The reason I haven't bothered to publish this particular "result" is that I considered it to fall below my standard for "least publishable unit": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit IMHO, my "result" falls into the category of "fun fact", which might have been included in HAKMEM, Programming Pearls, or Graphics Gems, but not in a separate paper. If you look at the math literature from the 19th century, these journals were happy to include tiny tidbits like this one. But that was before "publish or perish". Now, you find completely obscure papers with about 3 pages of intro; it might take you 3 months just to understand the vocabulary. Then, after all this work, you find that the "meat" is non-existent. The current size of "least publishable unit" is approaching Planck length. I just went through an exercise in trying to find priority on some minor element of "quadtrees", and was irritated by the volume of papers that all said the same thing, even while referencing one another, and while saying nothing new. I merely wanted to make this minorly interesting tidbit available to someone researching circumcircles & circumcenters, and thought that adding a single external link to my article was the best way to do this. I didn't want to distort the article itself, which was pretty good in laying out the classical info on circumcircles. But if someone were curious, they might have found my little tidbit fun. I guess Knuth or some other text might have made proving it an exercise for the reader. The size of the effort in publishing should be related to the importance of the result. Requiring full peer-reviewed publication for such "fun facts" is a waste of everyone's time. Just check the math, and if it is correct, allow it. This wasn't the Four Color Conjecture, or Fermat's Last Theorem. At 04:32 AM 6/3/2012, David Makin wrote:
I disagree as a Brit, since Wiki and any such open system really, really doesn't care *who* discovered the information, it only cares that the information is correct. Although not an "academic" myself, as a Brit that's how I think *all* such research should be i,e. just give the correct info for all to see, who discovered it originally and who posted it are comparatively unimportant (except to boost the ego/s of the person/s concerned).