Talk:Toy model

message: This article does a poor job of explaining the nature of the "toy" description.  My feeling is that this is a distinction from a physical model, however neither article does a good job of communicating  this distinction.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.254.117 (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lack of context 

message: This article does little to establish a toy model as an objective classification of models, and has a whiff of name-calling by labeling a theory a "toy".  My feeling is that there is a real distinction being made, but that it's expressed in a very vague way.  The sense in which it is being used, seems to suggest that it means "not full known fidelity", however, it would seem to me that this notion is already known within physics under the effective theory terminology.  If a toy model and a effective theory are the same idea, then there should probably not be two separate articles.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.254.117 (talk) 22:49, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  It would be very helpful if you would cite some reliable sources for what you said above, and add them to the article. The article currently does not cite any sources at all. Without reliable sources, it's difficult for a nonspecialist to ascertain whether the article (and your comment above) is a partial (or idiosyncratic) POV as 75.139.254.117 claimed above, nor not. Biogeographist (talk) 11:50, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Dear Biogeographist, "toy model" is a self-explanatory phrase frequently used by theoretical physicists, see e.g. these 55,000 papers  - but it is not any complicated technical term, so it doesn't have any formal definition in any textbook. It is an informal term whose meaning is obvious. I founded this Wikipedia page on toy model in 2004 *exactly* so that there exists a page where laymen may check that this indeed means a "model that is used as a toy" rather than something technical (some particular model) that they need to learn in a technical textbook. It's ludicrous to demand that there should be some other source backing this one. Lumidek (talk) 03:02, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  The phrase may be self-explanatory to you, but the comments by other editors on this talk page show that its meaning is not necessarily obvious and self-explanatory to others. Your assumption that the meaning is obvious may be an example of the curse of knowledge. And it is not ludicrous at all to demand reliable sources; in fact, it is a Wikipedia guideline (WP:V). In principle, every statement in a Wikipedia article should be referenced by a source. As the Wikipedia help pages say: "All content should ideally be supported by a reliable source, but content that is controversial or likely to be challenged will definitely require them! Unsourced material may be removed at any time and it is the obligation for the editor adding material to provide a reliable source." That is the reason why this article has been tagged with Template:Unreferenced since December 2009, over seven years ago. Multiple editors are demanding reliable sources here, so reliable sources are definitely required. Biogeographist (talk) 18:47, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Also, the search for "toy model" on Google Scholar that you linked to above presents several problems: (1) it is not clear that all of those papers define the phrase "toy model" in the same way—one would have to review a representative subset of those articles for their implicit and/or explicit definitions of the term in order to verify that they are indeed all using the same definition of "toy model", which is exactly why we need reliable sources cited within the article; and (2) many of those papers would be considered primary sources, when what would be most helpful are secondary and tertiary sources—sources that provide a review of the kind called for in point 1. Biogeographist (talk) 19:34, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: There may be differences in the meaning and purpose of the term "toy model" in various subdisciplines of science (or even subdisciplines of physics), although I don't see any substantial ones, but that shouldn't be a justification for some delegitimization of this term or this Wikipedia page. Every other word has various meanings and nuances. Take liberalism. In much of Europe, it's meant to be an ideology focusing on the human freedom, including pro-market policies etc. In the U.S., it's usually used for left-wing extremists. But there's still a Wikipedia page for liberalism. If you think that you have some particular things to fix, why don't you do so? Otherwise the requirements for the primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so on indefinitely sources that you mentioned are utterly unreasonable. If encyclopedia had to do things like that, they would be pretty much useless. Encyclopedias themselves should be the authority in the review of the meaning and selection of the essential information about each phrase. Your attitude – in which you persistently suggest that something is inaccurate about an article even though you openly admit that you have no clue what it could be – is absolutely unconstructive and only serves to waste other people's time. Lumidek (talk) 18:47, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Work on Wikipedia is entirely voluntary; if you choose to write a long response here, and you consider it a waste of time, then you are the one who is choosing to waste your own time. I have never claimed that there is anything "inaccurate" about the article, as you impute to me above. The issue I addressed, lack of references, does not imply that the article is "inaccurate" (again, your word, not mine). However, lack of references does imply a poor-quality article: in its current state, this article does not meet Wikipedia's good article criteria, notably number two of the six criteria. I will also point out that I am not the one who started this conversation by proposing the merger into Conceptual model, a merger which I oppose, as I noted below. I have no intention of improving this article; I am only participating in this conversation because I oppose the merger. Biogeographist (talk) 19:29, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

text:  Also, you mentioned "quaternary sources": this is not a term that is used on Wikipedia, but primary, secondary and tertiary sources are terms that are used in the Wikipedia core content policies, and for important reasons. The nature of the sources cited in a Wikipedia article strikes at the heart of the issue of encyclopedic "authority" that you mentioned, because in an encyclopedia like Wikipedia that anyone can edit, the kind and quality of sources cited (along with text–source integrity) are the main indicator of how "authoritative" a given Wikipedia article is. No reliable sources, no authority. That is why some have argued: No reliable sources, no verifiability, no article. Biogeographist (talk) 20:46, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Borderline POV 

message: When I first came across a link to this page I was expecting a page about modifying the laws of nature for thought experiments and the like in a recreational manner. After reading the page it is clear that the main author was intending a more pedagogical concept. This should be merged as a section in the main physical models page dedicated to pedagogical simplification.
Gsurfer04 (talk) 17:14, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I came here trying to find info about model toys. Maybe there could be a better title. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:19, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguous page title 

message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer#/media/File:Toffoli_BilliardBall.gif  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.220.69.200 (talk) 06:27, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Could you show this Gif? And direct traffic to this? It would answer most of the comments in the Talk Page, and would give a nice picture for the wikiarticle. 

message: Ising model for melt ponds on Arctic sea ice
Yi-Ping Ma1
, Ivan Sudakov2
, Courtenay Strong3
, and Kenneth M. Golden4,*
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.2487v3.pdf
(this isnt a large pdf to view, and a layman can skip the maths, it is explained well)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Transmission Medium (talk • contribs) 10:56, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  the Ising model[clarification needed] as a toy model for ferromagnetism, or lattice models more generally; 

message: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Spekkens'-toy-model-in-all-dimensions-and-its-with-Catani-Browne/9f99a4d1467c67648d19e62e0743aea290b0f5cd
This explains a 10pg Pdf, it links to. and it has several pictures.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0401052.pdf
The second link, the one just above this text, is 32 pages, and is the original of the Spekkens' toy model, written by Skeppens. It has some pictures, though it is 32 Pgs long. The following is the preamble to the document.
In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states: a toy theory
Robert W. Spekkens
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics,
31 Caroline St. North, Waterloo, Canada N2L 2Y5
(Dated: February 1, 2008)
We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide variety of quantum phenomena are found to have analogues within this toy theory. Such phenomena include: the noncommutativity of measurements, interference, the multiplicity of convex decompositions of a mixed state, the impossibility of discriminating nonorthogonal states, the impossibility of a universal state inverter, the distinction between
bi-partite and tri-partite entanglement, the monogamy of pure entanglement, no cloning, no broadcasting, remote steering, teleportation, dense coding, mutually unbiased bases, and many others.
The diversity and quality of these analogies is taken as evidence for the view that quantum states are states of incomplete knowledge rather than states of reality. A consideration of the phenomena
that the toy theory fails to reproduce, notably, violations of Bell inequalities and the existence of a Kochen-Specker theorem, provides clues for how to proceed with this research program.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Transmission Medium (talk • contribs) 11:08, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spekkens' Toy Model 

message: Does this really belong here?  It certainly doesn't fit in with the physics modelling that the intro describes so one or other should be changed.  Personally I'd ditch macroeconomics as it isn't any sort of science, but that might be a bit PoV so I'll leave it to someone else to decide! --Vometia (talk) 10:41, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Macroeconomics...?