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 delete. Lord Roem ~ (talk) 13:53, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Algebraic formula for the variance (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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This is a fork of content already at Variance. As far as I can find, there's nothing here that's not already covered at the main article, nor is there any apparent benefit to splitting this off into a separate article. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:42, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:42, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:42, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Redundant content as already mentioned, but the search term as a redirect back to variance wouldn't even really be suitable as it's extremely unlikely someone would search this instead of just typing in variance, std. dev., etc. to get the information. Kingofaces43 (talk) 18:19, 21 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  The assertion that this is "extremely unlikely" is not supported by evidence. The page in question actually gets a significant number of readers – over 50 per day, which is higher than average. Also, redundancy is addressed by merger, not by deletion per WP:REDUNDANTFORK. Andrew D. (talk) 12:39, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  You mentioned WP:REDUNDANTFORK, but WP:Deletion Policy specifically says (WP:DEL-REASON #5) that content forks are a valid reason for deletion unless a merger or redirect is more appropriate. It's been claimed that neither is appropriate here. For the merge question, I've asked for more detail below. And for redirecting, it's reasonable to suspect that those page views come from places where this article is linked directly. We can use our common sense that people aren't searching for this instead of just the plain "variance". If you or someone else feels that a redirect is really appropriate, then make a new redirect after deleting. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 14:06, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  If the page is linked to elsewhere then we should maintain those links rather than breaking them. If people are coming here as a result of searches then it seems likely that this is because they specifically want a formula for the variance rather than a more general page. The variance page is unlikely to help them because its talk page and archives indicate that most readers find it incomprehensible. Andrew D. (talk) 15:51, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Redundant. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 22:31, 24 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge The main article variance is quite large – over 50K with many sections. There's quite a lot to say as calculation of variances is problematic and so we have another large page about this - algorithms for calculating variance. As this is a vital topic, it naturally attracts a lot of attention and so we should be careful not to disrupt development by over-zealous deletion. See WP:ATD; WP:NOTPAPER and WP:PRESERVE. Andrew D. (talk) 09:51, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  @Andrew Davidson: What content are you proposing to merge exactly? It's certainly possible I overlooked something, but the whole point was that I couldn't find anything significant that's not already covered. Why do you think deleting this is going to disrupt development of anything? –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 14:06, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  The most important content which would be preserved by such merger is the edit history. If you examine this, as required by WP:BEFORE, you find that the page started as computational formula for the variance. Around 2013, there were some attempts at restructuring and these include edits which said they were merging content into algorithms for calculating variance. When content is merged like that, it is our policy to maintain the edit history as attribution – see WP:MAD, which explains the matter in detail. Deletion disrupts our record of contributions because the history is then not visible to editors or readers. Andrew D. (talk) 15:51, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Edit history is not content. Nothing in this was merged elsewhere – an attempt to do so was immediately reverted. A vote of "merge" makes no sense if there's nothing to merge. Maybe you want "redirect", but as pointed out above, this isn't a useful redirect, and there aren't any attribution reasons to keep the edit history. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 17:13, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete An unneeded fork, and something of an unlikely search term. I suppose redirect instead of delete would be alright (cheap etc etc), but I hope we are not seeing the birth of yet another "preserve at all costs" argument here - a pretty edit history. We are not building a museum of article writing, but a functional (and at least marginally streamlined) encyclopedia. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 19:47, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete It's an unnecessary fork of variance, and not even a logical one. The variance of a random variable is defined by an algebraic formula, so "algebraic formula for the variance" isn't the kind of material that could or should be split off. ("History" could be, in principle, if there were more of it than the one line and one quotation currently there.) XOR'easter (talk) 22:04, 26 November 2019 (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.