Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mechanical quantity

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 as original research with no reliable sources cited. Those who want to expound new ideas should seek publication in a traditional outlet. Potential use of the title as an unrelated redirect is left to ordinary editorial discretion. RL0919 (talk) 09:44, 24 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Mechanical quantity

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An odd way of defining "standard mechanical quantities" that I can't find in any reliable source. It appears to be entirely based on a Youtube video. Two quotes from the video say it all "surprisingly, this table does not seem to have been drawn before", and "check Wikipedia, we may have put the table there by the time you have watched this video." In other words, original research. SpinningSpark 09:44, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. A mention of this page has been shoehorned into multiple articles. If this page is deleted, those pages should be reverted, not merely unlinked. SpinningSpark 09:54, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I've put the page together this morning. I admit it's in the grey area when it comes to "original research". All terms used on the page are standard and not original, but putting these terms in a table seems to be new. My colleagues (Mathieu Hautefeuille, Vivek Sharma) and I (Marc-Antoine Fardin) have put together the youtube video used as reference because we do think that this presentation of mechanical quantities can be pretty useful. And we do think that wikipedia is a great place to check if it is useful indeed, and to invite people to contribute. Quoting wikipedia: The prohibition against original research means that all material added to articles must be verifiable in a reliable, published source. Here, the material of the article is so basic that it can draw entirely on uncontroversial wikipedia articles. We added the reference to the video to provide illustration, but this reference can be removed if it helps. Iluvendan (talk) 10:40, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Removing the video won't help, and the claim that it can rely entirely on other Wikipedia articles is both directly against policy (WP:V and WP:WINARS) and only true because you yourself have added links to multiple articles pointing to the page. The main claim of this article is that "standard mechanical quantities" are defined as those with a LTM dimensional analysis with M¹. That claim definitely needs a reliably published source, but the only hit I got on gbooks for "standard mechanical quantities" included temperature in their examples, which obviously does not fit. Also jumping out at me is the omission of velocity and acceleration which can't possibly have a cell in that table, and the inclusion of acoustic impedance which strikes me as nonsense to claim as fundamental. SpinningSpark 11:09, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The velocity and acceleration that you are mentioning are "mechanical quantities" in the way used in the article, but more restrictively "kinematic" (independent of mass). I guess, quantities including temperature or charge or any other dimension beyond M, L and T would be more broadly "physical quantities", but I note that this other page is also contentious. If the page is maintained users could refine these points and maybe even draw a similar table for kinematic quantities (speed, acceleration, diffusivity, etc). Maybe the word "standard" is inappropriate, "usual" may be more neutral. All these quantities were defined gradually throughout the history of science and classifying them is not really an active subject of research, so finding references beyond those where each term originates may be complicated. The goal of this page is really not to impose any standard but to provide a place where these useful mechanical concepts are understood with respect to one another, in a less random fashion that in pages of lists like List_of_physical_quantities. I doubt that the page makes controversial points, but I expect that it may be useful to wikipedia users. Another possibility would be to transform this page into a Category. Let's wait to see if someone else can contribute to this conversation. Iluvendan (talk) 11:38, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I understand the deletion discussion being started here but I'd like to chime in:

The omission of velocity and acceleration are because these do not contain M so not yet in scope. Would be interesting to visualise perhaps using 3 dimensions all the difference combinations of powers of L, T and M
I find this particular visualisation of mechanical quantities (quantities of the form \mathsf{L}^{x}\mathsf{T}^y \mathsf{M}) particularly interesting and helpful to relate very common quantities to each other. To me this is a legitimate and clear extension of the original dimensional analysis page.
I do think the article ought to be reworded as a visualisation though. Either way it's clearly not covered by the original research clause for deletion.

ΨΦΘ (talk) 15:31, 19 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to have missed the point of the deletion discussion. There exists no notable topic "mechanical quantities". It does not even exist as a concept in the page Dimensional analysis that you mention. In science, there is no defined category "mechanical quantities". —Quondum 15:46, 19 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as original reasearch, without support from general usage, and as an attempt at WP:CITOGENESIS. The classification "mechanical" has been used loosely (and rather lazily) in WP, primarily in articles on unit systems, to mean "without an electromagnetic component", for which there are better descriptions than "mechanical quantity". (And, of course, as failing to be notable in the sense required by WP.) This is no reason to create an article on the topic, no matter how well-meant, evidently trying to find unifying concepts in a patchwork conceptual framework. In fact, the definition given is not even rigorous: in the CGS system, every quantity meets the definition of "mechanical quantity" as given in the article. —Quondum 13:51, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Fails Wikipedia:Notability - see WP:GNG A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. Explicitly original research creation, defined so broadly that it seems no-one else has recognised its utility, lacks explanatory power when shoe-horned into, for example, Power (physics) as the second sentence.[1], no coverage other than a video co-created by the article creator. Might have been a candidate for speedy deletion under A11 NebY (talk) 14:50, 17 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete WP:OR--Srleffler (talk) 20:48, 18 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The term "mechanical quantity" has apparently existed for some time to refer to quantities with dimensions of length, time, and/or mass: for example, [2] (1971, in-depth discussion of dimensional analysis, including a mention of "kinematic quantities") and [3] (2013, use in the specific context of meteorology). According to these and other sources, the broad definition at the beginning of the introduction is not OR/citogenesis. However, I can't find any evidence for widespread use of the term specifically for quantities with one dimension of mass, and per the above comments about the video attempting to propagate "new information", everything starting from that specific definition (i.e., everything beyond the first two paragraphs) is WP:OR. I completely support the removal of OR, though seeing as the term is used in a more general sense, would prefer a redirect to physical quantity (whether outright or post-WP:TNT) to leaving a redlink. Additionally, nuances of dimensional analysis (that are discussed in RS) are already described in the article on dimensional analysis. ^Complex/_Rational 22:51, 19 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In the second source, I'm not seeing any attempt at a definition of a category of mechanical quantity, let alone one in terms of LTM (but perhaps I have just not read it carefully enough). I don't think a redirect to physical quantity is justified as there is no discussion there. However, I could agree to a merge of the sourceable parts to dimensional analysis which in my opinion is what this is a part of. SpinningSpark 00:07, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Such a partial merge could work. And the second source was intended as another example that the term exists and is in use, not to provide a definition for it. ^Complex/_Rational 01:10, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are you interpreting a statement such as "Since a mechanical quantity a can be considered as a composition of length, time and mass" to be a definition of "mechanical quantity"? I only read it to saying that every mechanical quantity can be expressed in that way; not that every quantity that can be expressed that way is a mechanical quantity. —Quondum 00:30, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In a strictly logical sense, you are correct, though I believe this could be reasonably construed as a definition and is consistent with how the term is used. Nonetheless, I can look to see whether another source gives a more concrete definition. ^Complex/_Rational 01:10, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
On the contrary, I'd suggest that it is very much not for us to "construe" anything, especially something that is clearly ambiguous. Is torque mechanical quantity? Sure. Is mass cubed a mechanical quantity? Hardly. Something that is without some "reality" or practical application could be argued to be clearly not within the mechanical realm. Besides, an occasional use of a pre-assumed concept by a small number of authors to give context for clarity not make it notable as a concept. —Quondum 02:24, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That line of the article states "length, time, and mass" with a strict logical and, i.e., a mechanical quantity appears to have all three of these dimensions be nonzero.

I agree that the topic is not sufficiently notable for a standalone article. I was only suggesting a redirect to a related article that deals with the subject as explained in reliable sources, as one of the definitions is not blatant OR. ^Complex/_Rational 13:35, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"one of the definitions is not blatant OR": I'll assume that you are referring to what I quoted: "Since a mechanical quantity a can be considered as a composition of length, time and mass, the unit of a, denoted by [a], must be a function of the fundamental units, i.e. [a] = f(L, T, M)". To assume "composition of a, b, c" in your strict sense seems to be irrelevant to the point you make. My point is that this is not a definition of "mechanical quantity" at all: Saying that a cat can be considered to be an animal is not defining the concept of "cat". It is merely constraining it. The same applies to "mechanical quantity" in this construction. —Quondum 15:30, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"this could be reasonably construed as a definition and is consistent with how the term is used": To argue that it is a definition if it is consistent with how it is used makes your argument is baseless: we have yet to find a single admissible usage that unambiguously uses the term to describe the entire class of quantities a that obey [a] = f(L, T, M), let alone show that this is "how the term is used". To create a redirect creates an implication that would reinforce WP:CITOGENESIS. (I have seen this happen, and it is a lot of work countering the edit wars that ensue because editors become entranced by the "neat concept" that they apparently discovered or had reinforced on WP.) —Quondum 15:44, 20 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A possible redirect target could be Mechanics, which (very briefly) mentions and lists quantities at one point, and could be elaborated. This is essentially unrelated to a definition involving dimensional analysis, though. —Quondum 15:11, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Delete OR and make sure to remove the mentions that got shoehorned into other articles. Don't simply unlink them. Doczilla _{@SUPERHEROLOGIST} 07:37, 24 December 2022 (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.