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 keep. ⇌ Jake Wartenberg 19:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Distance from a point to a line (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Wikipedia is not a textbook Bg9989 (talk) 11:50, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep WP:NOTTEXTBOOK states "The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to teach subject matter. It is not appropriate to create or edit articles that read as textbooks, with leading questions and systematic problem solutions as examples." The topic is not presented in this way and, even if it were, the issue would be best addressed by editing not deletion, per WP:PRESERVE. Warden (talk) 12:10, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:CANTFIX Bg9989 (talk) 12:25, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • WP:VAGUEWAVE. An encyclopedic source for the topic was easy to find. Q.E.D. Warden (talk) 20:58, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak Keep It needs historical context on the concepts and proofs like who did it first (Euclid? Pythagoras? - I don't know). That's what would make it more encyclopedic. Listing just the equations and proofs however, is not. --DHeyward (talk) 13:03, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Euclid certainly knew how to construct the line segment from a point perpendicular to a line, and would have considered that construction to be the answer to the question "what is the distance?". For the formula presented in the first section of the article, I think we have to wait for Descartes and his Cartesian coordinates, in the 17th century. Nowadays we think of the Pythagorean theorem as a distance formula for pairs of points given by Cartesian coordinates, but I don't think that is a historical point of view — it was about areas, not distances, and possibly of use in constructing right angles rather than in measuring things. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:43, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I mentioned Pythagoras only because the point on the line that forms the right angle with the point being measured can ne derived using his theorem (all other points are further away as b^2 is non-zero and c^2 is a minimum when b^2 = 0). The proofs, especially from different disciplines is encyclopedic. I also find the history behind the proofs to add the encyclopedic value of the article. That doen't mean that mathematics articles without history aren't encyclopedic, but it makes them more interesting. Donald in Mathmagic Land is the ideal way to present these topics :). --DHeyward (talk) 04:29, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. Clearly an encyclopedic topic, as Warden's reference indicates. The nominator has badly misinterpreted NOTTEXTBOOK, which is properly a style guideline rather than a notability guideline (we shouldn't present topics like this with lots of worked examples and exercises the way a textbook would — but this article already didn't do that). —David Eppstein (talk) 03:21, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep as above. Would the nominator, who started editing on 3 March but has shown much knowledge of AfD procedure, care to tell us if he has edited Wikipedia before?
• Keep What David Eppstein said. This is clearly a notable topic. -- Taku (talk) 04:13, 10 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:14, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep -- very useful material. I see the original poster's logic, though. If not keep, then move to Wikibooks and provide ample links from appropriate related topics. —Ben FrantzDale (talk) 13:53, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. It could use some cleanup though. a13ean (talk) 20:20, 11 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep not perfect, but perfection isn't required to survive a deletion challenge. Certainly an encyclopedic topic (more than the various folks who were on some reality show last decade), Carlossuarez46 (talk) 01:56, 13 March 2013 (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.