Talk:Whole number

message: My son laugh a problem in his math homework that we are trying to figure out. It asks what the error is in the following statement: Jeff says that every whole number is an integer and that every integer   is a whole number. Explain the error.Smcnell 03:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Because -1 is an integer but not a whole number."  That's what I would write.  --Ed Smilde
1 is a whole number but the integers include the negatives i think and whole numbers do not  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.142.156.50 (talk) 09:08, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Integers and Whole Numbers 

message: Most preschooler in certain English speaking societies know what a “whole dollar” is, not a “natural dollar” or an “integer dollar”. In those societies the words “whole number” is to arithmetic as the terms “point”, “line”, or “plane” is to geometry.  Mathematics has an intuitive base, please respect the term “whole number”. It is necessary in the learning process. Jim Kelly
:I'm really not sure what your point is.  I gather that you would like to write an article about the term "whole number"?  But Wikipedia is not a dictionary and does not exist to document terms.  There are a few accepted exceptions for words considered to be particularly interesting phenomena as words (for example thou) but surely whole number does not fall in that category. --Trovatore (talk) 19:31, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Maybe an undefined but understood term!

message: This term is not ambiguous, per WP:DABCONCEPT. To the contrary, there is apparently merely a dispute as to the actual meaning, but agreement that the term refers specifically to some set of integers. There is no set of disaparate classes of things (movies, albums, ships, people, planets) bearing the name. Rather, there is one type of thing bearing the name, with different ideas about the scope of that one type of thing. Perhaps it could be listed as an SIA, but the better practice would likely be to explain the dispute (whether live or merely historical) in the article itself, rather than leaving it to be found only by those who edit the page. bd2412 T 14:56, 24 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems ambiguous to me. Why should we have an article about it? Is there some source that says something useful about it as opposed to natural number or integer or do you think those two articles should be merged? Dmcq (talk) 15:10, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

text: I'm utterly opposed to making it an article; that's complete nonsense.  However bd2412 does have somewhat of a point that it's not a classical disambig either.  Has anyone considered possibly making it a Wiktionary redirect?  That would (at least to some extent) address the needs of anyone who enters "whole number" into the search box.  As for internal links to whole number, of course there should not be any; they should be changed to point to integer or natural number as the case may be. --Trovatore (talk) 02:21, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

text: By the way, I disagree that WP:DABCONCEPT is relevant.  That guide talks about different instantiations of some "broad concept", such as a triangle center, where there are interestingly different ways of finding a point in a triangle that is in some sense central.  But there is no "broad concept" here at all; some speakers are using whole number to mean one precise thing, and some to mean some other precise thing.  It's purely a piece of nomenclature; no article can be written about it that is not essentially a dictionary entry. --Trovatore (talk) 02:37, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. My main concern is that I don't see any way to write an "article" on the topic without engaging in lots of original research and speculation. Each author has a particular convention, but they don't justify or explain it in a way that we could cite here, they just use it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:43, 25 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[WP:DABCONCEPT]] 

message: So right now we have three entries in the disambiguation table, each of which has a single bluelink, namely integers.
I have to say that seems a little silly.  An awful lot more effort has been spent on this page than it's really worth.
So how about this simple alternative?
*Redirect this page to natural number
*Put a hatnote at the top of that article, pointing to the excellent section natural number#History of natural numbers and the status of zero, where all this is explained.
The reason not to redirect whole number straight to the section is that most occurrences of whole number in WP articles are most likely going to be talking about natural numbers, including 0.  The correct target for that concept is simply natural number, not a discussion of terminological issues.  (Ideally, no one would ever link to whole number at all, and that's probably the biggest downside of my proposal — as long as whole number is a disambig page, bots will notify you if you link to it, whereas if it were a redirect, they wouldn't.)
Thoughts? --Trovatore (talk) 04:53, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem with simply redirecting to "natural number" is that "natural number" is never used to refer to negative integers, but there are respected mathematical authorities for whom "whole number" includes negative integers. See the hidden references on the edit page. I was the one who added the references back in 2006. I even had a discussion on the talk page in 2006 with someone who had your point of view until he saw the references. I originally added the references to the visible content of the page but was told that references shouldn't be on a disambiguation page, so I put them in comments. Because these references aren't visible until you go to edit the page, this topic keeps coming up. BrianH123 (talk) 23:07, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, I know that usage exists, but I think it's a minority usage, and anyway I believe it's discussed at the section where I proposed to point the hatnote. --Trovatore (talk) 01:31, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I think just the act of making this page a redirect to natural number tells the visitor (or strongly implies) that the two terms have the same meaning. The visitor would then have to read through six paragraphs of "History of Natural Numbers and the Status of Zero" to learn, in passing, that the term he was originally interested in, for many mathematicians, includes negative integers, which are definitely not part of the picture for natural numbers. As for "whole number" = "integer" being "minority usage", I don't know that anyone has ever conducted a survey, but my personal experience is probably in line with yours. I was always taught that "whole number" was a non-negative integer. But if we're interested in the common man's definition, at least one dictionary (Webster's Third New International) has only one definition, integer, and arguably, that should be the sole definition because "whole" in this context means no fractional part, and -123 has no fractional part just as surely as 123. Perhaps the reason we were taught that "whole number" is 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., is because the notion of fractions is introduced to children before the notion of negative numbers (if I recall correctly and if my education is representative, two big assumptions). If I had my way, this page would be turned from a disambiguation page into a short article with content similar to the Wolfram MathWorld article (hopefully not plagiarized, and leaving out the Z set terminology) and the references we have made visible. We would discourage growth of this page ("whole number" being more of a grade school term) and encourage the visitor to see the article on integers and natural numbers. As long as this is a disambiguation page and the references are hidden, we're going to have to live with these recurring discussions. I agree with you that too much time has been spent on this page, and I think the reason is because the evidence that there are three definitions in use by respected authorities is hidden unless you edit the page. BrianH123 (talk) 16:32, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, my next preference would be a Wiktionary redirect, I guess.  There is nothing mathematical to say about the locution whole number, and Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so I think an article, even a short one, is out of place here. --Trovatore (talk) 19:43, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cut the Gordian knot? 

message: I went ahead and turned this back into a basic disambiguation page.  "Whole number" as a term is used to mean both natural number (which may or may not include 0) and integer.  Every dictionary I've checked lists both as possible definitions.  Conventions in math texts vary.  Anyone searching for "whole number" might mean either target, with no clear primary.  I only even found out about this because of someone found the use of "whole number" at Talk:0 inherently ambiguous.  In that case, the article text was clarified, but in general, a disambiguation page is the way to go here.  –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 04:39, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: This is OK with me as long as it stays a disambig page (a pure navigational tool with no expository content whatsoever).  The reason it was made a redirect (which I thought was "being done with it") was that people kept trying to add content here, which was inappropriate.  I do think the "integer" meaning is somewhat uncommon, and the situation was explained at natural number, so that's my preferred solution. --Trovatore (talk) 04:56, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I want to revisit WP:DABCONCEPT. There is a broad article about football that encompasses both traditional soccer and American "carry" football. Similarly, I wrote a paragraph about whole numbers as integers vs whole numbers as natural numbers in Integer#History, and I think it would better live here. A second paragraph would reiterate the zero vs non-zero ambiguity. It wouldn't be a long article but I think actually explaining the source of the different conventions is more useful than a simple DAB. Mathnerd314159 (talk) 18:40, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I would be sharply opposed to that.  As I understand it, DABCONCEPT is for things like "center of a triangle" where there is a common motivating concept, expressed in different ways.  I don't think there's any such thing here, not in any nontrivial way.  There's just a phrase that has two different definitions.  That's not a topic for a Wikipedia article. --Trovatore (talk) 17:10, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disambiguate and be done with it