[seqfan] Re: A139414

[Benoît Jubin]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Maximilian Hasler
<maximilian.hasler at gmail.com> wrote:
> This (not seq. A139414 but the general problem) is IMO an important
> and serious issue, and worth to be addressed and discussed in a
> suitable manner.

I agree, and I don't want to be misunderstood: I totally discourage
submissions of arbitrary sequences, although we should only reject
very few.

> For what it's worth, I have a first suggestion: how about adding more keywords,
> maybe any one or more among { "fun", "digit", "recreational",
> "serious", "math", "physics", "graph", ... }
> or whatever : suggestions are welcome (but I think "chaff", "crap",
> "great", ... might be too disputed to be useful).

I think we should on the contrary have only one keyword (already, less
and dumb are a bit redundant) for these sequences.  The idea is using
as few resources as possible for these sequences, so that we can
concentrate on the others.  Also, maybe the default search could
exclude these sequences (so that we don't have to write every time
"-kw:less -kw:dumb"), and an analogous option could be added to the
webcam.  To sum up, we don't want to exclude these sequences, but they
are not worth much effort neither.

Regards
Benoit

>
>
> I just discovered that the feature of prefixing a term by "-" (or "~"
> for numbers) to /exclude/ specific search terms is already
> implemented, so one might do a lookup for "1,11,111 -kw:fun"
> to exclude all "fun" sequences (where I used the shortcut "kw" for
> "keyword" which is yet implemented only in my dreams, as is "au:" for
> "author:").
>
> Also possible : provide a checkbox for this ("-kw:fun" or (the chosen
> equivalent of) "kw:serious"), next to the search window, like:
>
> [_] check here to use OEIS in "serious" mode, where
>     about half of all sequences are ignored.
>
> I'm aware that
> - it's rarely easy (or even possible) to make such a distinction in an
> objective way
> - it's not clear what of the above would apply to the sequence
> mentioned in the subject (but as mentioned privately I don't think
> that this one is likely to give "false positive" search results very
> often).
>
> Or another keyword like e.g. "elementary", which would be somewhere
> in-between "core" and "anything arbitrarily constructed"...?
>
> Regards,
> Maximilian
>
> PS: another idea: implement "votes" for sequences and/or authors - but
> that's a little less immediate to implement.
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 10:15 -0500, David Wilson wrote:
> As a one-time contributor of chaff, I attest that there is much chaff in
>> the OEIS. I have heard the argument that the OEIS is a database, and can
>> therefore afford to collect some chaff, however, I hasten to add that
>> the OEIS is also an academic work referenced in a great deal of
>> mathematical research, and in that regard should enforce some minimal
>> agreeable standard of accuracy and relevance.
>>
>> Such standards can only be enforced by a reasonably objective formal
>> editorial review process. In the absence of such a process, the OEIS
>> will continue to collect chaff.
>
>
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