User talk:Phlsph7/Archives/2025/July

Opinion on Cardinality

Hi Phlsph7, I've read a lot of your work here on Wikipedia, and I really enjoy the style and accessibility of your artilces. I was wondering if you had a minute look at an article I've been working on: Cardinality. Nothing formal, it's not finished (e.g. I haven't put in-line citations in yet and such), just things you like, things you think I should change, things you would have done different, etc. I'm trying to work on writing FA-level content (or at least closer to it). – Farkle Griffen (talk) 23:37, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi Farkle Griffen, that's an interesting project and congratulations on getting Equality (mathematics) to GA by the way. For Cardinality, it would probably be best to do the proposed merge first and then try a GA nomination before making an FA attempt.

A few observations:

• Do the sources in the earlier subsections of the history section explicitly talk about cardinality, rather than related concepts? I haven't looked at the sources, but my guess would be that the concept arose primarily with Cantor and set theory. If that's correct, having such a detailed discussion of somehow related earlier developments would violate WP:UNDUE and/or WP:SYNTH.
• Personally, I would put the history section at the end, since, presumably, readers are more interested in the mathematics than the intellectual history. But there is no fixed rule here.
• Since the lead is supposed to provide an overview of the article, you could try to squeeze in a sentence each on the history and the paradoxes so that those two sections are also covered.
• I don't think that etymology is important enough for this topic to deserve a full section. One option might be to condense it into a short paragraph and mention it somewhere in the history section.
• As far as I'm aware, the term "cardinality" is also used in computer science with a slightly different meaning. Should this be mentioned somewhere in this article?
• If you want to go for FA, you would also have to check that the sources are not only reliable but high-quality, which would create problems for sources like https://mathtimeline.weebly.com/early-human-counting-tools.html.

I hope some of the suggestions are helpful and good luck with the project! Phlsph7 (talk) 17:12, 8 July 2025 (UTC)