Template:Did you know nominations/Pell's equation
- The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 22:21, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
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Pell's equation
- ... that the Pell's equation was mistakenly attributed to mathematician John Pell? (Source: ResearchGate paper and many others)
Improved to Good Article status by Eumat114 (talk). Self-nominated at 10:45, 4 September 2020 (UTC).
- Comment (not a full review): Although this has been approved for GA status, it appears that it is not yet in compliance with DYK rules for sourcing, which require at least one reliable source in every paragraph (other than paragraphs in the lead of the article or in the lead of a section that summarize later sourced content). In particular, unsourced paragraphs include: the penultimate paragraph of "History" (the one with the hook claim! the note from the lead can be repeated here but it doesn't really contain a reliable source for the claim that Euler was mistaken, and the link you give in the nomination is not reliable), the first paragraph of "Fundamental solution via continued fractions", the first paragraph of "Concise representation and faster algorithms", the entire section "Continued fractions", the first paragraph of "The negative Pell equation" (note 3 is not a source). Incidentally (although this is not a DYK issue) I am a little surprised that the highly inconsistent reference formatting (where half the references are footnotes and the other half are inline parenthetical references, not counting the ones where the inline reference is also part of the text of the article) was allowed to pass GA. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:03, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
I note what David Eppstein says which puts us DYK folks in a dilemma because we don't have the mathematical knowledge to properly assess the position. My view is that as a newly promoted GA, this nomination should be allowed to proceed, even if it is on an IAR basis. So I will review it. The article is new enough and long enough. The hook fact in the lead is cited inline, the article is neutral and I detected no copyright issues. No QPQ is needed here. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:08, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
- It does not take any mathematical expertise or careful reading to look at the article and observe that it still has entire paragraphs without sources (at the ends of their sections so not summaries of anything later). —David Eppstein (talk) 06:46, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
