This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I have examined the pseudo code on the AVL Tree page and it appears to be flawed in many respects. I contacted Wikipedia via email and gave them the source code to AVL Trees in C++, C# and Java. I look forward to a better presentation resulting from this step.

AVL Trees account for Sets, Maps and Trees - the three most important classes in computer science. Therefore it is critical that the correct code be presented (if Wiki is to maintain credibility). NNcNannara (talk) 06:04, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

You can find the source code to AVL Trees in Java at I# in Java. A complete discussion of AVL Trees in C# may be found at I# in C#. NNcNannara (talk) 06:07, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

The Pseudo Code for AVL Trees involves pointers whereas the actual C# and Java contains no pointers. Perhaps Psuedo Code is a dated subject. It needs to be ascertained precisely how to approach the presentation of trees. My opinion is that actual modern code is better than dated pseudo code. The question is which language to use C++, C# or Java. I have already supplied the source code to AVL in Native C++, Managed C++, C# and Java at Rosetta. NNcNannara (talk) 13:38, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your interest in improving wikipedia, but this is not how it works. We don't publish original thout. Please read WP:NOR, WP:CITE, WP:RS. - üser:Altenmann >t 15:37, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Thout is indeed the correct hecsadeinnal spelling ou "thought". The original thout canne phronn the cited repherence ou Kruse. I uuish I could tace credit - but alas the Russian's got there phirst. It has sonne neuu pheatures such as a 4th state phor the Header node.NNcNannara (talk) 11:46, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

I recently made some significant edits to Singleton pattern to remove content which I perceived as overly Java-oriented. I received a negative reaction from an anonymous IP on my talk page whom I have replied to at Talk:Singleton pattern. I stand by my edits, but regardless, I have observed that there is very little consistency between the various software design pattern articles. Perhaps there need to be some, at least unofficial, guidelines which all of the articles should follow? I list my suggestions and thoughts here.

In my opinion, articles on individual software design patterns should be as programming language-neutral as possible. By this I mean that the article should discuss the pattern in a way that is generally applicable to the majority of languages in which that pattern is relevant. Examples that violate this guidelines include:

• Code samples which rely on features not present in the majority of relevant languages (e.g. using Java enums to implement the singleton pattern)
• Discussion of language-specific implementation details or bugs which should be accounted for when implementing a pattern (e.g. the Java synchronized and final keywords)

These articles are about software design patterns, not about things like naming conventions or software design best practices. For example, the following sentence from the Adapter pattern article is totally inappropriate:

When implementing the adapter pattern, for clarity one can apply the class name [ClassName]To[Interface]Adapter to the provider implementation, for example DAOToProviderAdapter.

Code samples should be embedded in the relevant sections of the article, not placed in a separate "Code samples" section. Code samples perform a similar function to images: they are an illustrative aid to understanding the topic under discussion. Segregating them to a separate section of the article only makes things harder for the reader. In addition, if we start listing code samples in various languages, how do we determine which languages deserve an entry? Presumable we have to draw the line somewhere, as these articles are not stand-alone lists. And we have to ask ourselves: what purpose does this serve? Is the article really improved by having a C++ example and a Java example and a C# example, when the syntax for all three languages is very similar? Does it help to get across important additional information about the pattern? I would say no.

There is still the question of which language should be used to provide the code samples? For the sake of consistency (I'm a software engineer after all), I would be perfectly fine if a consensus could be reached on a language to use for all articles on patterns (e.g. C++ or Java or C# for all object-oriented software design patterns – I would probably advocate Java on the basis that it is probably the most widely understood language). However, I can see this consensus being near-impossible to reach, so perhaps the language should be chosen per-article. I am open to the idea of using different languages for each code sample within an article – variation is good and neutral – but I worry that it will be harder to compare code samples if they are written in different languages (they will generally demonstrate different variations of the pattern). I'm keen to hear opinions on this.

Lastly, code sample should be as minimal as is appropriate. If a bare-bones template is sufficient to illustrate the pattern, then that should be used. If providing some additional dummy functionality is necessary to accurately convey the purpose of the pattern, then it's fine to elaborate a bit. However, the sample should be kept short. For example, the Adapter pattern PHP example is far too long.

We might be able to devise an infobox template for software design patterns. If possible, the infobox should contain the class diagram (or other applicable diagram) for the basic pattern. Other information the infobox could contain:

• The type of pattern (creational, structural, behavioural, ...)
• Summary of the purpose of the pattern (if this is do-able in infobox format).
• Aliases
• Well-known publications that discuss the pattern (e.g. GOF)
• Related patterns

However, perhaps there is simply not enough to summarize to justify an infobox. Definitely open of suggestions about this.

I propose the general headings to be standardized across all articles:

• Lead – Should summarise the article. As per Wikipedia guidelines, should not contain information not provided and sourced elsewhere.
• Purpose – Should describe what the pattern does and where, why and how it should be used (and should be well-sourced). I don't think it is necessary to subdivide this section unless the section becomes unmanageable.
• Implementation – Should list the requirements and general approach to implementation of the pattern. If there are variations on the pattern then they can have subsections here.

These headings are not hard and fast, and I'm certainly open to other suggestions, but it would be nice to have some consistency. For example, I would like to see a "Criticisms" section in the singleton pattern article, as it is a somewhat controversial pattern.

I'll be glad to hear feedback on my thoughts. Hpesoj00 (talk) 08:46, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Since data structures of the concatenate chain model, or blockchains (originally "block chains", but now most commonly spelled "blockchain") seem to be much in the news with major financial sector initiatives underway in addition to their tradition digital currency exchange-of-value use case, and since WikiProject Databases seems to be in hiatus, it would be real helpful to have a few more editors from the WikiProject Computer science project consider taking a look at a few of the articles in that space. The ones that I know could use much more work to improve them are blockchain (database) and Ethereum. But I'd be happy to suggest/find others if asked. Hope to see some of you over there. Cheers. N2e (talk) 01:13, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Hello WikiProject Computer science/Archive 11. You are cordially invited to participate in WikiProject PHP, a project dedicated on improving Wikipedia's coverage and detail regarding the PHP programming language. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project.

-- 1Wiki8........................... (talk) 17:58, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Please see Talk:Software update#Software update as a redirect to Patch (computing)? --5.170.9.7 (talk) 20:34, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

See

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Access locks: Visual Design RFC
• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Access Locks: Citation Template Behaviour RFC

Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:51, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello,

I have added enough material to Bird–Meertens formalism to revoke its stub status, in my estimation.

However, this is fresh paint and not my field, so if anyone is interested in the topic, their eyeballs (or any other relevant body parts) are welcome.

Cheers — Gamall Wednesday Ida (t · c) 16:43, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

Could somebody from the assessment team have a look at Pointing device and update the quality/importance class, please? A student in my course significantly extended the article compared to the previous state which (imho) improved it quite a bit. As I was involved in the writing of the article, I would prefer not to do the reassessment myself. Raphman (talk) 14:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Greetings WikiProject Computer science/Archive 11 Members!

This is a one-time-only message to inform you about a technical proposal to revive your Popular Pages list in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey that I think you may be interested in reviewing and perhaps even voting for:

• Fix and improve Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report

If the above proposal gets in the Top 10 based on the votes, there is a high likelihood of this bot being restored so your project will again see monthly updates of popular pages.

Further, there are over 260 proposals in all to review and vote for, across many aspects of wikis.

Thank you for your consideration. Please note that voting for proposals continues through December 12, 2016.

Best regards, Stevietheman — Delivered: 17:57, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

My list of missing topics related to computers is updated - Skysmith (talk) 19:31, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Link for giving input: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Designing for virtual reality. Samsara 14:46, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

The WikiJournal of Science is a start-up academic journal which aims to provide a new mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of Wikipedia's scientific content. It is part of a WikiJournal User Group that includes the flagship WikiJournal of Medicine.[1][2]. Like Wiki.J.Med, it intends to bridge the academia-Wikipedia gap by encouraging contributions by non-Wikipedians, and by putting content through peer review before integrating it into Wikipedia. Since it is just starting out, it is looking for contributors in two main areas: Editors See submissions through external academic peer review Format accepted articles Promote the journal Authors Original articles on topics that don't yet have a Wikipedia page, or only a stub/start Wikipedia articles that you are willing to see through external peer review (either solo or as in a group, process analagous to GA / FA review) Image articles, based around an important medical image or summary diagram If you're interested, please come and discuss the project on the journal's talk page, or the general discussion page for the WikiJournal User group. ^ Shafee, T; Das, D; Masukume, G; Häggström, M (2017). "WikiJournal of Medicine, the first Wikipedia-integrated academic journal". WikiJournal of Medicine. 4. doi:10.15347/wjm/2017.001. ^ "Wikiversity Journal: A new user group". The Signpost. 2016-06-15.

T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 10:38, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

Primitive data type - This article needs attention from an expert in Computer science. Is there anyone can edit this article? Please have a look on this. Thank you very much.

Dulaj Chathuranga (talk) 17:28, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Template:Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has been nominated for merging with Template:IEEE councils. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:11, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

I am trying to deal with

• AI takeover
• AI takeovers in popular culture
• Existential risk from artificial general intelligence
• AI control problem
• Superintelligence
• Technological singularity
• Intelligence explosion
• Friendly artificial intelligence

Which overlap in various ways, both in content and in concept.

I propose that AI takeover be reduced to a meta style article like this revision, covering several topics with specific content placed in topical articles where possible. Meanwhile, AI control problem ought to be merged into Existential risk from artificial general intelligence, Intelligence explosion ought to be merged into Technological singularity, and Friendly artificial intelligence ought to be merged into superintelligence. These topics are very similar and the sources are often shared. K.Bog 22:43, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Friendly artificial intelligence and superintelligence are distinct topics, although obviously there is overlap, and shouldn't be merged. — Gamall Wednesday Ida (t · c) 23:39, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

However, a merge of Friendly artificial intelligence into machine ethics might be possible. I don't see the harm in keeping them as distinct articles, though. — Gamall Wednesday Ida (t · c) 23:43, 28 March 2017 (UTC)]]

What to do with the AI takeover article is being discussed at Talk:AI takeover#What's next?. — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Transhumanist (talk • contribs)

The perennial discussion of whether our articles about algorithms are improved or worsened by adding long chunks of code implementing the algorithms has raised its head again, this time at Talk:Hopcroft–Karp algorithm. Please contribute your opinions there. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:05, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm trying to devise distinctive short descriptions for

• Category:Statistical algorithms
• Category:Stochastic algorithms, and
• Category:Randomized algorithms,

see Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2017_April_18#Category:Statistical algorithms. Maybe some of the categories should even be joined.

(Possibly, a statistical algorithm is an ordinary one that computes a function, such as the standard deviation, of a given set of statistical data points; and a stochastic algorithm, aka. randomized algorithm, aka. probabilistic algorithm, gets an extra random source as input, as in Monte Carlo and Las Vegas algorithms?)

Are there any experts in this field who can help? Thanks in advance. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 08:47, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject or task force is signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, Community Tech bot will post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science/Archive 11/Popular pages with a list of the most-viewed pages over the previous month that are within the scope of WikiProject Computer science.

We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:

• The pageview data includes both desktop and mobile data.
• The report will include a link to the pageviews tool for each article, to dig deeper into any surprises or anomalies.
• The report will include the total pageviews for the entire project (including redirects).

We're grateful to Mr.Z-man for his original Mr.Z-bot, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding the reach of WikiProject Computer science, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at m:User talk:Community Tech bot.

Warm regards, the Community Tech Team 17:16, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Hello. Could you please expand Alain Colmerauer with in-lined references?Zigzig20s (talk) 00:55, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm endeavouring to clean up the Disjoint-set data structure page. It's currently rated at C-Class. If you have thoughts about what would help improve it, do let me know.Finog (talk) 07:25, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

In February of 2016 the Wikimedia foundation started sending information to all of the websites we link to that allow the owner of the website (or someone who hacks the website, or law enforcement with a search warrant / subpoena) to figure out what Wikipedia page the user was reading when they clicked on the external link.

The WMF is not bound by Wikipedia RfCs, but we can use an advisory-only RfC to decide what information, if any, we want to send to websites we link to and then put in a request to the WMF. I have posted such an advisory-only RfC, which may be found here:

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy

Please comment so that we can determine the consensus of the Wikipedia community on this matter. --Guy Macon (talk) 21:45, 10 June 2017 (UTC)

I have created a new page for computer scientist Dr Kate Devlin. I would be grateful if you would consider it for your project and possibly rate it. Many thanks. Mramoeba (talk) 23:34, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Found "user:Tango tree", an abandoned userpage draft exploring the tango tree with a bunch of images. Are any of those images at all useful? DS (talk) 15:07, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

This draft has already been waiting for four weeks in the AFC queue, but it really needs a subject specialist to review it. If you do not wish to do a full AFC review please post your opinions to the talk page. Thanks Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:53, 6 July 2017 (UTC)

Hello, Please note that Search algorithm, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Today's articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 24 July 2017 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team

I'd like to draw your attention to this edit: recently, a paper has been published claiming to prove P≠NP. If the proof turned out to be unflawed, we'd have to change "unless P=NP" to "since P≠NP" (or similar) in a lot of articles. According to the cited blog, the paper will (have) be(en) discussed in this Oberwolfach Workshop (13-19 Aug). - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 04:43, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

There are hundreds of papers claiming proofs of either P≠NP or P=NP (see e.g. Woeginger's collection). This one was at least by someone with expertise in the right area, but a consensus has developed that it's wrong, the same as all the others. See e.g. the summary of the situation in this more-recent blog post. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:47, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

((Infobox journal)) now features ISO 4 redirect detection to help with the creation and maintenance of these redirects, and will populate Category:Articles with missing ISO 4 abbreviation redirects. ISO 4 redirects help readers find journal articles based on their official ISO abbreviations (e.g. J. Phys. A → Journal of Physics A), and also help with compilations like WP:JCW and WP:JCW/TAR. The category is populated by the |abbreviation= parameter of ((Infobox journal)). If you're interested in creating missing ISO 4 redirects:

• Load up an article from the category (or only check for e.g. Computer science journals).
• One or more maintenance templates should be at the top of page, with links to create the relevant redirects and verify the abbreviations.
• VERIFY THAT THE ABBREVIATION IN |abbreviation= IS CORRECT FIRST

• There are links in the maintenance templates to facilitate this. See full detailed instructions at Category:Articles with missing ISO 4 abbreviation redirects.
• |abbreviation= should contain dotted, title cased versions of the abbreviations (e.g. J. Phys., not J Phys or J. phys.). Also verify that the dots are appropriate.
• If you cannot determine the correct abbreviation, or aren't sure, leave a message at WT:JOURNALS and someone will help you.

• Use the link in the maintenance template to create the redirects and automatically tag them with ((R from ISO 4)).
• WP:NULL/WP:PURGE the original article to remove the maintenance templates.

Thanks. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:37, 31 August 2017 (UTC)

Hey there,

Requesting some assistance Re: this edit (and a more up-to-date diff). See talk page. François Robere (talk) 09:29, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

The WT:MOSCOMP#Definite article section is proposed, here, to be substantially revised for better agreement with RS practice, linguistics, and MoS norms.

Note: I meant to leave notice here on 1 November but didn't; this discussion has changed and is turning into a proposal to merge useful bits of MOS:COMP into MOS:COMPSCI then delete the rest of MOS:COMP. More on that in a moment.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:38, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see proposal at at WT:MOSCOMPSCI, pursuant to the direction the discussion mentioned above has turned.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:40, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Hi, would someone take a look at my userpage? User:BC1278 would like to update the article. Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 06:25, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

AlienVault is a leading cybersecurity software and threat detection firm. The article about them could use a number of updates. I've made my suggestions at Talk:AlienVault. I'm a consultant to AlienVault, and so, according to Wikipedia policy, must have all my suggestions independently reviewed and approved. If anyone has some time to take a look, I'd appreciate it. BC1278 (talk) 18:17, 12 November 2017 (UTC)BC1278

Wikipedia has many thousands of wikilinks which point to disambiguation pages. It would be useful to readers if these links directed them to the specific pages of interest, rather than making them search through a list. Members of WikiProject Disambiguation have been working on this and the total number is now below 20,000 for the first time. Some of these links require specialist knowledge of the topics concerned and therefore it would be great if you could help in your area of expertise.

A list of the relevant links on pages which fall within the remit of this wikiproject can be found at http://69.142.160.183/~dispenser/cgi-bin/topic_points.py?banner=WikiProject_Computer_science

Please take a few minutes to help make these more useful to our readers.— Rod ^talk 14:34, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

See associated discussion at Talk:Merge_algorithm#Merge_K-way_merge_algorithm_article_into_this_one. This is not just a pun. — PCB 22:05, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

I am one of two developers for http://bst.mit.edu I think it would fit as an external link on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_of_binary_search_trees

Firescar96 (talk) 22:35, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:Computer security#Some initial ideas on a split and an overhaul.

Summary: The present article is a mish-mash of material of a general nature (technical, academic, practices, history, terms, incidents, notable-figures) and material of a socio-political nature (infrastructural, regulatory, legal, corporate, financial, espionage and cyberwar, public impacts).

This started as an RM discussion but turned into a scope one. I've proposed that a Cybersecurity article (using the term favored in technology-and-public-policy circles) should be a spinoff, per WP:SUMMARY, for the second group of material, leaving the bulk of the more general info at Computer security (the basic, non-jargon, descriptive term for the field). This would be in keeping with Cyberwarfare, Internet privacy, Internet censorship, Genetically modified food controversies, and numerous other clear splits between technology and technology policy articles (sometimes multiple such articles, e.g. Electronic cigarette → Regulation of electronic cigarettes, Safety of electronic cigarettes, and several others – but let's just start with one here).

I've done a section-by-section review of what needs to be done, but it's just one opinion, so additional input is sought.

Computers: In particular, a whole lot of "cybersecurity" isn't about computers and their security so much as it is about telecommunications infrastructure and its management and control.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:42, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

There's a whole bunch of half-finished wrapper templates for syntax highlighting of example code in various programming language, at Category:Programming typing-aid templates.

They're mostly in the sorry state that Template:D-lang is in, with broken categorization, no documentation, misuse of large font size, and just malfunctioning – they do not respect whitespace, yet line breaks cannot even be forced with <br />.

I repaired some of the issues with a couple of them, like this in the template and this for skeletal documentation, before realizing they're all like this. I didn't resolve the whitespace problem in any of them. It appears to me that these serve no purpose and should be sent to WP:TFD, unless someone wants to make them work right: to issue the article category they're supposed to (actually it would be better to do a namespace test than the |notcat=y thing I did, on second thought), to have proper documentation, with the template category in that, and to do something sane with regard to whitespace. I think Sae1962 created most or all of them, and apparently got side-tracked (I know the feeling!).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  17:18, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Does anybody with any experience in programming have any idea whether uniform binary search is a notable enough technical term to need its own article? I'm running into problems doing a simple Google search because there seem to be some sources that refer to a normal "binary search" as "uniform" without necessarily meaning the topic depicted in the article. I don't know anything about programming so I can't tell the difference with any real certainty.

I'll do any legwork if there should be a merge or delete. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:25, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

I just noticed that there appears to be some overcategorization in Category:Programming languages. Please comment at Category talk:Programming languages § Overcategorization in this category and help fix the issue if you can. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 15:12, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

The article Linda Shapiro has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

I don't believe that Professor Shapiro meets the basic notability guideline, of having "received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." I looked through the top 50 G-Hits for "professor Linda Shapiro" and quickly realized that there are multiple subjects, found no independent reliable sources providing coverage, and got to the point where the three words were each appearing separately in the article instead of together.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated)) notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing ((proposed deletion/dated)) will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion.  ★  Bigr Tex 02:59, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

What does it mean for a source to be "reliable and independent of the subject"? I understand one's personal webpage is not independent, but what about if a committee has them listed as a former chair -- is that not reliable or independent? Because if not I'm confused by that considering there are other articles of computer scientists where such sources are the few (or only) sources that are not written by the subject themselves. Derek M (talk) 03:18, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

For a professor the relevant notability guideline is WP:NPROF, not WP:GNG. People who meet NPROF are actually exempt from having to meet GNG, mostly because notable academics are rarely written about personally, and most of their notability comes from citations to or reviews of their work. You'd be perfectly justified to remove the PROD on that basis, especially if you have reason to believe the person passes NPROF. DGG knows NPROF better than most people know the alphabet so I have pinged him to have a look.

That being said...I think generally you can take a committee's own word for whether or not someone was a member or a chair. Same thing with a university saying someone is a professor there. That may not add much to notability depending on the individual committee or university. "Independent" when it comes to NPROF is more like, don't cite their own papers or publications to support notability.

And finally, WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. There's no way to know how the PROD tagger came across this article specifically, nor does it really matter why they tagged this article and not others in the category. If the subjects of those other articles are not notable, they should be deleted. If they are, their sourcing should be improved. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:43, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. So if I am understanding you correctly, the proposal quoted the wrong criteria. We should instead be focusing more on whether this professor passes the "Average Professor Test." I am not in academia so I can't comment on whether a particular committee is notable or a particular award is "prestigious" enough for that criteria but I am glad to learn more about the process regardless. Derek M (talk) 04:08, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

The criteria are in WP:PROF. They are much more specific than the "average professor test", which we have not used for years. Shapiro easily passes several of them. But the article as nominated was very bad, mentioning almost nothing about Shapiro beyond the name of her employer. It is understandable that an article in that shape was nominated for deletion, but the nominator also demonstrates a clear failure to understand the criteria for academic notability. I unprodded it and added some better information about her. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:28, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

depending on how one defines professor, using the so-called "average professor test" would make all associate professors and higher at any college notable; but our standards are higher, and I do not think anyone has advocated anything so broad with 1996 or so. With the actual WP:PROF standards the line is more at the level of all full professors at major research universities--but that's only a very rough indication, because the actual specific criteria need to be applied. (the clearest one here is IEEE Fellow, which is a major honor in the field) This is entirely indpendent of the GNG,, which does not have to be met; though it is usually could be met also, it would givevery erratic results in this area. DGG ( talk ) 14:51, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I know it is late in the day, and the IEEE Fellow entry wasn't in the article, but a quick 10 minute search would have shown she was a fellow, and they dont hand these out in lucky bags. I mean they really dont. scope_creep (talk) 15:34, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Question please. Is "Foo?" with a question-mark used in computing as a variant of Foo. In ictu oculi (talk) 18:05, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I've never seen this in the wild. Languages like Ruby can have function names of the form foo?, typically used as predicate functions, so I suppose it is possible as a metasyntactic construct. --Mark viking (talk) 20:22, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The B-tree article (version oldid=817371125, 28 December 2017) seems to have an interesting part in section #Initial construction, which is unsourced, incomplete and possibly original research. Please comment on appropriate way of resolving the issue at Talk:B-tree#Initial construction by bulkloading. --CiaPan (talk) 11:10, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

A common and well-studied problem is generating uniform random numbers mod n, i.e. a random number 0 ≤ x < n. I can't find mention of the common algorithms (rand32() % n, (uint64_t)rand32() * n >> 32, and the rejection techniques used to eliminate bias in the results).

• Am I blind and this is already in Wikipedia somewhere?
• Assuming not, where should it go? I'm not sure which is best among:
  • Discrete uniform distribution
  • Random number generation
  • Pseudo-random number sampling
  • A separate article like Draft:Algorithms for generating uniform distributions

Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks! 23.83.37.241 (talk) 03:08, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree that these are popular techniques in practice to get a random number in [0...n] given the output of rand32 or a similar random function. However, what kind of encyclopedic content did you imagine we should have about them? To me, these just seem like code snippets, not notable algorithms. BenKuykendall (talk) 22:03, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

@BenKuykendall: Well, algorithms are encyclopedic content. Including ones to generate probability distributions like the alias method and ziggurat algorithm and the Box-Muller transform. Mostly I want to talk about the bias, how it varies depending on the input size, how it differs between the modulo and multiplication algorithms (the fact that the overrepresented numbers are all at the low end with the modulo algorithm biases the mean more than the multiplicative), and then ways to eliminate it.

The actual inspiration was simpler: I came across Fast random shuffling and hadn't seen the algorithm there for debiasing the multiplicative technique. "I wonder if that's in Wikipedia?" And then I couldn't find any discussion of the entire subject, so I had to write more.

For my own future reference: How much bias is introduced by the remainder technique?

23.83.37.241 (talk) 01:38, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

@23.83.37.241: Sorry if it sounded like I was trying to shut down your idea; I just want to make sure that other sources have talked about these sampling techniques. If you're still looking for sources, I recommend Knuth; he mentions the first technique in section 3.4.1 of TAOCP vol 2 and has some other citations. In terms of an appropriate article, I would lean towards adding a new section to Pseudo-random number sampling. Best, BenKuykendall (talk) 17:50, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Hey all. Someone has nominated ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for speedy deletion. Anyone here want to step in to the debate? I for one think ACM awards are significant in general, but I would appreciate hearing what you all have to say. Best BenKuykendall (talk) 17:56, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

For everyone's information, the issue of WP:Notability is still under discussion, but the WP:SPEEDY proposal (under A7) has been withdrawn; it's going through the long process while an editor is working to find references. 23.83.37.241 (talk) 03:11, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

With the wikilinks, you can see many of the winners/honorable mentions are notable (and many more need to be linked or added). I'm not trying to inherit to the award, but I think many gained notability from the award. I was wondering about how to improve the article. Should we always include the university's announcement of the award and/or third party mentions or just use the ACM list? Should we add the title of each thesis? StrayBolt (talk) 08:09, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

The deleted page was linked to on this project page and our to-do list. I removed the newly red links.

Any thoughts on how we can keep track of biographies of computer scientists without this page? I liked having the recently-changed link [[Special:RecentChangesLinked/Academic genealogy of computer scientists|Biographies of computer scientists]]. Any idea on how to maintain that functionality now?

(The Afd page: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Academic genealogy of computer scientists) BenKuykendall (talk) 19:13, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

I guess I resolved this by linking to List of computer scientists instead BenKuykendall (talk) 04:15, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

New to the WikiProject Computer science. I noticed there is no Computer History category listed as part of this WikiProject scope? I guess there might be many interesting articles. Floppy Disk, ENIAC, IE6, etc.

Xinbenlv (talk) 04:16, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a great deal of information about historic computation; much of it is organized in the Timeline of computing. BenKuykendall (talk) 19:26, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@Xinbenlv: There is a Category:History of computing with a subcategory Category:History of computing hardware and multiple sub-sub-categories... --CiaPan (talk) 13:02, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi there. A user is asking quite a lot of questions on this page that falls under the scope of this WP but I have no idea how to answer them. Could someone more knowledgeable have a look please? Regards SoWhy 07:26, 3 May 2018 (UTC)

Just thought I'd pop up here and link to an article that could use some attention. Cache hierarchy needs some serious copy-editing, suffers from WP:Jargon, and is very intel-specific with few sources cited, lending itself to read almost like an advertisement for x86/x86-64 architecture design decisions. Figured any academics that are on here that want to research it or anyone knowledgeable about the subject might want to take a look at the article. I'm getting by just going through a section at a time and fixing the most egregious errors, but this is going to need more than a couple people looking through it. Rejewskifan (talk) 20:09, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template ((Transclude lead excerpt)).

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:29, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Over on WP:WPM we been working on identifying draft which come under our project and reviewing them at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/List of math draft pages. Part of this process involved finding draft which had mathematical of chemical equations in them. Quite a few of them come under your project and we have listed them at Wikipedia:List of draft pages on science and engineering. You may wish to examine these and see if any should be promoted to main space. --Salix alba (talk): 07:45, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi! The § Things to do section requests a copy-edit of the Computing article. I've found and fixed a few small things. Please have a look, and comment or improve on my efforts. There's also no ((copyedit)) template on that page, so I won't be removing it when done …! yoyo (talk) 20:50, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

I have nominated ROT13 for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. — Bilorv_(c)(talk) 01:19, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

The disamb page for the word "Bot" includes a link to our article about Turing's paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The word "bot" apparently doesn't occur in that article.

This paper and the concept of "bots" might be related, but IMHO it's wrong to include a link to that article as an actual disamb of "Bot".

What say you? - 189.122.52.73 (talk) 02:42, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi there. I noticed that Garden of Eden (cellular automaton) was unreviewed, and given the quality of it, I felt it was better to B-class assess it now than rate it C-class and it not get seen for a while. I've assessed all categories other than scope, but could do with a subject-matter expert to confirm whether it "reasonably covers the topic, and does not contain obvious omissions or inaccuracies." Would someone be able to take a look at it? Thank you. — Sasuke Sarutobi (push to talk) 18:44, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Well, I think it does (and probably qualify as a cellular automaton expert), but I have a COI, as I wrote most of the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:26, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

From my physics background I know something of cellular automata, but would not say I was an expert. I read through the article and some of the sourcing in some depth at the time of the RFC there and began to think of it as a good article candidate. As far as I can tell, it covers the field well and no obvious omissions or errors. In my opinion, easily a B class. --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 03:09, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you both. I've now updated it to B-class accordingly.  Done — Sasuke Sarutobi (push to talk) 16:34, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Some strangeness happened at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Toledo Nanochess. Could I entice somebody impartial who's both a programmer (and can thus understand the geekiness) and an admin (and is thus qualified to close the discussion) to take a look at it? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:49, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Not an admin, but it's a weird debate. I think most the votes are to keep, nominally a weak keep based on the chessbase and ICGA articles. Most participants appear to be making a joke of the code in the article. Their votes are also explained in English. I would recommended to ignore the code as it's not written to be valid. Instead take whatever inference is possible from the English in the debate. — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 18:47, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

I am surprised that there isn't already one. And I talked to another Editor who was also surprised. I am here to ask for help to improve that article and I do believe that some of you will certainly help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Web_shell

I have copied the most of the draft from a US government website https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA15-314A I know that United States copyright law does permit re-use. But my problem is that it addresses the reader and offers opinions and advice. Can any willing editor help me to fix it ? Eatcha (talk) 14:29, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

UPDATE i fixed the "addresses the reader and offers opinions and advice" Eatcha (talk) 09:17, 23 December 2018 (UTC)