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User:DIYeditor, I removed that section because when I read the article, I found it to be the most distracting section out of all. Biographies should be focused on the people themselves. I know that Godel is an influential mathematician, but it's far better to show why he is influential in the first place rather than listing things that are tangentially related to him. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:25, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
To me removing the mention of Gödel, Escher, Bach was perplexing and indicates exactly why this "nuking" you have been doing to biography articles in inappropriate. The reader deserves to understand the legacy. Not mentioning that book in an article about Gödel seems very strange to me. —DIYeditor (talk) 16:28, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that book is already mentioned in the Further reading section, but I do agree with you about this. Perhaps I should be more careful with my content removal then... CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 16:33, 30 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, maybe we do need to figure this out. I would have thought the article was in American English per WP:TIES, but then again that applies only when it's clear, and Gödel was American but other things as well. Is there an established variety? I can't find "color" or "colour", "labor" or "labour". "Honor" and "honour" both appear. As far as I can tell, all words that are distinguished between the varieties by -ise versus -ize are resolved in favor of -ize. --Trovatore (talk) 23:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The last paragraph of the section attributes the statement “Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.” to this person. It cites [47] which points (I gather) through [44] to a Google Books copy of Wang 1996, p. 316. I read that page; I didn’t find that subject discussed there and hence didn’t find the quote.
I searched the book for the word “religion”. The closest similar statement I found was on p. 266 in statement 8.4.10, “Churches deviated from religion which had been founded by rational men.”
If there’s no change needed, please accept my apology and delete this message. If change is needed, I don’t know what it is; sorry to leave this work for others.
I totally understand that Godel as a mathematical logician did super complex math logic. However, it should be possible to summarize his initial key findings (eg on incompleteness) without resorting to incredibly deep math jargon and multiple deep links. I imagine it'll take some thought, and certainly be an oversimplification. However the second paragraph of this page is utterly incomprehensible to a non mathematician. Thanks in advance to whomever can take this on. Jed (talk) 04:19, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think the "technical" tag is an overreaction to the second paragraph, and I'm going to remove it. Readers can tell that there is something they don't follow here, but it doesn't impede them from understanding most of the thrust of the article.
That said, I'm sure it is possible to improve the language and make it more readable, and I agree we should. We can discuss that here. --Trovatore (talk) 05:56, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK, let's see. Let's start with the second sentence of the second paragraph, which is the one that seems both most problematic and possibly easiest to fix:
The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistentrecursiveaxiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example, Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms.
The lowest-hanging fruit is certainly the bit about ω-consistency. I think we can all agree that that does not need to be called out in the introductory section of a biography. What if we do some combination of inline glossing with less specific (but still accurate) statement of the theorems, maybe along the lines of
The incompleteness theorems address limitations of formal axiomatic systems. In particular they imply that a formal axiomatic system satisfying certain technical conditions cannot decide the truth value of all statements about the natural numbers, and cannot prove that it itself is consistent.
That would be a start.
The later text about the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis seem harder to fix, but also less problematic per se. It's not sufficient to say, "well, they're linked after all"; wikilinks by themselves are never a substitute for making the actual text of the article clear. However the terms have completely standard meanings on- and off-wiki, so a reader working from the printed version would still be able to find out unambiguously what they were talking about, and it should be clear enough to the reader without the background to understand them that this is "some math thing", which is likely all they really want to know about them (and if it isn't, great; a whole new vista may be opening up for them). If we want we could gloss them briefly but I wouldn't go into much detail. --Trovatore (talk) 07:24, 4 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
User Nikkimaria removed my edit of a 'Cause of Death' section in the info box citing the template doc. The template doc states that the cause of death "should only be included when the cause of death has significance for the subject's notability". However, despite what the template doc says, a plethora of biographical pages include a cause of death section even though the cause of death is completely irrelevant to the person's notability. Examples include Martin Luther King Jr., Juice Wrld, Mac Miller, 2pac, The Notorious B.I.G., King Von, Heath Ledger, Marilyn Monroe, Vincent van Gogh, Judas Iscariot and the list goes on and on and on. The reason why those pages include that cause of death information in the info box despite its relevance to the person's notability is because it is of notable biographical value, and that is the reason that that information should stay in those info boxes.
On such grounds, I have re-added the cause of death section. Please do not remove it until we have reached consensus on this talk page section. Cerebrality (talk) 23:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Remsense, you've my favorite editor since Levivich, and I've been waiting for the day you'd say something I disagree with; that day has finally come. The fact that KG starved himself to death is an important part of his life story, and a definite proportion of readers will arrive at the page wanting to quickly verify whether this odd fact, which they may have heard somewhere, is actually true. The infobox is a convenient place to serve that need. EEng23:33, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If that's the case, then my disagreement is just a function of my ignorance and it should naturally be restored.
Good man. Now check out my talk page and see if you can get that busybody to go mind his own business. I've got grading to do (some of it on Godel, as it happens). EEng00:16, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
level-3 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
