Talk:WolframAlpha

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Archives

Archive 1

Removed quote that purveyed no information[edit]

I just removed this:

Using the Mathematica toolkit, Wolfram Alpha can respond to natural language questions and generate a human-readable answer. Founder Stephen Wolfram has said of the engine:
"All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do,"^[1]

... because firstly, it suggests that Mathematica is a magical natural language understanding tool (which AFAIK it is not), and secondly the quote is even more mystifying. It amounts to "for a computer to do task X, it must first parse its input, then perform the task". QVVERTYVS (hm?) 21:15, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Farber, Dan (March 8, 2009). "Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough?". CNET. Retrieved 2013-02-09.

@McGeddon: "natural language" is right there in the next paragraph. The quote serves no purpose. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 21:27, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, realised my mistake after I'd clicked revert. I've undone my edit and put a wikilink in. --McGeddon (talk) 21:30, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cool, thanks! I should have moved kept the link to NLU. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 21:33, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

&;&; Perhaps there is no problem here except for my taking idle chatter too seriously! If I should return someday to this talk page, and find any clarification of the relavency of contribs 2 thru 4 to the initial talk contrib, I for one will recosider the possibility that more carefully communicative editors have dogs in that fight.

Jerzy•t 06:43, 29 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, wiser authorities than I have noted that similar recipes are suitable to more than one choice of primary ingredient. Until next time, i remain YMMC&OS.
--Jerzy•t 06:56, 29 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Reads like an advertisement[edit]

Reading through this page seems more like an advertisement of the service than information about the site. Needs more information about how the engine works and its history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:A601:7001:4500:9139:D729:7650:C174 (talk) 00:41, 30 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Appropriate syntax must support any accurate information[edit]

I found

Wolfram Alpha can only provide robust query results based on computational facts, not queries on the social sciences,

which demands replacement by syntax more like

Wolfram Alpha can ~~only~~ provide robust query results only based on computational facts, and thus not to many queries that pertain to the social sciences.
Perhaps even more importantly, I may not have adequately challenged our colleague's black and white contrast between the Two Cultures, since "the soft-sister sciences" do depend on lots of numerical realities, and much "hard science" is far from reducible to numeric information!
--Jerzy•t 08:37, 29 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

UPE[edit]

Hello. I have just tagged this article {{undisclosed paid}}, because it was very heavily edited by a (highly likely paid) sockfarm that is focused almost exclusively on promoting Stephen Wolfram and his work. Please see this COIN thread (perma) and the related SPI for more information. The article will need a thorough review before the tag is removed. Thanks and best, Blablubbs|talk 15:13, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It would not surprise me if people are paid to edit the article. I have not looked at the current version of the Mathematica entry, but in the past, it has read very much like an advert. But do you have any evidence of someone being paid to do this? Without any evidence, I don't see how you can justify having the tag there, despite I strongly suspect you are right. Drkirkby (talk) 11:10, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you can find a LinkedIn profile of a former employee whose resume states he was responsible for managing "Wolfram's presence on collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, and Quora..." --Montesquieu1789 (talk) 17:04, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]