Talk:How Not to Be Wrong

Very misleading summary

Wanted to say as someone who finished this book, the summary as is, is very misleading. As just a single example, the article references the author talking about Bible Codes as an example of something mathematical in nature when in reality, the author was trying to demonstrate incorrect conclusions drawn by an attempt at using math. I propose the summary be removed to something more concise (say a paragraph like most books) as the detail chapter by chapter one misses so many points. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FEA8:23C0:32F:B868:A344:3CA8:9732 (talk) 18:01, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Question about editing this Article

Q: Is it okay to scan or take a picture of one of Ellenberg's drawings and post it in the article summary as long as I cite it from his book?

Here is my evaluation of this article: The article I am going to be editing is on a book called "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg. Upon first sight, the article is extremely barren. There is one sentence at the very beginning that introduces the work. There's nothing that's necessarily wrong with it, but personally I think that section could be expanded upon. The first piece of a Wikipedia article is essential, in that it should describe exactly what the topic is, and I feel like this part in my particular article should be longer and clearer. The summary section of my article is very small as well. Unlike other articles on novels which go in depth on each chapter and provide some sort of analysis, this article doesn't have that. If I was someone who was looking to learn more about the book, I would not be able to figure out what the book was about based on the very small summary they gave. The longest and last section of this page is one on Reception. It includes three book reviews from very widely known sources, which include Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington post. The reviews that were chosen were very good in the sense that they weren't biased in any particular way, and were very objective in their critique. They also included links to other reviews/sources where people could check out more reviews if they wanted to.

There's a box in the corner that has a picture of the book, as well as the books ISBN, amount of pages, publication date, and other useful information. The picture of the book is just a scan of its front cover, and it's making me think about what I'm going to add for my media aspect. Something that Ellenberg does consistently throughout the book is draw very minimalistic/simple illustrations that go with the topic he is trying to explain, and it aids the reader in their understanding of the topic. I would most likely try to add a scan of one of these illustrations and pair it with its respective chapter summary when I go back and edit the article.The article itself is rated "Start Class" and has "low priority" as well. This is great, because the only place that this article can really go is up. Because of the fact that it is considered low priority, the goal would be to expand a little on not only the chapters, but go into the actual theories themselves that he explains. This is very cool considering the fact that not many books have a mathematical component to them, besides textbooks of course.The formulas could be cited from his book in addition to other textbooks/articles, so it would also contribute to the overall length of the works cited too. Ellenberg does a really great job of explaining all of the high level concepts in a way that everyone can understand, and the article on his book definitely deserves to be better. Atresgallos (talk) 01:47, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Puff prominence

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, written by Jordan Ellenberg, is a New York Times Best Selling book that connects various economic and societal philosophies with basic mathematics and statistical principles.

I'm really not a fan of puff language embedded as a modifier in the defining, topic sentence. — MaxEnt 21:26, 21 June 2018 (UTC)