Talk:ArXiv

message: Amongst physicists the site is always referred to as 'the arXiv', which parts of this article reflects. Other parts of the article miss out the 'the'. It should be consistent across the entire article, so should it be 'the arXiv' or just 'arXive' throughout? Apparently this is a point of contention as whether you call include the definite article or not seems to be field-dependent. (Mathematics and Engineering friends of mine just call it 'arXiv'. Yuck.)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.19.1 (talk) 09:16, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: 'The ArXiv'? or just 'ArXiv'

message: anyonhe know how the name arXiv came about? I'm guessing its a pun on 'archive' with X coming from the old 'xxx' name? But why no 'e' on the end?
:Their FAQ says "no reason" for both "why arXiv.org?" and "why xxx.lanl.gov?". HTH. -- ALoan (Talk) 12:02, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: What's in a Name

message: The following paragraph currently in the article is wrong:
:arXiv.org was formerly known as xxx.lanl.gov but it changed its name when it was found that censorware programs were blocking access to it from various sites, under the impression that the three letters 'X' in its name implied that it was a pornographic site. The idea of XXX was that it was one better than WWW in every way.
XXX was chosen by Paul Ginsparg as a joke to try to get the site and it's emails blocked. See http://arxiv.org/help/faq/skullfaq for more info.
Also, the entire article is slanted towards mathematics, and there's no mention of the nlin category (non-linear sciences).
arXiv surpassed 300,000 papers in November 2004.
I'd make the changes myself, but I work for the arXiv, and thought that it could be a conflict of interest. So I'll let someone else in the community edit the page as a buffer between my POV and the the NPOV of the article. ktheory 18:58, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I updated the article count and added a mention of the nlin category. The FAQ (http://arxiv.org/help/faq/skullfaq) you are pointing to is entirely unconvincing. I can't help with the slant towards maths, as I am a mathematician myself, but feel free to edit (I think the conflict of interest is no problem once you have declared it). -- Jitse Niesen 17:51, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: XXX

message: Why not just move the title to "arXiv.org e-print archive" I dont think that theres any limitation.
:MediaWiki capitalises the first letter of article names. That is why iPod is at IPod. The reason for this is so that there is no need to worry about the case of something when linking it ie you can talk about "how fast the car went" and also that "Cars can go fast". Both links go to the same place. 132.181.7.1 00:41, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorrect Title 

message: Is there a template for arxiv referencing? --Staecker 15:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The template  can be used inside a larger reference. For example  creates . This can be used in the ID field of templates such as . -- Fropuff 02:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template? 

message: Hi, so what did Perelman and Arenstorf do in 2002 and 2004? (sorry - you've got a physicist here). Did they keep doing it afterwards, or were they one-off events? Just asking because the passage in the article read oddly. I've changed it somewhat, but someone who kows had better check I haven't stuffed up the meaning. More detailed explanation wouldn't go awry, either ;-) Deuar 16:30, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Perelman and Arenstorf 

message: Why does this article have such a strange name? JSTOR is in JSTOR, so why not put this in ArXiv or ArXiv.org? Loom91 11:27, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is strange and I have no answer except to say it should be moved to arXiv.  There are already a number of redirects from that page and I suspect the only reason there is a large number of links to arXiv.org e-print archive is because people have been fixing the redirects.  --C S (Talk) 19:33, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why this strange name? 

message: "It is sometimes claimed that some censorware programs were preventing some users from accessing it at its previous address, xxx.lanl.gov, under the impression that the XXX in its name implied that it was a pornographic site; however, this is believed to be untrue: private internet service providers would not be financially viable if they blocked access to such sites."
This is true for residential ISPs. However, arXiv contains scholarly works that are intended in part to be useful to students accessing the web through a school ISP. In the United States and possibly other jurisdictions, internal ISPs run by the IT departments of public schools (both K-12 and university) and public libraries are required by law to use censorware on student-accessible machines, or they will lose funding. (See Children's Internet Protection Act and foreign counterparts.) Here, censorware increases financial viability. As for private schools, socially conservative parents are likely to send their children to schools that take steps to protect their children from pornography. --Damian Yerrick (☎) 22:04, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Children's Internet Protection Act 

message: Most of the external links should be made into references cited in an appropriate place in the text. Jmath666 17:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: Information on what hardware and software underlies ArXiv seems to be sparse on the Internet and in this article. The ArXiv help files occasionally reference something called "AutoTeX" (e.g. at http://arxiv.org/help/submit_tex) but searching the web for this term yields unrelated results such as http://www.surf.nuqe.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~nakahara/Software/AutoTeX/index-e.html
Can anyone locate a description of the platform on which ArXiv operates, whether it is made available, and if so, under what sort of license? — PaulKishimoto (talk) 02:58, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I can ask on mod-admin if you think that would be helpful. But to add anything to the article, we're going to need to find a reliable source. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:15, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Underlying Software / Hardware 

message: Could we at least have a paragraph or so on Vixra ? I'd do it myself, but I've had it with trolls. Robma (talk) 14:09, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Does Vixra pass WP:WEB? I don't see anything about it in Google news archive. How could we source such a paragraph? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:22, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

text: It was whittled down because the sources it was based on were not reliable. In the most recent removal, the editor who removed the material wrote "Removed unreliable source. The guy is a PhD student and his website reveals him to be a grade-A crank". Do not re-add without proper reliably-published independent sourcing. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:27, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversy section whittled down to nothing 

message: A deletion discussion for a parody site called "SnarXiv" resulted in a decision that material about that site should be merged here, to arXiv, with no notification to editors of this article nor any attempt to create a consensus here that such a merge is appropriate. I believe it is inappropriate (the material is not notable and has too little significance with respect to the arXiv itself to be mentioned, per WP:UNDUE) and have reverted the change. For an ongoing discussion of this issue, see Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2014 March 8. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:45, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately, SnarXiv still redirects here, confusing links like the one in SCIgen#See also. 129.93.4.34 (talk) 17:06, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  SnarXiv 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on ArXiv. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050505044157/http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/arXiv.org.pdf to http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/arXiv.org.pdf
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Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 07:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This talk entry is to address the first line of the article. In particular, to address the phrase "peer review". According to peer review: "Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers)." This is what the committees that review arXiv submissions do. Their reviews determine such things as if the work is deemed "scientific" in the opinion of the corresponding arXiv committee. They also provide written feedback to submitters on individual aspects of the submissions such as citations. For example, a submitter was told to remove a citation to a viXra publication as a condition of having his arXiv submission accepted. These examples are clearly "evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence".
173.56.74.61 (talk) 00:30, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Moderators merely check whether submissions meet some very basic standards (e.g. do they have references) and whether they are on-topic for their category. In most cases this entails a quick scan of the abstract of the article without even reading the article itself. There is very little quality or correctness checking, except maybe in some cases rejecting obvious crankery, plagiarism, or copyright violation. It is not peer review in the usual sense of that phrase. (I am speaking from personal experience here, but not in any official capacity for the arXiv; I am a moderator there.) —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

text: I agree with the article that arXiv is not peer-reviewed. Most papers are accepted through a two level process of endorsement plus an automated check. According to how the process has been described, once authors have been endorsed for some topic categories, their subsequent submissions are not checked by any human peer or moderator unless they are flagged up by the automated filters. Do you have a reliable source to confirm that removal of a vixra link has been used as a condition for acceptance? I don't doubt that a reference to vixra would trigger the filters, but there are papers on arXiv that do have references to papers on viXra. Weburbia (talk) 07:19, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

text: I can confirm that what I wrote in that essay is true, but whether that qualifies for inclusion under relevant wikipedia policies is something I leave to others to judge. I understand that it's not simply a case of whether someone thinks it is true or false.Weburbia (talk) 17:04, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

text: Look, if you don't understand that summarily filtering out blatant crankery and plagiarism is a different thing than actual peer review, or don't want to understand, I can't help you. And when you say "article, published" what you actually mean is "blog, posted"; that's not something we can use as a source for any content here. Stop pinging me for this nonsense. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:20, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

text: I'll have a go at it, then. Peer review is done by researchers who are specialists in the topic of the paper, or at least a small subfield to which the paper belongs. They carefully read the entire paper and usually have a good understanding of the material, the methods, and the relevance of the research. Using their expertise, they comment on mistakes, flawed methods, unclear/irrelevant content, omissions, failures to discuss existing literature, etc, and they may suggest ways to improve the paper. It can take a full workday to review a single paper properly, and a referee report can be several pages of text. The arXiv moderators have to handle circa 500 submissions each workday. Just based on the size of the team (about 170), they cannot have a specialist on each topic across the wide range of arXiv areas, and are therefore not 'peers' in the sense of peer review. Furthermore, they have to moderate about three submissions per person per workday on average. It's quite clear that they will only spend at most 5-10 minutes per paper, and maybe even less (see David Eppstein's description above). This is vastly more superficial than peer review. Your examples are fully consistent with the superficial moderation, and are no evidence at all that the arXiv moderators are somehow spending all their time performing peer review. Gap9551 (talk) 00:46, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Just a minor correction: it is more than 3/day. Today's email for me (so far) includes 14 arxiv-moderator emails, most of which involve asking me to look at a paper and make a decision on it. Even 10 minutes per paper would be too much at that volume. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:04, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. Gap9551 (talk) 02:10, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

text: Huh? Are you saying your arguments so far are not about arXiv doing peer review? If so, please tell me what we are discussing here. Gap9551 (talk) 02:10, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

text: By the way, arXiv has posted over 1.3 million papers so far. Even if there have been a few cases of a moderator going beyond their normal duty and actually doing peer review on a submission, that does not mean that this is their standard practise. Gap9551 (talk) 02:13, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

text: You are saying,  and . I'm assuming you have noticed that both phrases contain the key words "arXiv" and "peer review", so it does not make sense to suggest that my statement has nothing to do with your arguments. At the same time you ignored my , which is highly relevant to the issue you bring up in your last comment, regarding removing a reference (who knows if that even happened, but that's not the point, I'm willing to assume it did). Your unwillingness to be open to discussion forces me to leave this "conversation", because I am wasting my time. Do not introduce your so far unsubstantiated claim in the article without consensus. Gap9551 (talk) 02:46, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  First Line of the Article 

message: I suspect that the site icon is a reference to a design used by The Wildhearts in 1992.  :Image:WildiesDontBeHappy.jpg but don't have a reference. At that time there was so little graphic art available on the web people used to reuse icons from the small number openly available]] Elseware (talk) 08:21, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: ArXiv has used a skull-and-crossbones theme since its founding (as xxx.lanl.gov) in 1991. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:56, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

text: Quora (not quite an RS) has some useful informal information on the icon history. I was originally a typical skull and crossbones, reflecting both the xxx of the web site and (my own personal recollection, definitely unreliable) the pirate nature of passing around preprints without publisher approval. The smiley face came after, making it less offensive to physicists w/o a sense of humor. -- {Talk} 17:11, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Site icon (favicon) 

message: I just removed an "obsolete source" tag without realizing that I was at least the third editor to do so. To me, the matter is clear: it's not "obsolete," it's history. Having a more recent source on the same topic would be nice, but knowing what the past situation was like continues to be important. As David Eppstein's edit summary points out,  XOR'easter (talk) 15:38, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Fully agree with XOR'easter and David Eppstein here.  Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:33, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Obsolete" source 

message: I changed "scientific papers" of ArXiv for "academic papers" to avoid confussion, because whether mathematics is or not a science is strongly debated. On the other hand, all ArXiv preprint papers are academic, so with the word academic all problems are solved.
There exists a strong debate on whether mathematics is or not  a science. It depends on the conception of science and mathematics each one has. Of course, what constitutes science is also hihgly debated (the demarcation problem). Anyhow, science is not a natural object that exists independently of humans. Science is a human creation, and so what constitutes science is decided by humans. So the question of whether mathematics is or not science is a bit subjective, in the sense that what constitutes science is decided by us humans. Among the main reasons to NOT consider maths a science are its non-empirical method (in contrast with science) and its object of study. While scientists test their hypotheses by observing the natural world, mathematicians work on abstract entities. There is also a debate on whether mathematical objects and numbers are part of nature or an abstraction created by humans.
Many university departments have faculties of "Mathematics AND science" (implicitly suggesting a separation of both concepts):
http://www.deltastate.edu/artsandsciences/mathematics-and-sciences/
https://brocku.ca/mathematics-science/
https://smt.sutd.edu.sg/faculty/
https://ems.tcd.ie/
https://www.lyon.edu/math-science-faculty
https://www.aubg.edu/mathematics-and-science-department
https://www.cedarville.edu/Academic-Schools-and-Departments/Science-and-Mathematics.aspx
https://www.muw.edu/case/scimath
https://www.everettcc.edu/programs/math-science
Some English dictionaries do not define Mathematics as a science. Among those dictionaries that do not define mathematics as science are:
Dictionary.com
McMillan Dictionary
Many authors do not consider mathematics to be a science:
"Mathematics is not science, and its turths must not be understood as empirically verifiable". -Alan Bishop. Page 54 of the book Mathematical Enculturation: A Cultural Perspective on Mathematics Education. https://books.google.es/books?id=9AgrBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA54&dq=mathematics+are+not+science&hl=es&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRlYbvm9zmAhWKGBQKHXpACqwQ6AEIeTAI#v=onepage&q=mathematics%20are%20not%20science&f=false
"mathematical knowledge isn’t the same as empirical knowledge, and consequently mathematics is, indeed, a different way of knowing from science." - Massimo Pigliucci. Are there "other" ways of knowing? (2014) Philosophy now.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/102/Are_There_Other_Ways_of_Knowing
"Nonscience traditionally includes not only pseudoscience and metaphysics but also logic, pure mathematics, and other subjects that cannot be tested against experience, including the normative topics studied in value theory." -Thomas Nickles. The Problem of Demarcation. Page 104 of Chapter in the book Philosophy of Pseudoscience (2013).
Many articles of science education also explicitly separate science from mathematics:
"The more successful professional development programs were not simply courses in mathematics or science" -MM Kennedy. Form and Substance in Mathematics and Science Professional Development. In Eric: Institute of Education Sciences. (1999)
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED435552
"they realized learning science and mathematics does not have to be stressful" -DA Huinker. Preparing efficacious elementary teachers in science and mathematics: The influence of methods courses. In Journal of Science Teacher Education (1997)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1023/A%3A1009466323843?journalCode=uste20
Connecting Science and Mathematics Instruction: Pedagogical Context Knowledge for Teachers. -Frykholm. In School Science and Mathematics. (2010)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1949-8594.2005.tb18047.x
The webpage "Understanding science" is founded by the National Science Foundation and attempts to both define and describe science. Even in Understanding  Science it is said that "math is closely related to science" (suggesting that both domains can be considered similar but different):
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/mathematics
In sum, I am not trying to defend one reasoning (mathematics is science) or the other (mathematics is not science). I am just trying to illustrate that it is a highly debated issue. Therefore, I believe it is better for the article to simply talk about "academic papers" of ArXiv. ALL articles on ArXiv are academic, therefore there is nothing misleading about it. Whether all of them are scientific or not is a mather of dispute (mathematics), hence I think it is useful to change "sceintific articles" for "academic articles" to avoid the problematics of assuming that mathematics is universally or generally considered science (when it is debated). James343e (talk) 2:10, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: "Scientific" is fine for a short description. It is true, as far as it goes, whereas "academic" is too broad. XOR'easter (talk) 03:03, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  Arxiv describes itself as a "free distribution service and an open archive for scholarly articles.". How about using "scholarly"? The term encompasses math, science, engineering, finance, economics, etc., as topics, and academic, corporate, and private sources. -- {Talk} 04:18, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Scholarly" is just as broad as "academic", and thus too broad. And no: Arxiv does not describes itself just as a "free distribution service and an open archive for scholarly articles", but much more precisely as a "free distribution service and an open archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics". This is much too long, and "scientific" is fine for a short description. Sapphorain (talk) 11:09, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  I must disagree. Scholarly and academic are two different concepts; scholarly is an approach to knowledge, whereas academic is a kind of institution. Engineering is not usually considered science, nor is quantitative finance. -- {Talk} 12:05, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  What about "technical"? XOR'easter (talk) 16:42, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Technical" is also a good descriptor that I would support. -- {Talk} 20:03, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Much fuss about nothing. I'm fine with either scientific or academic. Technical or scholarly is pedantic.  Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:06, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Academic papers or scientific papers? 

message: Paul Ginsparg's "The global-village pioneers" is no longer available at the sourced URL (directs to an error 404 page). Should the link to this article be updated, or is it relevant to cite here in the first place? Paxrei (talk) 21:02, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Updated. XOR'easter (talk) 21:51, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Defunct links 

message: An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect :ArKiVe and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 July 10#ArKiVe until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.   Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:47, 10 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "ArKiVe" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: I referring here https://www.space.com/dark-energy-2nd-big-bang-research
on this astronomical website source of this study was mentioned: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03710
We all know that arXiv is not peer reviewed…I do not think it is wise to add a preliminary study to the encyclopedia...it is still not reliable Clerk18890 (talk) 20:38, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: This talk page is for discussions of how to improve the Wikipedia article about arXiv, not for the use of arXiv elsewhere on Wikipedia. That said,  is the same as , a reliably published paper in a major journal. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:51, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I misunderstood this page Clerk18890 (talk) 06:45, 25 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  ‏source isn't reliable