create resources simply by exploring a topic and compiling what we find. We do not have to satisfy notabiity or reliable source requirements, because we are not an encyclopedia. Original research could include synthesis, which is routine on Wikipedia, but is not understood as original research, which is prohibited. That is, on Wikipedia, if anyone objects, the community will insist on every statement being supported by reliable source, in theory. In fact, if a statement is generally agreeable to a majority of users active on an article, aware of changes to it, it might be accepted even if it was essentially invented, not accurately found in the sources. I find examples frequently, researching topics on Wikipedia.

The article as-is doesn't include what would reasonably be controversial. So we *could* remove the tag. However, the tag is harmless. Later, if we care enough to try to remove it, we can. At that point, there should be no reasonable controversy left.

Jack's claim, however, that Boubaker polynomials are not "academic," is essentially preposterous. It may have been sustainable -- somewhat -- when the whole affair first arose, but it is not, any more. However, I'm doing research on sources. This is "original research." That is, I don't have to prove anything to anyone. I may make comments along the way, that are my own conclusions. That is definitely "original research." However, if anyone else wants to engage with the article, the Wikiversity Way is that we seek consensus. If we need help doing that, we can get it, we have a supportive community. We have even more powerful ways of creating academic freedom here than the "original research" tag. We can push a page down and make it into an essay, which certainly allows more than original research, it even allows unsupported opinion, as long as that opinion is not, in itself, disruptive.

The resource is presently being used to study, not so much Boubaker polynomials, as such, but the history and the sources that exist. What kinds of sources? Who were the authors? In the deletion discussions, many claims were casually made, without evidence. It must have been very frustrating to "team Boubaker," since they would present reams of sources, stacks of them, and it would all be pushed aside by mere declaration.

We will be supplying, for future use, compilations of evidence that could be used to argue for or against the notability of Boubaker polynomials. What I'm finding, though, so far, is overwhelmingly in favor of the topic being notable by en.wikipedia standards. It's not even close.

Team Boubaker, at least some of them, seem to have believed they were victims of racism. That's not preposterous, racism can show up in disguised ways, such as rejecting a set of sources because they come from a particular region, or because the names of authors telegraph an ethnic identity. However, we are not a court set up to judge racism. We may collect some evidence that might provide support for or against the idea, but we will not make the conclusion on that, at least I won't. It's not useful; but it can be useful for policy creation to recognize when an appearance of racism may exist. It may also explain some of the reactions of team Boubaker.

Something created an extremely strong community reaction. There was sock puppetry, and not just on one side of this fracas. Why were people so exercised? I can understand being incensed because one believes one is being discriminated against. However, the obvious intensity in the opposite direction? So far, what I come up with -- aside from racism, which would really only have a minor effect, my suspicion -- is hatred of self-promotion. That is a very Wikipedian thing, and there are reasons for it, but the hatred becomes an emotional reaction rather than merely a stand for neutrality for the project. People who self-promote are considered dangerous, and a lot of effort is put into detecting and banning them. Example: a German user started to add links to lyrikline.org to articles on poets. That web site is a joint project of the German government and academic institutions, it hosts text, translations, and audio of notable poets reading their work. It's actually reliable source, it is academically curated, not a wiki, etc. The user added a few. No problem. The user added more, no problem. The user started adding many, cross-wiki. This attracted the attention of the antispam patrollers. He was blocked, and hundreds of links were removed, cross-wiki, as "spam," and the site was added to the global spam blacklist.

Why? Well, one of the antispam administrators has said that his IP was that of lyrikline.org. So he had a conflict of interest, in theory, at least. Or he was a volunteer who happened to use their computers. Not only is policy on this unclear, but there is no warning that if you add many links cross-wiki, you will come under intense scrutiny.

de.wikipedia administrators protested on the meta blacklist page. No use. Links had been "spammed," they are inflexible about this. I researched the links. They were all good. But the spam blacklist administrator I most interacted with on this said there was a bad link. It was, in my opinion, quite a good link and, in fact, I restored it later with no problem. (It used a page on lyrikline as an example of the language of the poet.)

The administrators set themselves up as content judges. If you can convince them that a link is good, you can get it whitelisted. I not only went through this process on en.wikipedia, I also attempted to set it up so that it was more reliable and efficient. The admins hated that, it was "meddling." The fact was, though, that you could request a link, and the request would sit there for months with no response. So I clerked the page (which I've done many times, queuing requests, making recommendations), it is a way for the community to support administration. They did not object to the recommendations, but to the very idea of a non-admin offering opinions, and I ran into this many times.

I got the entire lyrikline English interface whitelisted on en.wikipedia, and then, having added many, many links without a problem (and I consulted the community at every step), I then requested delisting on meta, and it was finally granted, rather grudgingly. The process took something like three years, and I found lots of evidence of users who had been frustrated by the blacklist, which can be mysterious to encounter.

So what is the problem? Self-promotion. COI. Yet actual COI policy is not so draconian.

Admins who have done major antispam work have told me that one becomes jaded, that one starts to see spam underneath everything, and definitely "spammers" are the *enemy*. They are fighting a war, and a little collateral damage, too bad.

We will prepare the way for a possible reconsideration on the encyclopedia projects, We will also encourage team Boubaker to participate here, and to gather support and consensus before moving to add material to the encyclopedias. It should not be done by anyone with a conflict of interest! They did not understand due process, how to move beyond obstacles without causing disruption. What they did was common, and fairly normal, it happens all the time. But it was, obviously, ineffective, and I believe I can make that point (I often have, with users getting into trouble.)

This is a major part of the role I see Wikiversity as playing in the WMF family. We can do original research, we can study a problem and collect evidence and argument, so that a discussion somewhere else can be far better informed, ab initio, and less likely to fall into knee-jerk reactions based on superficial appearances. At least that is the idea, and this will do no harm. The plan may prevent harm, if it reduces disruption elsehwere. We will resist the attempts to delete work here, because that is routine for us. We won't be blocking and banning people, though we might warn when personal attacks appear, and we may enforce civility and other necessary policies.

And we will be neutral, and we will be neutral by consensus, at least as closely as we can approach to consensus.

And that is why we will allow the original research tag now, my opinion, because it increases consensus and is harmless, it respects Jack"s opinion, even though I disagree with much he's written on this topic. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 00:52, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Attempt to find who is writing these papers

Going down Google, this is what I find using the keywords "Boubaker_Polynomials":

1. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Boubaker_Polynomials "Wikiversity". OK, we are number 1. That's probably a bad sign.
2. http://planetmath.org/sites/default/files/texpdf/42200.pdf "PlanetMath" Self published by Zhangaini in 2013 -- no contact info
3. http://ejtp.com/articles/ejtpv7i24p319.pdf "A Boubaker Polynomials Expansion Scheme Solution to Random Love’s Equation in the Case of a Rational Kernel" by M. Agida, and A. S. Kumar at universities in India and Nigeria, respectively. Published in "w:Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics" The fact that they have a Wikiversity page means little to me. Does anybody know how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal? I don't.
4. http://www.mathem.pub.ro/apps/v12/A12-zh.pdf "The Boubaker polynomials expansion scheme BPES for solving a standard boundary value problem" by D. H. Zhang and L. Naing. The journal is "Applied Sciences, Vol.12, 2010, pp. 153-157. (Balkan Society of Geometers, Geometry Balkan Press 2010). The authors list an address in Missouri. Google Maps shows it as a collection of townhouses with 2 or 3 bedrooms and basements, conveniently situated a short walk from either Chinatown restaurant and Paul's Donuts and Ice Cream. The journal looks more impressive, with a website at http://www.mathem.pub.ro/apps/. Virtually all the articles are Ph.D. dissertations. The journal should be credited for honestly stating this fact.
5. http://proofwiki.org/wiki/Boubaker_Polynomials_Expansion_Scheme_(BPES) Proofwiki is an open source wiki. The primary contributor is a user whose name I won't reveal because it is not made public on that wiki (I am registered on Proofwiki--and the username has no mathematical activity on Wikiversity or Wikipedia)
6. http://www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/~gvm/radovi/ASCA-1050-1053.pdf "Some properties of Boubaker polynomials and applications" by Gradimir V. Milovanović and Dušan Joksimović. This appears to be an invited talk at a conference in Kos, Greece in September 19-25,2012.

I don't care what template you place on this. I would hardly call it "research" though. Nor is it an effort by one person at self-promotion. It might represent a number of good-faith efforts by many people to establish themselves in the world of mathematics. Personally, I vote that we keep it and leave it alone.

--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 19:16, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

"Original research," here, simply means that someone is researching a topic by writing about it, rather than simply by finding and paraphrasing information in reliable secondary sources. As original research, a page need not satisfy, for example, due weight considerations. Because we have a neutrality policy, this could create a problem. We have not developed formal policies to handle this, but we do have some traditions that have arisen.

• We require top-level mainspace pages to be neutral (and the site, overall, must be neutral). We do not require this by excluding original research, however, but by balancing it. We have allowed "owned pages" in top-level, for example, a professor at a brick and mortar school may start a top-level resource corresponding to a course being taught. My opinion is that this can create long-term problems. What if someone else wants to "teach" that same subject.
• So we can fork resources if there is a problem. Because we are a collection of educational resources, and there is no requirement that a given topic must have only one educational resource, we can create "sections" with different "section managers." A section can be open or it can be "owned." An owned section is the responsibility of the owner. It is attributed. It is like an essay, only it may become an entire family of resources.
• Now, above, you dive into the issue of quality of sources. It's a huge can of worms. For Wikipedia purposes, what makes a source "reliable" is independent publication. You have found some sources that have defects, from a WP point of view. For example, a conference paper. If these are peer-reviewed, it can be very weak. Basically, the topic is approved. And I've seen some very wild topics approved.
• However, those are all primary sources. That is, a known person, in some way, expressed their own primary research, or perhaps wrote a review that has not been published under peer review. It is a fact that the paper exists. So we can point to it if it interests us in any way.

"Team Boubaker," which I use to refer those attempting to promote the topic on the encyclopedias, lacked skill at designing encyclopedic articles to survive deletion requests, and made all the classic mistakes. A pile of weak sources that includes three strong sources is much worse than just the three sources. That's a political problem that a newbie would not be likely to realize, so, for years, I watched articles go down because they were either unsourced or oversourced. Unsourced is the most common phenomenon, because people imagined, from all the publicity about Wikipedia, that it was "the encyclopedia that anyone could edit." The believed that if they knew something, they could write about it. Of course, Wikipedia went in a very different direction, it attempted to set up procedures designed to create a reliable encyclopedia, not just any old topic and any old expression.

In fact, Wikipedia started with a huge pile of poorly sourced or unsourced articles, and the idea that these would improve with time. An experienced Wikipedian response to a poorly-written article would be to stub it. A stub creates an invitation to improve. However, there are those who claim a redlink is more useful. But, then, redlinks are removed! Wikipedia can be quite schizophrenic.

As you may have noticed, I moved the "external links" all to a Sources subpage. On that page, my intention is to collect all sources on Boubaker polynomials, and, in addition, on the controversy. Collection may start with haphazard assembly, but then proceeds to organize the material. You can see that I started with an ab initio organization, based on the kinds of objections that have been made. That is not to legitimate those objections, but this resource is not simply being created as a waste-of-time hobby. Rather, what are the facts behind what has so often been alleged?

What you complied above makes the topic look very weak. But what I've been collecting is developing something deeper. First of all, there are fairly objective ways to assess journal quality. That will be done. At the start, though, I'm seeing many publications in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. I have also found dead links, but with only one link so far have I been unable to track down the original yet.

It is fairly obvious to me that Team Boubaker had become desperate, by the time our resource was written (put together, probably from the French). For example, papers by Boubaker, in reliable source, are shown without giving his name. They were reacting to the claims of self-promotion, by suppressing the name. Papers in NASA archives are shown in such a way as to attempt to color them with the reputation of NASA, which is completely irrelevant. They linked to an archive, not to the journal of publication. In standard Wikipedia sourcing, one gives the full publication info, a standard bibliographical reference, then a link to the paper as published, if available, and then to a free copy, if available (and it is illegal to deliberately link to copyright violation, but if in doubt, it is not illegal).

This is the tragedy of this affair: I don't see that anyone who knew what they were doing put sufficient effort into helping them. I do see places where a user attempted to correct errors on the part of those attacking the topic. An admin on en.wiki, no less, and he'd undeleted the article when it was speedied. But he was faced with an avalanche, and, again, I've seen this.

Wikipedia process is unreliable, and was developed, as it were, in a vacuum, without regard for or respect for traditional process, which handles these problems readily. This is very basic: to deliberate and make a decision on an issue, first collect evidence. Then create and collect argument. And only then start to choose. What happens in deletion requests? Someone makes a request, generally brief, and then users immediately start to vote. From the timing of these things, the initial voters have not investigated, and they certainly have not heard balanced argument. In theory, it's not a problem because consensus can change, but the reality is that people develop fixed ideas and will often oppose change without consideration. And, after all, if this is just some nut job promoting his own ideas, is it worth the effort?

We set all this aside, in general. It was not always this way, there was a time when deletionism was active here, and there was high disruption, there was blocking and banning, etc. JWSchmidt called it the "Wikipedian disease." JWS was a founder of Wikiversity, and was totally outraged, so outraged that he lost his balance, and he was blocked for years.

But the problem he'd seen was real. I wanted him back so he could help develop solutions. It doesn't work to have a counter-reaction, to attempt to ban or exclude "Wikipedians."

No, we will educate them. Most are respectful, when they come here. Often they show up because they read something that seems fringe or pseudoscientific to them. We suggest that they improve the resource. Occasionally, they do. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:41, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Promotion of "controversy" section to higher than "applications"

I moved the "controversy" section to a higher level than the long list of applications.

The controversy section informs the reader of the fact that this solves the well known heat equation, which is all one needs to establish that physical applications exist. It is also more interesting than the long list of applications of this simple differential equation. Also, I vote that we remove the "research" template, but if it is "research" it is social science research on what people put on the internet these days and how Wikipedia struggles with this surplus of information. I don't know if I support Wikipedia's decision to block the article, but I certainly don't condemn it. (Not my monkeys, not my zoo)

Another reason for promoting the "controversy" section is that our students need to know that there is a distinction between research, important research, and unimportant research. Boubaker Polynomials is not exactly a hot topic nowadays, and it never will be. Students need to know that "publishing" in a refereed (but electronic) journal might make something so unimportant that even Wikipedia won't publish it.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 20:44, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

This is problematic. First of all, you have:

Boubaker polynomials are so closely related to Chebyshev polynomials that Wikipedia chose not to host an article on the subject, expending quite a bit of effort in making that decision.

This treats Wikipedia as if it were a person who expends effort to make decisions. In fact, the decision on Wikipedia was made by one person, the closing administrator, who did not choose to explain the decision, so we can only guess. The strongest argument for deletion was non-notability. Evidence of notability was dismissed as being from a small group. Many comments were on the order of "doesn't seem notable to me." That is roughly equivalent to "I never heard of this." This was 2009. There were fewer sources then.

The AfD enjoyed the presence of a vandal who repeatedly blanked it, and SPAs promoting the topic. The latter tend to vastly irritate Wikipedians, who may then tend to delete punitively. SPAs frequently are clueless about, say, the unusability of a wiki such as OEIS for sourcing on Wikipedia. I don't blame the SPAs. Much to my surprise, one of them pointed to [5]. That is still there. It is a clear example of how schizophrenic Wikipedia can be. Who was more in line with policy here? What is easy to see is why some of the supporters of Boubaker have thought there is racism involved.

OEIS is a wiki, all right, but it has an editorial board that determines what content is normally displayed.{https://oeis.org/wiki/Editorial_Board]. The editorial board appears to be experts, using real names. They have Flagged Revisions installed. The normal guideline that wikis cannot be reliable source is based on wikis without responsible editorial review. So the Wikipedians were assuming that OEIS was like Wikipedia: unreliable.

That AfD was a train wreck. I find it impossible to discern from it a policy-based reason for deletion. The majority of the arguments were behavioral, about sock puppetry or promotion. There were claims of fraud in authorship for peer-reviewed journals. There were complaints about policy from long-standing Wikipedians, who claimed the policy was written by a sock puppet. So why is it still standing?

This kind of mess is why I've been happy to remain banned on en.wiki. It keeps me from being tempted to dive into the cesspool. To be sure, the pro-Boubakr side was radically unskillful, and angrily disruptive. My long-term observation, though, is that the wiki community and policies and procedures set this up. In spite of a structural design which requires consensus, the actual procedures create an appearance of consensus by through exclusion of dissent.

Bottom line, it is relevant to point to the Wikipedia deletion, especially the last. However, to state an opinion about why the topic was rejected is definitely original research, synthesis, and as such should really be attributed. Hence I intend to move that to this talk page. Meanwhile, the resource is actually being improved. It will have more eyes on it. To serve the wikipedias, we might categorize the sources. That is, sources with Boubakr as author or co-author, and sources without. Sources which are peer-reviewed journals and those not. We see massive arguments in the AfD, and people are more concerned there about whether the user arguing is a sock puppet than about the actual facts. That kind of concern makes some sense on Wikipedia and in an AfD, though the Wikipedia community has never realized the irony of claiming that decisions are not by voting but by strength of arguments, and then getting bent out of shape over sock puppetry or vote-stacking (if that happened).

We may compiled sources and evidence here, without pressure. We have solid administrative support, we will not tolerate sustained ad-hominem arguments, and we don't delete unless reasons for deletion are very clear, exceptions being very rare.

I would hope we can attract the Boubakr people, and encourage them to leave the wikipedias alone, until and unless they have support from regular users there.

Looking around, I just found User:White_Fennec/Rebuttal which documents, as of August or September 2011, sources and categorizes them.... The user apparently does not have email enabled. From that, I get a bad feeling, and check. Yes. Globally locked. Recent changes to the operation of global lock cause an automatic removal of the ability to email a globally locked user. There has long been a recognition of the global lock as a blunt instrument. It used to be possible to locally bypass a lock. That ability was removed with SUL globalization. Then the WMF started banning users on its own initiative, and shortly thereafter, the ability to email a locked user disappeared without any notice. Yuk.

The account was globally locked for "long term abuse" in 2011. The user was only blocked on one wiki, enwiki, where the user had no edits.[6]. That was a violation of global lock and ban policy (when the lock tool was implemented, it was said that it would never be used like this, but only to stop cross-wiki abuse, where a user was blocked on N wikis already, A number like 10 was proposed, but policy never was solidified. I'm very familiar with lock process. Normally, a lock request will be refused if there is disruption only on one wiki, sometimes two is not enough. Unfortunately, nobody notices, and if someone does, they tend to shoot the messenger. I will think about asking for that global lock to be lifted, I'll have to research the history first.

I do not wonder if these people continue socking, if treated with such disrespect. I might have an old email from White Fennec. I have handled cases like this before. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 23:39, 28 June 2015 (UTC)

Another reason people might sock is that they are unaware that it is wrong. It doesn't take much time on a wiki to learn for yourself that socking should not be allowed. But a person with no experience is also not likely to read up on the regulations. Instead they just start editing and attempt to guess what the rules and norms are. In less formal internet environments and in governmental elections socking is permitted-- its called campaigning. It is entirely possible that many of these sock accounts were friends who were asked to set up accounts. We had a case of that at work where a coworker asked us to "like" a song on facebook because there was a songwriting contest, and apparently the rules permitted such requests (or equivalently, it was understood that everybody would break them) Different cultures have different norms, and not following those norms can signify nothing more than ignorance. One thing is certain-- knowledgeable don't sock the way the Boubaker folks did. The consequences are far too great.

I like the way you used subpages to divide the Boubaker page into a math page and a social science page. The older I get the less interesting math and science get, and the more interesting the human process that created math and science becomes--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia took the internet meme of sock puppetry, which had a very specific meaning of creating additional accounts to make some argument look stronger by pretending to have additional supporters, and redefined it in ways that often offend outsiders. Creating a new account to evade a block is not classic sock puppetry. Editing anonymously would not be sock puppetry unless there is pretense of being different in order to increase weight on a position. Blocking a user abrogates the obligation of a user to be cooperative, we failed to understand that. Users imagine, typically, that what is in the project should be truthful and it should be complete. That's more or less what people expect from Wikipedia. Of course, "truthful" is actually a judgment, not a fact, and "complete" is impossible. But a naive user has not developed a wiki ontology!

In any case, Wikipedia sits at a crossroads that it appropriated about fifteen years ago. It is what it is largely because it was first. People resent a handful of users who attempt to stop them from improving the project. They readily believe that these are usurpers, once they have seen the operation of the Wikipedia core. Before that, they assume that "there must be some mistake." So, for example, if an article is deleted, they will recreate it. Nothing stops them from doing this. They have no idea of Conflict of Interest policy as it might apply to academics. That policy is routinely ignored by insiders who are academics, by the way. Then there is Wikipedia Rule Number One: "If a rule stops you from improving the project, ignore it." What is not said that is if you are not an insider, this can get you quickly blocked. My tagline on Wikipedia Review used to be a corollary to Rule Number One: "If you have not been blocked, you are not trying hard enough to improve the project."

Now, yes, I created a "Wikipedia" subpage. That completely astonished a French user. But we do this. We can study Wikipedia articles and process. It requires care, because these things readily can turn into personal attacks. However, we are a community, and if there is a problem, we will warn and assist each other, and work out how to accomplish legitimate goals without harm. So that subpage will study the Wikipedia sage over Boubaker Polynomials. The sources page may also point to sources on this, with brief commentaries. I already found a discussion on PlanetMath.

What is important about the PlanetMath source is that this is a managed site. The existence of a page there implies editorial approval. It's similar with OEIS, perhaps more formal and clear. The PlanetMath discussion I found expressed outrage that an article on Boubaker Polynomials was being hosted.

Now, this is what I find fascinating: what is the source of this excited outrage? A Boubaker polynomial is just a specific series of polynomials, that will generate a series of numbers, given a chosen value. Is the outrage over some false claim? What's false? Generally, objections have been based on the methods used by Team Boubaker. It is entirely unclear who has done what, in this regard, since not only could some Tunisian nationalist hothead have done something that would not at all be approved by Boubaker, but there were false flag operations, apparently. Essentially, for encyclopedia purpose, all that should be irrelevant. But it isn't because of how Wikipedia process works. People do consider these irrelevancies, and vote in deletion discussions explicitly based on them. If we really look at this, the readers are punished for the behavior of some users. Basically, people are angry, when they are angry, they want to hit the target, and they way to hit the target is to delete the target's favorite topic. Very simple, really.

I found the PlanetMath objection incoherent. "... the literature presented to justify such polynomials is clearly forged."[7] What does that mean? Evidence? In any case, this appears to have been an administrative response:

Please submit corrections if the entry is erroneous (or garbage). We do not "agree" or "disagree" to publish entries - that is up to the submitter at present, although that may change in the future. I do encourage you to submit corrections and, if you don't get reasonable satisfaction from the poster, to raise the issue again in the forums.

This would be very similar to our response.

The PlanetMath source is weak because it has an anonymous author. However, surviving on PlanetMath, especially in the presence of objection as shown above, indicates the article is basically sound, in the view of the supervising editors of PlanetMath. PlanetMath has no page that explains the PlanetMath decision process. There is some information on Wikipedia.

I just found Fate of Boubaker polynomials entries, 09/16/2009. Fpur entries were deleted, apparently from review by the Content Committee.

There is more. [8] is where Boubaker, using his original Wikipedia username, asks questions, which are answered by Zhangaini, the author of the standing PlanetMath article. This was 2008. Very unlikely, then, that Zhangaini is not independent of Boubaker. [9] is a Table of Disciplinary actions. Of 11 actions, 10 were warnings. Of the 10 warnings, 4 were to four different users, in 2009, for failure to delete "inappropriate" entries per admin request, regarding Boubaker topics.

I see PlanetMath as being in trouble. The search engine is broken. [10], the most recent entry is 8 months ago, and notes "zero budget."[11]. PlanetMath and PlanetPhysics were affiliated. PlanetPhysics disappeared. We were able to find an archive and have uploaded PlanetPhysics content, see PlanetPhysics.

I also found a question by Zhangaini answered by perucho, the PlanetMath user who complained above. Following that, I found a proofwiki page that may be useful: [12] and then this page Relation_of_Boubaker_Polynomials_to_Chebyshev_Polynomials. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:59, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Lets do some maths

Since the marvelous Boubaker polynomials are starting by:

${\begin{aligned}B_{0}(x)&{}=1\\B_{1}(x)&{}=x\\B_{2}(x)&{}=x^{2}+2\\B_{3}(x)&{}=x^{3}+x\\B_{4}(x)&{}=x^{4}-2\\B_{5}(x)&{}=x^{5}-x^{3}-3x\\B_{6}(x)&{}=x^{6}-2x^{4}-3x^{2}+2\\B_{7}(x)&{}=x^{7}-3x^{5}-2x^{3}+5x\\B_{8}(x)&{}=x^{8}-4x^{6}+8x^{2}-2\\B_{9}(x)&{}=x^{9}-5x^{7}+3x^{5}+10x^{3}-7x\\&{}\,\,\,\vdots \end{aligned}}$

Their generating function is   $S(x,z)=3+{\frac {3\,xz-2}{1-xz+{z}^{2}}}$   and we see that

$marvelous\_Boubaker(n,x)=-6\,Chebyshev(n,x/2)+4\,Gegenbauer(n,x/2)$

What an original research! Pldx1 (discuss • contribs) 22:09, 7 January 2016 (UTC)