Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computer science/Archive 11

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 5Archive 9Archive 10Archive 11

AVL Trees - Pseudo Code

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)

Guidelines for individual software design pattern articles

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.

Language-neutrality

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)

No superfluous information or opinions

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

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.

Infoboxes

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.

Article structure

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)

Blockchain data structure and "blockchain" as an emerging imprtant technology

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)

WikiProject PHP

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

Software update as a redirect to Patch (computing)?

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

RFCs on citations templates and the flagging free-to-read sources

See

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

Bird–Meertens formalism

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)

Reassessment request for article "Pointing device"

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:

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, SteviethemanDelivered: 17:57, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Missing topics list

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.

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ "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 - needs attention from an expert

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)

Too many articles on singularity/superintelligence/etc

I am trying to deal with

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 (talkcontribs)

Source code vs pseudocode, yet again

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)

Stochastical algorithms

I'm trying to devise distinctive short descriptions for

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)

Disjoint-sets

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)

RfC Announce: Wikimedia referrer policy

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)

New page

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)

old userspace draft

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)

Please help review Draft:Priority search tree

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)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

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

Recent proof attempt of P≠NP

I'd like to draw your attention to this edit: recently, a paper has been published claiming to prove PNP. 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)

ISO 4 redirects help!

{{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. AJournal 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)

Program execution sidebar

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)

WP:Manual of Style/Computing#Definite article section proposed for revision

 – 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 ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ʌ<  11:38, 5 November 2017 (UTC)

Merging MOS:COMPSCI#Style and salvageable parts of MOS:COMP into a real guideline

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see proposal at at WT:MOSCOMPSCI, pursuant to the direction the discussion mentioned above has turned.  — SMcCandlish ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ʌ<  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)

Add Geometric BST View Visualizer

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)

Splitting public-policy from technical material at Computer security

 – 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 cigaretteRegulation 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 ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ʌ<  10:42, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Pile of broken programming-language templates

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 ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ʌ<  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)

Overcategorization in Category:Programming languages

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)

Foo

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)

Problem with bulkloading a B-tree

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)

Algorithms for generating uniform distributions

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).

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)

Speedy deletion of ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

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)

No "Computer History" category?

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)

Input needed at Talk:AV1

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)

Cache hierarchy page could use some work

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)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

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.

Background

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)

Various Computer Science/AI drafts

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)

Copy-edit to "Computing" article

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)

Featured article review of ROT13

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.  DoneSasuke Sarutobi (push to talk) 16:34, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Help closing AfD

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)

There is no article about web shell on Wikipedia so i created a draft regarding web shell

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)

Editors in this WikiProject may be interested in the featured quality source review RFC that has been ongoing. It would change the featured article candidate process (FAC) so that source reviews would need to occur prior to any other reviews for FAC. Your comments are appreciated. --IznoRepeat (talk) 21:33, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Was wondering if someone from this WikiProject would mind taking a look at this new article and assssing it. It looks like a first attempt at writing an article by a new user. Subject matter seems quite technical, and it reads more like an academic paper than a Wikipedia article. I tried to do some basic formatting cleanup, but perhaps someone here is familiair with the subject matter and can help with the phrasing, etc. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:16, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

The article contains a huge fork of CAPTCHA, which must be trimmed mercilessly. That done, we may take a closer look whether it is OR or covered somewhere else. Unfortunately I cannot do this due to computer access impairment.- Altenmann >talk 05:27, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Missing deep learning topics

Articles about many notable deep networks are not created. --Sharouser (talk) 12:18, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Weird Article alerts behavior

Why is Pareto efficiency listed under PR but the discussion link is broken? Qzekrom (talk) 02:16, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Boldface for computational complexity classes

In computational complexity theory it's traditional to denote complexity classes by short, inscrutable, boldface, all-capital abbreviations. Of course (as a project and an encyclopedia) we have to decide what is right for us. At the moment our articles are split between boldfacing complexity classes throughout (e.g., RE, AM, UP, PH, ⊕P, PP, ♯P, IP, ZPP, BQP, NC, L) and leaving them in standard type (e.g., EXPTIME, R, P, NP, PSPACE, APX, AC0). It would be nice to have a style guide imposing uniformity (or at least admitting to the current lack thereof).

Thoughts?

CRGreathouse (t | c) 07:06, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Prefer normal weight. Boldface might be fine in a textbook, if you have complete freedom to choose other style elements. In a Wikipedia article it's too overloaded. --Trovatore (talk) 07:59, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
I'd be okay with sans-serif (in particular the LaTeX command \mathsf), as that's the convention used by many papers/textbooks. I don't think we should use boldface, per the reason given by Trovatore. Enterprisey (talk!) 03:29, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
I'm happy with just one vote, if it's Trovatore's, but I'd like to have somewhere to point to other than this Talk page before I start making changes. Is there a good subject-specific MOS somewhere? - CRGreathouse (t | c) 01:08, 11 January 2019 (UTC)
I agree with Enterprisey (talk · contribs) that \textsf is the most common convention (e.g. instead of NP or NP); but for Wikipedia articles, this may be too distracting. I would be fine with normal weight text in running text, and \textsf inside of formulas on their own lines. I do think, per CRGreathouse (talk · contribs), that we should add this to an MOS -- perhaps a new section in Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science/Manual of style? BenKuykendall (talk) 17:33, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
First choice for me is normal weight text font. Second choice is \textsf in a math formula. (I have different publications with different choices of these conventions, and in my own publications prefer \textsf but here I think the convenience of normal text outweighs the visual distinctiveness of \textsf, which is anyway much smaller than usual because most Wikipedia display styles use sans-serif body text.) Far behind either of those is bold. But behind even boldface is the current mess of sometimes bold and sometimes not. We should standardize this. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:50, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
If "inscrutable" is a term of art regarding fonts, it's one I've never come across... Do you mean "sans-serif" ? Regarding the question, I too would favour normal text font; \textsf is fine within a formula, but frankly I don't give a hoot, so long as it's clear what is meant, and it's consistent *within an article*. — Gamall Wednesday Ida (t · c) 19:29, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
@Gamall Wednesday Ida: I believe the "inscrutability" is due to the overwhelming number of (perhaps unfamiliar) initialisms; not due to the way we typeset them. This issue is perhaps avoidable, if we commit to referencing complexity classes by name (e.g. non-deterministic polynomial time instead of NP) but I do not think this would be a good policy. Wikipedia already has guidelines about the use of acronyms: MOS:ACRO (in summary: write out all but the most common acronyms in full in the first usage). BenKuykendall (talk) 20:53, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Complexity class names like EXP and PSPACE are not acronyms. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:59, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh, I see. Or rather I don't see how they are more -- or less -- inscrutable than any other jargon. I'm also not convinced that spelling them out -- even on first usage -- is likely to be useful; especially for the most common ones. If the reader cares AND they are not familiar with NP yet, then they need a lot more than a few extra words (that were already available on mouseover anyway) to understand what NP actually means. Actually, in the case of NP, I imagine that many, many, *more* people might know the class just as "NP" rather than as "non-deterministic polynomial time". For something more esoteric like ⊕P... that's certainly a class I for one didn't know, and "Parity P" helped me naught in guessing its definition. So yeah, I've trouble imagining a likely usecase where spelling them out might be useful. — Gamall Wednesday Ida (t · c) 02:42, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Deletion of the article on Harald Tveit Alvestrand has been proposed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Harald Tveit Alvestrand. You are invited to join the discussion. — MarkH21 (talk) 21:21, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Haskell (programming language) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Haskell (programming language) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Haskell (programming language) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 00:50, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Java (programming language) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Java (programming language) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Haskell (programming language) (it's part of a bundled nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 00:50, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Python (programming language) for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Python (programming language) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Haskell (programming language) (it's part of a bundled nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 00:50, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Quote_notation: overly optimistic

The article on "Quote_notation", although sort of interesting, is overly optimistic on the usefulness of this notation for general computation with fractions. There is an obvious problem that the length of a quote notated fraction is linear in its denominator, often even close to it.

This optimism is already there in the original article.

For example, the suggestion is that subtraction of two quote notated number is "just subtract". Here a bad counterexample: To subtract 1/19 from 1/17 (giving 2/323), you compute 2941176470588235'3 - 894736842105263159'9, and after subtraction you get a number with a repeating part of 144 digits, ending in ...4334365325077'4

This is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. However, the notation is still an interesting thought experiment, so I would suggest not to remove it, but just make it a bit more realistic.

Software Lifecyle for Mobile app development

Agile is best methodology for software development but when I closely work in Agile methodology I got so many problem in testing phase because in agile methodology the testing phase in not much important and also the clients continuously ask for changes which crate the difficulties in development because we create the test plans and cases acc. to client requirements but when requirements changes then it consumes so much time that why can develop one life cycle which makes the mobile application development easy I have structure and plan but I need some one who can help me If any one intersted please mail me : spatial763@gmail.com

A new newsletter directory is out!

A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.

– Sent on behalf of Headbomb. 03:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Int main

The redirects Int main, With statement and Iterative for loop, which seem relevant to this project, have been nominated for deletion. Your participation in the discussions linked below would be welcome:

Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 11:15, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

A possible Science/STEM User Group

There's a discussion about a possible User Group for STEM over at Meta:Talk:STEM_Wiki_User_Group. The idea would be to help coordinate, collaborate and network cross-subject, cross-wiki and cross-language to share experience and resources that may be valuable to the relevant wikiprojects. Current discussion includes preferred scope and structure. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 02:55, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of List of ACM-W chapters for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of ACM-W chapters is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of ACM-W chapters until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.Cypherquest (talk) 21:02, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of List of ACM-W Celebrations for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of ACM-W Celebrations is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of ACM-W Celebrations until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Cypherquest (talk) 21:02, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Computer graphics for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Computer graphics is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Computer graphics until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 06:06, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

What is a suitable secondary/independent work for the purposes of notability of a language?

Stifle speedy-closed some recently POINTy AFDs. While I agree that they were POINTy, it wasn't obvious to me that the AFDs had no merit. For the particular AFD I noticed, Monkey X, I went and took a moment to see what exists to see what can actually be cited for the purposes of meeting the WP:GNG. I found a small section of a book where the language is used as an example, a how-to program in the language book, an article where the language is used to explore game design, and then trivial mentions elsewhere (nothing of interest in Google, GNews, Gbooks, Gscholar). None of these strike me as rising to the requirements in the WP:GNG.

I am, of course, less interested in the specifics of the case. I'm much more interested in the kinds of works that show a language's notability. --Izno (talk) 21:40, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

It is a good question. From my observations at language AfDs, beyond the requirements of multiple, in-depth, independent RS, the kinds of sources that gain the most traction with other editors are those written "out of universe", that is, sources that write about the language as a separate entity. Such sources might describe the history of the language, what kind of language it is in the pantheon of languages, and what its unique or notable features are. The sources might compare and contrast a language with other languages, or give a history of major applications of a language. They might discuss language standards or standardization efforts. They might discuss the influence of the language on other languages. Sources like this avoid being dismissed as just WP:NOTHOWTO-forbidden manuals. One challenge of the field is that the best sources may be written by the creators. It is sort of absurd that The C Programming Language by K&R, a book with a big impact itself, doesn't technically contribute toward notability of the C language. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 00:15, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
  • I make no comment on the notability of the underlying articles, but to the extent it isn't implied, if you wish to renominate in good faith any of the articles I speedily kept, you are welcome to do so. I did not speedy-close all of the AFDs; where I felt there was justification or other people had weighed in some were left open. Stifle (talk) 10:49, 9 July 2019 (UTC)
    @Stifle: Oh yeah, no worries. As I said, I understand speedy-closing them in this instance. :) --Izno (talk) 13:13, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Sorry guys, I am new to Wikipedia projects. Who should i contact to get this [1] draft reviewed? It's been months. Cheers --MLvisualizer (talk) 09:37, 30 July 2019 (CET)

Issue about Bubble sort page

Hello,

I have recently made some changes to the page Bubble sort, explaining that for some authors (e.g. on CLRS book) Bubble sort is different from the one presented now in Wikipedia, because it does not include a test to check if the array is already sorted, which implies that the time complexity is quadratic () even in the best case, while the version presented in Wikipedia now has linear best-case time complexity ().

But my edits were reversed by a single user. Then, I created a section in Bubble sort's talk page so that we could discuss about that. But, unfortunately, people didn't participate on it. Therefore, I would like to invite you to take a look at it and add your comments there. My main goal is to decide if we should include or omit that information about that version of Bubble sort used by some authors. So, if you can, please, go there and let's discuss. Thank you very much.

--Lp.vitor (talk) 10:41, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

Turing PPT

(Originally posted to talk:Turing completeness, where it got no responses)


A while back, Tom Wildenhain wrote a paper for SIGBOVIK (a parody conference at which computer scientists get to post academic jokes and be silly) about PowerPoint being Turing-complete. This circulated online and has, more than once, been cited in our article on Turing completeness. I have removed it, and left a commented-out warning because, well, SIGBOVIK. However, it occurs to me that this deliberately-silly paper may nonetheless be scientifically valid.

I am completely unqualified to judge whether this actually is the case. I recognize many jokes, but other parts could be serious?

Could anyone who genuinely understands the topic read Wildenhain's article and determine the extent to which it can be trusted? Thanks. DS (talk) 17:45, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Well, it seems that we can really simulate Turing machines with power point, which implies that any program that can be computed by a Turing machine can also be computed by Power Point. However, there is no formal proof in that joke paper (as expected, since formal proofs would be boring). Therefore, I suggest that we don't cite it.
As a side note, I would like to say that actually, Power Point being Turing-complete would not be surprising result, since it is a very complex program that can, for instance, process conditional statements and "action links" between slides (which is probably sufficient to perform loops)... Moreover, there are much less complex things that are Turing complete, like Game of life.
--Lp.vitor (talk) 07:10, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Note...

Does anyone think that Computer Science has reached it's highest ground level? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Killershark101 (talkcontribs) 20:31, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Grammar/meaning question from "Adaptation (Computer Science)"

The text "the potential user groups are not known a prior, but need to be identified according to future scenarios" appears in the page Adaptation (computer science), under the first section ("The need for adaptation") as part of a bullet. Maybe I don't know enough about the English language to recognize it as something else, but "a prior" sounds to me like an attempt to write "a priori", as in A priori and a posteriori, which I'm not sure is meaningful outside of analytical philosophy. If that is the intended usage, the typo should be fixed, the a priori article should be linked, and the sentence should be reworded to capture what it means——possibly in a way that removes the phrase "a priori" altogether. Is it supposed to communicate that potential user groups aren't known at the beginning of the software engineering cycle? Even substituting "a priori" for "a prior", I'm at a loss.

--Beaker Bytes (talk) 15:13, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the problems. Your understanding is correct--in this context, a priori means at the start. I have rewritten the passage to clarify the prose. See if it helps. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 18:10, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Request for information on WP1.0 web tool

Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

New Page - Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms

Hi! I am mapping Austrian computer science scene. I have created a new wikipedia article about Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms, which was co-founded by Helmut Veith (1971-2019). The article is still in review, and it needs editors. Do you know someone who could review the article? Best — Preceding unsigned comment added by Terrenus (talkcontribs) 14:50, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

A link: Draft:Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms. --CiaPan (talk) 20:37, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

GraphBLAS Article - Review and Improvements Requested

Hello WikiProject Computer Science! I'm one of the authors of the draft article on GraphBLAS. It's akin to the BLAS, but for graph algorithms and operations. It's been stuck in the review queue for a while, so I was wondering if I could recruit some help in 1) Improving the article and/or 2) Getting it approved and out of draft. Thank you so much for your help! --ScottKolo (talk) 21:09, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Lua

Hello everyone. Would anyone be interested in starting a WikiProject Lua? If so, sign your username at User:E Super Maker/WikiProject Lua Consensus.

E Super Maker (😲 shout) 01:11, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Proof of space hierarchy theorem

There seems to be an issue with the proof given in the article on Space hierarchy theorem. See the talk page of that article. Hermel (talk) 22:21, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Database Project: More eyes, less bugs

There is several messages on Database Project Talk page about whether to merge back that project into this project. Even if 2 people added their name recently, the project is inactive at best. What do you think? --i⋅am⋅amz3 (talk) 08:26, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Response to "vague" in the definition early in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element

I agree with the label, FWIW.

Recommended: Add a clause at the end of the sentence so the end reads, "document or web page, typically an opening HTML tag (HTML Tags still applies), a closing HTML tag, and everything between."

This wording is consistent with my own experience and with these and other URLs: [1] [2] [3]

Recommended: Near the end of the article, after the text "|title=HTML Tags", and in the field "access-date", change "2009-03-28" to "2020-01-16" (or whatever later date you process this).

Several places in the article indicate this source remains useful. I agree. Further, it's comforting we can point to such foundational documents as having continuing value.

SoftwarePM (talk) 21:59, 16 January 2020 (UTC)


@SoftwarePM: I tried to improve the description a bit. Please see the result: Special:Diff/936903302. If you also want to look at accumulated changes I made, they are available here. --CiaPan (talk) 21:21, 21 January 2020 (UTC); updated 07:43, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Uniquely inversible grammar

Hi could anyone with a knowledge of natural language processing please take a look at Uniquely inversible grammar? It’s been unsourced since 2005. I can see that sources exist and the subject is notable, but not sure how relevant or accurate the current article is or what the best sources would be. Thanks Mccapra (talk) 10:14, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Idea for new community workspace

Hi. I would like to create some kind of collaborative workspace where coordinators or members of various WikiProjects would gather and provide updates and information on what is going on at each wikiproject, i.e. regarding their latest efforts, projects, and where interested editors can get involved. For those of you at this very active WikiProject, your input would be very helpful, so I wanted to get your input on whether you'd be interested in helping me to make this happen.

we are discussing this proposal right now at:

* Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Idea for new community workspace

Please feel free to let me know what you think of this idea, and please let me know your preference, regarding the options below. if you do not see any need for this idea, that is totally fine. However, I think that the majority of editors lack awareness of where the truly active editing is taking place and at which WikiProjects, and I would like to do whatever I can to help make people more aware of where the activity is, what they can do to help, and also which areas of Wikipedia offer ideas and efforts that might help them in their own editing activities. Please feel free to let me know.

thanks. --Sm8900 (talk) 19:04, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I found this WikiProject on the talk page of Computer programming which I am proposing a WikiProject for. If you would like to support this proposal, please consider signing in the support section. Thanks! --RH9 09:23, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

ACM: Open Access to ACM Digital Library During Coronavirus Pandemic

...

We believe that ACM can help support research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis by opening the Digital Library to all. For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM. ... the ACM DL is now open, and will continue that way through June 30, 2020.

RDBrown (talk) 03:46, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Help with draft article Draft:Evolutionary automata

Can I get a real help from competent Wikipedia editors, e.g., the anonymous editor who added Example section to our draft? The submission did not have luck with the last two editors, where it looked that the draft was close to publishing. Please re-review the draft on evolutionary automata by specialists from computer science or evolutionary computation. Thanks for your help.

Eeberbach (talk) 16:33, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

You keep using the term "our" despite saying only one person edits from your account and you've yet to disclose as per WP:COI. Can you please clarify? Praxidicae (talk) 16:37, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
Wikipedia is similar to a sailboat. It's not possible to steer the boat into a certain direction, but what the user has to do is to predict the existing trend. The question is not how to convince the opponent to create edits in a certain draft, but the question is, what will the opponent do next by himself. The prediction is, that draft articles from the domain of biographies and companies have a high amount of participation. That means, each day many of these articles are generated from scratch and transferred into the main space. While articles with a background in hard science and especially with recent AI theories are not attractive for most wikipedia editors.
Again, the question is not how to change this trend, but the question is if this trend is valid or not. I think so, and the outcome is, that the amount of edits taken in the Draft:Evolutionary automata article are low in the future. In case of doubt, no edits at all are created, because it takes time to prepare and upload an edit. The amount of Wikipedia editors is limited and the amount of edits they can create too.
Perhaps it make sense to describe the situation from an abstract point of view. The initial question was a request for more resources to edit a certain draft article. That means, it was an request from the outside to Wikipedia for doing a certain task. Now we can estimate how long does it take until the request is fulfilled. Perhaps an example from the past make sense. Last month, i created a draft article for an article request which was created 10 years ! ago. That means, in the year 2010 somebody had asked Wikipedia to do a certain action which was to convert an article wish into an article, and it took until the year 2020 until a stranger (me) has fulfilled the request.
I'm sure, that in the case of the Draft:Evolutionary automata it will take less than 10 years. The short term goal is to prevent a G13 deletion of the article. That means, once in every 6 months, somebody has to create a formal edit in the article to prevent that an admin beliefs the article is abandoned.
And a short note for the end. The main reason why it's a bit complicated to transfer an Artificial Inteligence draft into the main space is because the total amount of AI Drafts is low. I have counted only 25 of them, which are waiting in the draft space. If an admin will move them now into the main space, nothing has improved.--ManuelRodriguez (talk) 11:09, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

‎Cataloguing programming language constructs

Hey there,

I'm looking for comments / additions / re-arranging of this template. The point is to review programming language constructs (this being a somewhat vague term encompassing both practical aspects like specific types, and conceptual aspects like type systems) without duplicating other templates. François Robere (talk) 19:41, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Problem with computer network page

Could someone help with the computer network page. Telecommunications technicians are forcing that computer networks are a subset of telecommunications networks and that they are not part of computing. Please join the discussion here:

Regards, Et4y (talk) 02:37, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

CFD: proposed renaming of Category:Computer science by century + subcats

I have proposed renaming Category:Computer science by century to Category:Computing by century, along with 100 sub-categories for computer science by year and by decade.

The discussion is at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 May 17#Computing_by_time, where your comments will be welcome. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:13, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

GA reassessment of Deep Blue (chess computer)

Deep Blue (chess computer), an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for an individual good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Mz7 (talk) 20:58, 23 May 2020 (UTC)

Tomas Cerny

Hello there - seeking some guidance please on whether or not Tomas Cerny (professor) is notable per WP:NACADEMIC, based on @Tomcerny:'s list of achievements here. If he is I am happy to create a stub and sort out disambiguation from Tomáš Černý. GiantSnowman 07:11, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Resolved at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(academics)#Tomas_Cerny ~Kvng (talk) 14:08, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Use of Watson (computer) at Bambino Gesù Hospital

Hello! On behalf of IBM as part of my work at Beutler Ink, I've submitted an edit request to add mention of Watson's use at Bambino Gesù Hospital to the article's Current and future applications section. I've provided specific text and sourcing, but one editor has suggested perhaps I've proposed too much detail about John Kelly (the "father of Watson") in my request and asked that I find other editors to take a look. Would any other editors be willing to review my proposed text and update the page if appropriate? Thanks for your consideration, Inkian Jason (talk) 14:43, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Looking for help writing an article based on an academic paper

I wish to summarize the findings of this paper about a computational model into this article, but lack the technical knowledge to do so. If someone could help that would great..--22:09, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Where should the apostrophe go?

Where should the apostrophe go:

A new-ish computer-graphics sense of "mura"

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:Mura#Another meaning. We seem to be missing an article.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  07:17, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Missing article about digital circuit theory

There is a missing article about digital circuits theory (or computing circuits theory) as the study of this circuits, known as digital logic circuits or computing circuits - abstract models of computation independent of their physical implementation. Nowadays it is widely used in electronics, but it can be (and was) realised as mechanical, electromechnical or even biological circuits (see also: unconventional computing). This field is closly related to automata theory, computational logic and computer architecture. It is divided into the study of combinational logic circuits and sequential logic circuits (see also: digital-logic-circuits.html). I have some knowledge on the subject, but too little fluency in English. Best regards — Preceding unsigned comment added by Et4y (talkcontribs) 21:30, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Nomination of InnerSloth for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article InnerSloth is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/InnerSloth until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Right cite (talk) 13:31, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

"Internet" vs. "internet"

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:Internet#Request for comment: should "internet" be capitalized as a proper noun?
There's some debate there about the difference between "the Internet" and "an internet", about what a proper name is, and about whether news style guides (cf. WP:NOT#NEWS policy) should be considered reliable for how to write about technical topics.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  14:36, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Enumeration reducibility: Proposed Article

Enumeration reducibility is a requested article in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Logic page, I am looking to hear the opinions of others on this article I am now proposing. Has it been discussed in the past? Is it deserving of its own article, or should it be merged with other studies of reducibility relations at reduction (recursion theory)? It is also mentioned in Kleene's recursion theorem. Thanks. Redactedentity (talk) 23:33, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

I see a lot of Scholar hits on this term so it is likely deserving of a stand-alone article. ~Kvng (talk) 16:20, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Camera tracking vs. match moving

The Camera tracking article was recently merged into match moving, but these articles seemed to describe two different concepts: the camera tracking article was about the process of locating a moving object using a camera, but the motion tracking article is about the process of combining footage from two different scenes. Was this merge done incorrectly? Jarble (talk) 17:43, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Jarble, Camera tracking was last changed in 2006. It looks like the merge was done properly back then. ~Kvng (talk) 16:25, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
@Kvng: "Camera tracking" is a somewhat ambiguous term: it can also refer to video tracking, which is a different problem. Should the page redirect to "Motion tracking" instead of "match moving?" Jarble (talk) 17:52, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
Jarble, the first Google hits on "camera tracking" are about Motion tracking. The term may sound ambiguous but it does not appear that it actually is. ~Kvng (talk) 21:14, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Sandbox Organiser

A place to help you organise your work

Hi all

I've been working on a tool for the past few months that you may find useful. Wikipedia:Sandbox organiser is a set of tools to help you better organise your draft articles and other pages in your userspace. It also includes areas to keep your to do lists, bookmarks, list of tools. You can customise your sandbox organiser to add new features and sections. Once created you can access it simply by clicking the sandbox link at the top of the page. You can create and then customise your own sandbox organiser just by clicking the button on the page. All ideas for improvements and other versions would be really appreciated.

Huge thanks to PrimeHunter and NavinoEvans for their work on the technical parts, without them it wouldn't have happened.

Hope its helpful

John Cummings (talk) 11:37, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Cheman Shaik up for deletion

Indian inventor. Question of notability and sourcing. 7&6=thirteen () 15:42, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject Artificial Intelligence

To anyone interested in improving Wikipedia's coverage of Artificial Intelligence, please support the WikiProject Proposal: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Proposals/Artificial_Intelligence. Thank you! Burritok (talk) 20:18, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Disambiguation for Serverless

Is this the place to discuss a compsci disambiguation page?

Serverless redirects to Serverless computing, which only gives a single, more modern meaning. I think it should instead be a disambiguation page.

There is a big difference between classic and modern serverless computing, and plenty of examples of the classic sort.

From what I read on Disambiguation this needs discussion somewhere before jumping in.

Dan Shearer (talk) 15:11, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

@DanShearer: a disambiguation page may be needed if there are multiple articles that cover the term. Serverless computing is one article. What are the others? ~Kvng (talk) 13:30, 23 March 2021 (UTC)
@Kvng: I was thinking more that "Serverless" traditionally means "local" or "embedded", and so references embedded databases, whether SQlite or ISAM or Firebird Embedded . The same SQLite page I referenced had a 2007 version using ordinary terminology for the time, before the meaning now used in wikipedia. Perhaps instead of a disambiguation page, the distinction should be to use the term "server-less"?
@DanShearer:, OK but there are apparently no existing Wikipedia articles covering this meaning of the term. If you think it is a notable topic, maybe create a stub article and then we can talk about a disambiguation page. ~Kvng (talk) 16:08, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

network

net and work is a incredible meningful method of transfer direct to air communication as the name applied network simple mean the transfer of data from one side to another by means of analytic mostly nowaday the work with technology has become more wide to the global till date and the communication sending mass media has play a role to society which become more easy to flactuate the mass to air to bothside of the gam to gam which focused to analyticle network has determined the several sode goes via air — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dahiru dalhatu (talkcontribs) 20:58, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Alfred Aho (Turing Award)

We are looking to clean up the article on Alfred Aho to make sure the description of his work is accurate and cited properly. Your help would be most welcome. Joofjoof (talk) 08:42, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

AlphaFold, transformer networks, and "attention mechanisms" in machine learning

Given the recent "milestone scientific breakthrough" being hailed for AlphaFold for its results in the protein structure prediction problem at CASP 14, which is believed to use two transformer networks as a key core of its design; and the use of transformer networks also in computer vision, I've left the following at Talk:Transformer (machine learning model), but am re-posting it here, in case anyone with a recent background in machine learning / deep learning / artificial intelligence can help.

On that page I've asked whether "we could try to present what transformer networks are trying to do in a more general framing perspective, wider and more general than their use in NLP."

In AlphaFold#Algorithm I've written that the transformers

"effect a mathematical transformation of [the elements of two feature-vs-feature matrices].
These transformations have the effect of bringing relevant data together and filtering out irrelevant data for these two relationships, in a context-dependent way (the "attention mechanism"), that can itself be learnt from training data."

I'd be grateful for input as to whether I've got this more or less right?

Are transformers therefore doing a similar sort of job to bottleneck networks, autoencoders, latent variable extractors, and other forms of nonlinear input transformation and dimensional reduction techniques? (Though there's obviously more to it than that). But might be useful to try to identify if there are similarities and differences?

As a final point, it's clear that we could use an article on attention (machine learning), aka attention networks, aka attention mechanisms. Some of the following, found by Google, look like they may be relevant, but it would be good to get at least a stub created by someone who knows a bit about it.

Would anybody feel they could help with this? Jheald (talk) 15:20, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Are references/input still needed for this? I've been working with recurrent neural nets for quite a while and have piled up some links that might be helpful (although some may be rather dated...) --Idemperialism (talk) 21:54, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Category:Science articles needing expert attention

You are invited to participate in a discussion Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Science#Category:Science_articles_needing_expert_attention about the following articles:

Most viewed stub in this Wikiproject

MicroVision, Inc. 17,795 593 Stub--Coin945 (talk) 14:37, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Photometric Stereo

Dear all—I have proposed a new section in the Photometric Stereo article for extensions to non-line-of-sight surfaces (in addition to non-Lambertian surfaces already there). The editors there and I would like expert opinions on the edit. Would anyone be available to have a look? Thanks, J6ancmvs (talk) 00:15, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

AfC Drafts

Hi, there are two draft submissions that could do with someone with knowledge of the area to assess if they are notable or not, both have been waiting over two months

Cheers KylieTastic (talk) 11:49, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Here is input from WikiProject Physics on Draft:The CHSH Game. --Cerebellum (talk) 09:09, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

The page "Algorithmics" needs disambiguation

Hello friends, researching some programming language theory topics I came across the page for Algorithmics, which defines the study as essentially "synonymous with 'algorithms and data structures.'". Although, I don't think that's accurate. A pamphlet by M.M. Fokkinga, "Law and Order in Algorithmics", introduces the study right in the header paragraph like so:

> An algorithm is the input-output effect of a computer program; mathematically, the notion of algorithm comes close to the notion of function. Just as arithmetic is the theory and practice of calculating with numbers, so is ALGORITHMICS the theory and practice of calculating with algorithms. Just as a law in arithmetic is an equation between numbers, like a(b + c) = ab + ac , so is a LAW in algorithmics an equation between algorithms. The goal of the research done is: (extending algorithmics by) the systematic detection and use of laws for algorithms. To this end category theory (a branch of mathematics) is used to formalise the notion of algorithm, and to formally prove theorems and laws about algorithms.

In this sense, algorithmics is NOT synonymous with algorithms and data structures and as such it could be helpful to disambiguate the study of algorithms and their complexity with the study of algebraically deriving programs (usually operations on lists) somewhat like algebraically solving for numbers.

In another pamphlet, "Background Info for Map and Reduce", Fokkkinga gives a slick introduction to the topic and lists several important references for researching further. Algebra of Programming (Richard Bird et al.) is another good reference. These plus some historical context would make for a solid wikipedia page. I think it would be helpful to stub the disambiguated version of the page; the current page, taking "algorithmics" to mean just "the study of algorithms" is not that useful as it stands and essentially subsumed by pages like Algorithm.

--21:32, 23 August 2021 (UTC)2600:1014:B026:50B3:D975:2B90:C1DB:DB10 (talk)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Color code#Requested move 16 August 2021 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. — Shibbolethink ( ) 22:55, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Second Opinion on Draft:Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence

Hi, I was wondering if someone interested in AI, computer vision, or related topics could please take a look at the article "Draft:Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence." It was previously rejected because it was not considered adequately notable. However, IIAI is a leading AI-research institute in the MENA region, with several hundred publications in highly recognised international venues (including CVPR, TPAMI, ECCV, ICCV, etc.). I am therefore just looking for a second opinion from someone perhaps a bit more familiar with the particular field. Please note that the article cannot be added to the page on MBZUAI, as originally recommended by the reviewer, because the two are entirely separate entities. If someone has time to take a look it would be greatly appreciated!

Alh123456789 (talk) 03:57, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

We need to see coverage in reliable sources that meet WP:NORG. There are 35 references in the draft. Can you help identify the WP:THREE best sources that get us there. ~Kvng (talk) 14:06, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi Kvng, thanks for getting back to me. Here are three references that demonstrate significant coverage of IIAI in reliable sources:

1. "NYU Abu Dhabi and IIAI join forces to boost Artificial Intelligence research". Emirates News Agency. Retrieved 16 August 2021.

Emirates News Agency is the official news agency of the UAE. This article discusses a recent partnership between IIAI and New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. It serves to highlight one way in which the company is helping to shape the UAE's AI research landscape, i.e. by helping to establish and fund a PhD programme within an internationally recognised university, and by promoting collaborative research within the country.

2. Amsterdam, Universiteit van (2019-03-18). "New public-private AI research lab for medical image analysis". University of Amsterdam. Retrieved 2021-09-24.

This is a news article taken from the University of Amsterdam's official website. It discusses the recent "AIM Lab" set up in collaboration with IIAI for the purpose of medical image analysis. This collaboration highlights the international recognition that IIAI has gained, and the article includes a description of the company and its impact at both a local and global level

3. Fan, Deng-Ping; Zhou, Tao; Ji, Ge-Peng; Zhou, Yi; Chen, Geng; Fu, Huazhu; Shen, Jianbing; Shao, Ling (May 2020). "Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation From CT Images". IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 39 (8): 2626–2637. arXiv:2004.14133. doi:10.1109/TMI.2020.2996645. PMID 32730213. S2CID 219648586. Retrieved 16 August 2021.

This article is a recent publication by IIAI researchers in an internationally renowned, peer-reviewed journal. IIAI has over 300 publications in other similar top venues (e.g. CVPR, ICCV, TPAMI) but this particular one was chosen to help demonstrate the impact and wide recognition of the company's research, as it has already received nearly 300 GoogleScholar citations despite being published just over a year ago.

Alh123456789 (talk) 16:20, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

@Alh123456789: If this is the best available, you do not have a strong case here. The first two sources sound suspiciously like press releases and their publishers are not clearly WP:INDEPENDENT of the subject in this reporting. The third doesn't appear to say anything directly about the institute. Although your argument that the achievements of IIAI researchers should reflect well on the institute, our notability guidelines say WP:NOTINHERIT. ~Kvng (talk) 20:46, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
@Kvng: Thank you very much for taking a look. I understand where you are coming from, but just wanted to clarify a few points. First, I believe the achievements of the IIAI researchers in this case can also be considered achievements of the institute, since their research was done directly on behalf of IIAI, with company resources and ideas. As for the other two sources, I agree that the first article does seem to based on a press release. However, not one from IIAI -- it appears to be based on a press release from NYUAD, which is a fully independent organisation from IIAI. Further, the article itself was released by the Emirates News Agency (which is independent from both IIAI and NYUAD) with, in my opinion, the aim of highlighting notable organisations and partnerships that are helping the UAE in achieving its ambitious AI goals. Finally, the second source is a press release, but again not from IIAI; it was released by the University of Amsterdam, which is fully independent. I chose this source not just because of what is written about IIAI, but also because it highlights that the institution, which was created only three years ago, has quickly grown notable enough to be known and highly regarded by other renowned institutions around the globe. I hope you may reconsider the merit of this article.
@Alh123456789: Again, I appreciate that reserchers' achievements reflect on the importance of the institution but that's not how we establish notability of organizations. Our assumption under WP:NOTINHERIT is that if the institution is notable for these reasons, there should be separate independent reporting on it.
NYUAD and University of Amsterdam are not independent because they have business relationships with IIAI. ~Kvng (talk) 15:13, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
@Kvng: Fair enough. Thank you again for taking the time to consider it. Alh123456789 (talk) 06:52, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Request edit at Photometric stereo

An editor made a request edit at Talk:Photometric stereo a couple months ago. Two responders noted that they might not have the technical expertise to determine if the request should be added to the article. Can someone from this project determine if the edit should be added to the page, then close the request? Thanks. Z1720 (talk) 23:46, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure how much expertise we're going to be able to find to help with this but I replied with a suggestion I hope will work. ~Kvng (talk) 18:42, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Arabeyes up for deletion

Open source publisher trying to aid Arab language users with their computers etc. It was established in early 2001 by a number of Arab Linux enthusiasts. Trying to find sources is hampered by the presumed language of sources. It is a systemic bias in Wikipedia. Arabic language speakers needed. 7&6=thirteen () 15:40, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Convolution/zip prodded

The article Convolution (computer science) was proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

"The references do not support the claim that the term convolution is used in this sense and I could not find any other instances online where it is (beyond copy-pastes of this article). (proposed by 142.113.109.61)"

I too wasn't able to find a source to support the claim that "convolution" is used in the sense described in the article. However, the concept of zipping a tuple of sequences into a sequence of tuples is clearly notable (not to be confused with Zipper (data structure), though). Does anybody here know if there is another Wikipedia article where this could be integrated? —Tea2min (talk) 12:21, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Ah, zipping two sequences can of course be seen as a special case of map2/zipwith. So perhaps the existing redirects Zip (function) and Zip (higher-order function) should be redirected to Map (higher-order function) if Convolution (computer science) is deleted. —Tea2min (talk) 12:44, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
A quick search yields the concept of convolution is used in formal language theory [2], [3] and references therein. But the current article is mostly about applications in programming languages. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 21:20, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Overloaded template

Template:Edsger Dijkstra is way too full IMO, starting with Main research areas, Related people, most (but not all) of Scientific contributions, and then there's List of people considered father or mother of a field#Computing (sic). I don't know enough to weed them out in a reasonable amount of time. Anybody else want to take a crack at it? Clarityfiend (talk) 09:13, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Definition of kernel in CS literature

The lede in Kernel (operating system) currently has an incorrect definition, as discussed in Talk:Kernel (operating system)#Consistency and generality, and I am seeking comments from those familiar with the literature, and a few reliable sources for the correct definition. My library is missing the relevant papers from the 1970s. The issues in contention are

  1. Whether the kernel contains all of the code that is permanently in memory
  2. Whether the term kernel is relevant beyond systems with a layered architecture.

Please ping me and user:Rockstone35 in your responses. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 13:32, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

@Chatul: thank you for bringing it here. I'll restore the tags for now until we get consensus. -- RockstoneSend me a message! 22:33, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Big-O list (deletion)

Hi, there is currently an AfD for a table located at Big_o_list. The original version of this list was very poorly described (I've tried to make it more clear), and the list itself is extremely small. I am in two minds whether it should be kept (and expanded) or deleted. I am concerned that its deletion debate currently lacks input from people who understand algorithm-science and the use of big-O notation. I would be very grateful if anyone could comment on the list, whether it has value, or what should be done with it. Elemimele (talk) 21:34, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

New page on "PH-Tree"

I plan to write an article about an algorithm called "PH-Tree" (it is a spatial index). I started the discussion in the Teahouse and they proposed to ask here.

COI: I am the author of the original paper that proposed the PH-Tree. I am not affiliated with any organization.

Notability:

  • The algorithm was originally published in a well known Conference (SIGMOD) in 2014 and has since been cited 55 times (Google Scholar). About 50 of those are independent citations.
  • I have implemented the algorithm in Java, the implementation has been forked 17 times and liked 94 times (GitHub page), I think this is a lot for such a specialized algorithm.
  • There is an independent C++ implementation [4]
  • There is a new C++ implementation by Improbable Worlds available [5]. I was hired by this company specifically to support them in using this algorithm (though I am not affiliated with them any more).
  • Probably irrelevant: I have also been contacted by two other developers who said they want to provide open-source implementations in other programming languages: Python and most recently C#, but I cannot make this public just yet without their consent.

I looked at some pages regarding notability (WP:NSOFTWARE and academics) but they seem not to be applicable (PH-Tree is neither a software nor a person). I think the article about significant coverage is applicable but not very concrete.

Questions:

  1. Would you say this qualifies as "notable" such that it justifies a separate article?
  2. If it is not notable enough, is there a page where I could add a section (i couldn't find an obvious page to do that).
  3. Some of the 50 publications reference the PH-Tree only in passing (i.e. acknowledge that it exists). Would it help if I identified those that go a bit more in-depth?
  4. Is it a problem that I am the original author of the PH-Tree? I am aware how important unbiased articles are and promise to do my best to make the article as neutral as possible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TilmannZ (talkcontribs)
Yes, you will need to identify at least WP:THREE independent, reliable sources that have substantial coverage. - MrOllie (talk) 13:23, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@MrOllie Thanks for answering. I went through some of the citations and found the following:

Non-trivial citations

Peer-reviewed publications

I found 9 non-trival citations by 8 different authors. I am not affiliated with any of them.

Detailed discussion or major part of the publication:

  • Detailed discussion and performance comparison in a PhD thesis: Efficient Processing of Range Queries in Main Memory; S. Sprenger; 2019; DOI:10.18452/19786; Corpus ID: 196174711
  • Discussion (PH-Tree is in the title): Managing Sparse Spatio-Temporal Data in SAVIME: an Evaluation of the Ph-tree Index; S. Herrera, L. Miguez da Silva, +2 authors F. Porto; 2021; (SBBD 2021); DOI:10.5753/sbbd.2021.17895; Corpus ID: 245185935
  • Discussion (PH-Tree is in the title): Friend Recommendation Algorithm Based on PH-Tree Multi-attribute Index Tree; J LIANG, Y SUN - Computer Science, 2015 - en.cnki.com.cn

PH-Tree used as reference in performance evaluation of spatial indexing algorithms:

  • Online Indices for Predictive Top-k Entity and Aggregate Queries on Knowledge Graphs; Yan Li, Tingjian Ge, Cindy X. Chen; 2020; 2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE); DOI:10.1109/ICDE48307.2020.00096; Corpus ID: 218907333
  • GeoBlocks: A Query-Cache Accelerated Data Structure for Spatial Aggregation over Polygons; C. Winter, A. Kipf, +5 authors; EDBT 23 / 2020; DOI:10.5441/002/edbt.2021.16; Corpus ID: 227143160
  • BB-Tree: A Main-Memory Index Structure for Multidimensional Range Queries; S. Sprenger, P. Schäfer, U. Leser; 2019; 2019 IEEE 35th ICDE; DOI:10.1109/ICDE.2019.00143; Corpus ID: 174820186
  • Pre-processing and Indexing Techniques for Constellation Queries in Big Data; A. Khatibi, F. Porto, +3 authors D. Shasha; DaWaK 2017; DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-64283-3_12; Corpus ID: 3857469
  • Fast and Adaptive Indexing of Multi-Dimensional Observational Data; S. Wang, D. Maier, B. Ooi; 2016; VLDB Endow.; DOI:10.14778/3007328.3007334; Corpus ID: 8597509


A survey with a section on PH-Tree:

  • Spatio-temporal access methods: a survey (2010 – 2017); A. R. Mahmood, S. Punni, W. G. Aref; 2018; GeoInformatica; DOI:10.1007/s10707-018-0329-2; Corpus ID: 106407322


Non-peer-review “publications”


Summary

I haven’t looked at all 50 citations, just the most promising ones. So far I’d argue there are at least 9 + 2 = 11 non-trivial citations. Would you agree? Thoughts? TilmannZ (talk) 21:03, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Please suggest a program for SampleCode argument of Template:Infobox_programming_language

Hi, I have an idea for replacing "Screenshot argument" to a SampleCode in all instances of the template Template:Infobox_programming_language. But I need a small program that successfully represent most some of important factors of a programing language such as "Typing discipline", "Scope", and others. Perhaps most some of items existing in the template Template:Factors of comparison of programming languages should have some representative in this sample program. See

The program "Hello world" is small enough but it does not have most some of these factors. Can any one suggest a better program? This sample program will then appear in Infobox of articles like "Python", "PHP", "Java", and etc. after the tag <syntaxhighlight> is applied to it. It will be used as "SampleCode argument" and will be shown as the second rendering item (after logo) (it might be shown in a mouse hover opening tooltip), to successfully convey an overview of that programming language. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 13:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I believe that you will have to settle for sample program that only highlight half a dozen of the features of any given language; otherwise it would get too bulky. How large would be reasonable? --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 21:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
@Chatul: Oh, you are right! I had written "most" but most is wrong, the word "some" is true here (much less than half a dozen of the features have a representative). In my opinion even "Hello World" program itself is somehow a good example, because it is small enough. Do you agree with using "Hello World" program for this purpose? Or make it a little more complicated? Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 04:11, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
I don't believe that Hello World is enough to convey the flavor of a language. I'd like to see examples complex enough to illustrate, e.g., block structure, conditional execution, data definition, exception handling, subroutine definition. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:46, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
Computing a factorial is a commonly used example that does a bit more than a "Hello, world!" - MrOllie (talk) 21:08, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

OCaml but simpler

Good evening everyone. I'm from an active member of one of our sister projects and am hoping to get some assistance on an article. At Simple English Wikipedia, we try to present complicated topics in a simpler and easier to understand format for those who may have difficulty understanding articles on the main project. Currently OCaml is at AFD there and although it will likely be kept, it needs lots of improvement. I know close to nothing about the topic, and while I'm not asking you all to write the article for me, I'm hoping to get some help breaking the primary article down into some key points that show its notability and why it's important. I can assist with the simplification, I just don't know where to start when it comes to the subject matter. Thank you for all your help, Griffinofwales (talk) SimpleWP 20:53, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, User:Griffinofwales! I'm an OCaml enthusiast and would be happy to help with this effort. Could you point towards an exemplary programming language entry on the Simple English Wikipedia? That might help me get a sense for what kind of information to emphasize.
Shonfeder (talk) 23:09, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
I appreciate the response. The project is small (a core active community of about 50) and we don't have many great SMEs in that sector, but our article on Python is a little more fleshed out than most. Djsasso, a bureaucrat at the project (and administrator here) works in the sector and has offered to provide help in the simplification of the article if you can get us started. Thank you again! Griffinofwales (talk) SimpleWP 21:40, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Named professorships?

There are a lot of computer scientist's pages which list named professorships in the lead -- particularly BLP pages, e.g. Jennifer Widom. To me, the named professorships read like an academic formality and don't really help in terms of introducing the reader to the person and why they are important. I think they would be appropriate in an accolades/recognition section but I don't see the point in the lead. Is there a general policy here and what do others think? Caleb Stanford (talk) 04:06, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Re-posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Science and academia. Caleb Stanford (talk) 18:10, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
In principle, these kinds of university honorifics can be informative, since some are well-known and prestigious, like the Waynflete Professorships. Without context, however, these are words quite likely to convey nothing useful to the reader beyond the fact that there is an honorific. In the Widom case you cite, for example, is she one of several who have held the named honour? Without a source, it is hard to distinguish what is substantial from puffery. Even in the accolades section, I'd like to have a source that is a first breadcrumb in the trail to finding how the honorific came to be. — Charles Stewart (talk) 14:26, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Postscript - Computer science does have documented professorships; e.g., the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing has two previous holders and is looking for a third. — Charles Stewart (talk) 14:32, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for your comment. It seems there is some disagreement on this; some others felt that named professorships are inherently an honor and useful to include in the lead. Certainly I think it would be useful to add some of this context that you suggest. It's also worth saying that many readers are not familiar with academic conventions and may not understand how to interpret a named professorship. Caleb Stanford (talk) 15:16, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

Mayfly optimization algorithm

Is the Mayfly optimization algorithm of encyclopedic importance? I note that the article on it has seemingly been the sole article here of interest to the editor who created it, and that a recent editor has seemed oddly keen to draw attention to the subject. All this makes it seem fishy to me, but the subject area isn't one of the few in which I'm competent. -- Hoary (talk) 05:42, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

It seems suspect to me too. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 06:31, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
I would propose this article for deletion if I weren't tired of the bureaucracy. It's valid scholarship, but we cannot maintain an article about each piece of scholarship. It very much looks like self promotion. -- Quintus V. (talk) 13:29, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mayfly optimization algorithm if interested. -- Hoary (talk) 03:36, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

User script to detect unreliable sources

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. Some of you may already be familiar with it, given it is currently the 39th most imported script on Wikipedia. The idea is that it takes something like

  • John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

The script is mostly based on WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:NPPSG and WP:CITEWATCH and a good dose of common sense. I'm always expanding coverage and tweaking the script's logic, so general feedback and suggestions to expand coverage to other unreliable sources are always welcomed.

Do note that this is not a script to be mindlessly used, and several caveats apply. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable.

- Headbomb {t · c · p · b}

This is a one time notice and can't be unsubscribed from. Delivered by: MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:01, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Definition of software interrupt

I'm looking for assistance in resolving a dispute on whether signals are interrupts, and also looking for reliable sources that are not behind a paywall, preferably PDFs.

The text in Operating system#Software interrupt treats software interrupt as synonymous with signal, which I question, while the text Interrupt#Software interrupts matches what I have seen. The relevant discussions are in Talk:Operating system#Software interrupt?, Talk:Operating system#Organization of Interrupts and Talk:Operating system#Software interrupt? (Third Opinion).

Signal (IPC) says, "Signals are similar to interrupts, the difference being that interrupts are mediated by the CPU and handled by the kernel while signals are mediated by the kernel (possibly via system calls) and handled by individual processes." But I question the word "similar". Nor can I digest the sentence. I believe the UNIX implementation of software interrupts is called signal. The defining feature is signals cause the interruption of the currently running process. Timhowardriley (talk) 20:17, 4 May 2022 (UTC)
Poking around, I came across this webpage: https://wiki.osdev.org/SYSENTER . It seems that advances in hardware are enabling the sending of messages (signals) without the overhead of software interrupts. The key is the availability of a more complex machine instruction. Instead of executing an instruction like INT, the software executes the instruction SYSENTER. However, I would surmise that SYSENTER is executed for only a subset of system calls. Timhowardriley (talk) 01:57, 5 May 2022 (UTC)
More poking around, I came across the original reason for the invention of signals in UNIX. The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Bach (1986; page 200) says, "Signals inform processes of the occurrence of asynchronous events." To implement asynchronous event communication, interrupts are required. The reason a process needs to asynchronously communicate to another process is the classic writer/reader problem. The writer has a pipe for its output to be sent to the reader's input stream. You probably do this all the time: foo | bar. foo will write to the pipe when its output is ready and then sleep in the wait queue. bar will then be moved to the ready queue and soon will read from its input stream. No external device participates in this process. Therefore, no hardware interrupt is generated. Instead, the OS will generate software interrupts to coordinate the piping. Timhowardriley (talk) 07:20, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Articles on conference series

As I am currently AfC-reviewing a page on a physics workshop series, I was looking around the current pages on conference series in computer science (which, given the publication culture here, I thought would be more prominent than for other subjects). I was surprised to see that the majority had no independent sources cited at all, including headline venues such as IJCAI and LICS. DOes anyone have there any thoughts or ideas on this? Felix QW (talk) 09:46, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Yeah the state of most of these articles looks pretty bad at the moment. STOC and FOCS seem a little better than average. A sampling of others is POPL, PLDI, SOSP, and CAV. Some pages even seem to have been deleted, like OSDI...
It's honestly probably unrealistic for all these conference wikis to be maintained. Does anyone have thoughts on merging them into list articles? They could also be merged with the parent article for the relevant organizing group or ACM SIG. Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:41, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Conferences and conference series a bit like journals in that workers in the field think they are obviously important and should be covered in Wikipedia. The problem is that conference series are rarely independently written about as entities, discussing their history, impact, etc., which leads them to being a bad match for WP's policies of independent verification. If a conference has selective peer review, it may be useful to treat it like a journal and investigate if it satisfies WP:NJournals by being included in selective indices, etc. If there is no secondary sourcing or indexing that can be found, the article is probably going to be put up for deletion at some point. Selectively merging to a parent organization is often a useful alternative to deletion. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 16:47, 13 May 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I was going to say what Mark viking already said: the importance of these conferences to their fields is not generally reflected in the availability of in-depth, independently and reliably published sourcing about them. Without sources it is very difficult to write an article. Incidentally, see List of computer science conferences for a fairly comprehensive listing of the ones we have articles on. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:02, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Can someone, with subject-matter knowledge, help evaluate whether the article Computational X should exist? Mgnbar (talk) 01:27, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I think it should not exist. I see a not-clearly-defined scope, a random assortment of a few fields which have "computational" in the name, and links to articles that are more precise realizations of what might be the core idea (big data, informatics, and computational thinking). Will list for AfD. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:06, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Nominated for WP:PROD. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:18, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Notice

The article United States of America Computing Olympiad has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Not notable under WP:NONPROFIT: no significant coverage by reliable sources

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. 0xDeadbeef (talk) 07:51, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't think I have the time or capacity to work on this, but as somebody who's applied to college for CS in the US in the past 10 years, USACO is definitely notable in the sense that it is a major figure in the lives of high schoolers trying to get into a good college. I'm sure sources could be found. Surprised this is up for deletion, but I hope my vote against it is worth something. A40585 (talk) 02:28, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Curating the top-importance list

I've been doing some work to curate the list at Category:Top-importance Computer science articles and welcome any participation and feedback! Pinging Kvng (talk · contribs)

The list was in a pretty inconsistent state initially. Notes so far:

  • Regarding language articles, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and COBOL were included, but I think we should only include these if we also include C, C++, Python, and Java. Currently I'm including none of these based on some pushback at moving the others to top. My hunch is that "high" is correct for all of these.
  • In general the list is still pretty theory-biased. We should include a few key systems articles and not unilaterally exclude them -- suggestions for which are welcome. For instance, I nominate Embedded system for top.
  • It may also be useful to reference the list of most popular CS articles. Not sure how much popularity/views factor into importance for computer science specifically.

Obviously, top articles should be those with a strong consensus for such, and I believe that many decisions about what to include are likely to get political (i.e., which fields of computer science are important or not), so I'll try not to get too invested in any particular inclusion. Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:43, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I demoted Dining philosophers problem, Cellular automaton, and Lambda calculus. I still see a couple of articles listed that may be top for crypto but not CS (e.g. Transport Layer Security). Embedded system seems like a fine choice for top (in my department it's one of the major faculty research groupings). Another candidate that I think is currently much lower prioritized than it should be is middleware (currently low for computing, not even listed for computer science). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
I try not to quibble about importance or quality assessments that are one bracket away from where I'd place them but I have not exactly stuck to that for this round of assessments. Sorry about that but I hope the discussion gets us on the same page. I don't see a description of the importance categories on this wikiproject so I assume we're using the ones at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computing/Assessment#Importance.
Programming language is and should be Top importance. Individual programming languages may be popular but are any actually essential? I would be inclined to rate them at High or below.
I question a Top rating for Embedded system because I see it as an computer engineering topic, not so much of a computer science one so Top for Computing, High for Computer science. I seem to have an inclination to only give a Top rating to one wikiproject on each article but maybe that's misguided. ~Kvng (talk) 20:29, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
I would personally vote for top for Embedded system and lambda calculus. Caleb Stanford (talk) 18:22, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
I changed Embedded system to Top for this project as that is acceptable to me and seems to be the rough consensus. ~Kvng (talk) 15:10, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
Thanks! I just changed it (in case you forgot). Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:08, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I must have gotten interrupted and then forgotten. Thanks! ~Kvng (talk) 15:57, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Hello, WikiProject,

I just delayed deletion of this stale draft for another 6 months. I have no knowledge of the history of computer science but I think this person might be considered notable enough to be included in Wikipedia. I don't think it would take a lot to improve this draft to get it approved but the page creator has been gone for over a year so it is unlikely that they will be spending any more time on it. So, I thought I'd bring it here in case a WikiProject member was inspired to take it on and get it improved enough for main space. Thank you for considering my request. Liz Read! Talk! 02:56, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't see anything in the draft that screams notable. I haven't reviewed the sources but Nightenbelle has and found them lacking. ~Kvng (talk) 14:47, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Weak supervision

There's a long-standing merge proposal between Weak supervision and Semi-supervised learning that could do with some expert views at Talk:Semi-supervised learning. I work on merges, but am not a subject expert; so, some help at that talk page would be appreciated. Klbrain (talk) 08:18, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Formatting function names

I’m working on harmonizing and cleaning up the C standard library articles, and noticed a stylistic inconsistency for which I’d like broader input before changing. For standard functions like malloc, it’s customary to display them in monospace font (at least when talking about it as a specific function, rather than, say, memory allocation as a whole), and this is usually done with code tags, but I find them unsightly in inline text. I think it looks nicer with {{mono}}. Compare the following:

In computing, mmap(2) is a POSIX-compliant Unix system call that maps files or devices into memory. When no longer in use, memory-mapped pointers should be unmapped with munmap(2). Some malloc implementations use mmap internally.

In computing, mmap(2) is a POSIX-compliant Unix system call that maps files or devices into memory. When no longer in use, memory-mapped pointers should be unmapped with munmap(2). Some malloc implementations use mmap internally.

In computing, mmap(2) is a POSIX-compliant Unix system call that maps files or devices into memory. When no longer in use, memory-mapped pointers should be unmapped with munmap(2). Some malloc implementations use mmap internally.

There’s of course an argument for (2)—not treating functions any differently than other nouns, considering the monospacing is somewhat of a specialist style—but I think (3) is cleanest and easiest to read, by how it unobtrusively differentiates from prose. Thoughts? Ovinus (talk) 16:32, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Consistency is probably the most important consideration. Consistency within an article is paramount. Consistency between articles, less so. So my suggestion would be to choose <code> or {{mono}} in the lead dependent on what's already used elsewhere in the article. Be aware that a campaign to create consistency between articles has the potential to be mildly controversial (e.g. WP:ENGVAR), but I agree that the third option looks the cleanest. ~Kvng (talk) 14:21, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

AOZ Studio

I also posted a message on the WikiProject Computing page. I received a message saying that my draft page about AOZ Studio should qualify for this area, however, the page was rejected twice. Also, I have a conflict of interest, in that I have done work for AOZ Studio in the past, and still volunteer for them now. Perhaps someone else could attempt to work on this? FYI, AOZ is a modern version of the AMOS BASIC programming language. Here's the draft page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:AOZ_Studio ...although Wikipedia recommended starting over from scratch.

Here are some background reference articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Lionet Ising4jesus (talk) 23:50, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Python (programming language)

Python (programming language) has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:46, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Project-independent quality assessments. This proposes support for quality assessment at the article level, recorded in {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and inherited by the wikiproject banners. However, wikiprojects that prefer to use custom approaches to quality assessment can continue to do so. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:27, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

We now have several articles dealing with tensors in statistical computing and machine learning — both theory (Multiway data analysis, Multilinear subspace learning, Tensor (machine learning), Tensor decomposition) and specific technologies (PyTorch, TensorFlow). Some of these articles were made recently and have just a few contributors. I thought I'd mention them here, in case there was broader interest in editing around this topic. Mgnbar (talk) 08:07, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi,

I worked on an article about Confidential Computing. Tried to make it as objective and well-referenced as possible. Seeking review and suggestions. Note, I'm affiliated with a related non-profit industry group and will abide by all rules regarding conflicts. All help appreciated. Thanks! -HudsonAttests (talk) 20:59, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:45, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks -- concretely, does this mean we should replace
:{{WikiProject banner shell|collapsed=yes|1=
:{{WikiProject Computer science |importance=high |class=GA}}
:{{WikiProject Computing |importance=high |class=GA |software=yes}}
:}}
:
with
:{{WikiProject banner shell|collapsed=yes|class=GA|1=
:{{WikiProject Computer science |importance=high }}
:{{WikiProject Computing |importance=high |software=yes}}
:}}
:
?
Or will this be done automatically by bots?
Caleb Stanford (talk) 19:44, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I saw there is a draft for Neural Radiance Fields. It may be of interest to members of this project. Thriley (talk) 16:24, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi,

I recently worked on an article draft about Ken McMillan, the computer scientist (Draft:Kenneth L. McMillan). I contributed the article because I noticed there is a German Wikipedia page about him (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._McMillan) and McMillan's name has been referenced in several related Wikipedia articles (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Esparza). Help for improving the draft and reviewing would be much appreciated, thanks! 2601:48:4300:580:597B:D8B6:B6F8:647A (talk) 16:02, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Moved to mainspace; please notify me if any objections. Caleb Stanford (talk) 03:27, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello, User:Paper9oll reviewed this article about the Bull Gamma 3 vacuum tube computer (1952), and mentioned some sentences were not sourced. They were, in fact, as the references were targeting several sentences and not just the last one. After a talk with him he let me know he would let someone else review it.

This article is translated from the French version which was accepted last year. I added several more external references and technical complements in this new version.

Could someone have a look? Damien.b (talk) 11:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Nice work! ~Kvng (talk) 13:38, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for your review, @Kvng.
Judging from the list of early vacuum tubes computers, the Gamma 3 also seems to have been the world first mass produced computer, however this title seems to be attributed to the IBM 650, released two years later.
One reason could be a lack of knowledge about the Gamma 3, or a restrictive definition of a computer (stored program computer).
This would be a fairly important fact in regards to computing history, so I propose to include this paragraph in the article, while keeping the title to the IBM 650.
"Released in 1952 and produced in approximately 1,200 units, the Gamma 3 was the first mass-produced electronic digital computer. However, it only became a stored program computer in 1955 with the release of the A.E.T extension, leaving the title of the first electronic, digital, stored program computer to the IBM 650 (1954)."
Any thought?
Damien.b (talk) 22:22, 28 July 2023 (UTC)
Find a source that backs this up otherwise it is WP:OR. If other reliable sources indicate IBM 650 was first, this also should be mentioned. ~Kvng (talk) 13:50, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

DuckDB

Is DuckDB encyclopaedic and should it have its own article? User JalenFolf keeps on deleting the page content and replaces it with a redirect to a generic list of databases. See Special:History/DuckDB.

151.37.202.217 (talk) 17:37, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

There must be evidence of notability. Two potentially WP:INDEPENDENT sources are included with the proposed article: [6], [7]. The first is a dead link. Neither appear to be particularly WP:RELIABLE. Is there any better coverage available? ~Kvng (talk) 13:22, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Too many data stream articles

We currently have way too many articles for data streams: data stream, streaming data, stream (computing), bitstream, and stream (abstract data type). Most of these are relatively short and of somewhat mediocre or stub quality at the moment. I think we should merge into at most 2 articles, maybe the following:

- Data stream with redirects from streaming data, bitstream (to a subsection) and stream (computing)

- Stream (abstract data type) possibly with a redirect from stream (computer science) and expanded to be a little less focused on the coinductive functional programming definition

Any objections or comments before I go through with these changes? Thanks, Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:56, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Three of these are on distinct, well-defined topics and should not be merged or mixed up with each other:
  • Data stream is about a medium for communication between processes.
  • Streaming data is about a type of data used as input to a streaming algorithm. (Those two articles are closely related but streaming data focuses much more on applications and streaming algorithm focuses much more on theory so a merge between the two would be awkward. Also the link in streaming algorithm to data stream should go to streaming data instead.)
  • Stream (abstract data type) is about an abstract data type used internally within functional programs.
That leaves Stream (computing), which is something of an overview of these and other various related topics, and bitstream, which combines some of that overview material with a paragraph on the mathematics of infinite sequences of bits. So it might make sense to merge bitstream into Stream (computing), and edit the result to make their overview function more clear, but not to merge any of the others. In addition, some of the incoming links to bitstream and bytestream (currently a redirect to bitstream), such as the one for Reliable byte stream, appear to really be about internet communication, and should go to data stream instead. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:34, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Also there's Streaming media.
I would tend to align with Caleb Stanford's proposal. David Eppstein is right that these closely related topics can be distinguished but I think it could better serve readers to do the distinguishing in one normal size article rather then ask them to navigate a mesh of small articles. ~Kvng (talk) 18:38, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
I don't think that would give us an article on a single topic. See WP:NOTDICT: we have articles on topics, not on words. We don't merge Stream (film) and The Stream (film) merely because they are both films and the similarity of their titles is confusing. We shouldn't merge the very different topics of functional programming data structures, streaming algorithm design, and stream-based internet communication protocols, merely for the reason that their subfields chose the same keyword to describe those topics. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:00, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
I agree streaming algorithm is substantively different. Also, the current intro to streaming data overemphasizes the distributed and heterogeneous aspects. While these usages in different subfields are different, they are related, and not accidental -- all deal with data that is processed in one pass and represents an unbounded or infinite sequence (this is true even for stream (abstract data type)). Caleb Stanford (talk) 00:07, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Point location#Requested move 14 August 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. ModernDayTrilobite (talkcontribs) 16:06, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Hot-potato and cold-potato routing#Requested move 29 August 2023

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Hot-potato and cold-potato routing#Requested move 29 August 2023 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —usernamekiran (talk) 04:10, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

This article has significant long-standing quality issues. An AfD nomination in 2011 resolved keep but noted those issues, and there has not been significant revision since. I think the topic is WP:NOTABLE, but it might be better as a stub. Would welcome others' thoughts on the talk page. Will WP:be bold if I don't hear any contrary opinions. mjec (t/c) 04:40, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

Do y'all think Cross-site leaks has a chance at a GA ?

Hey, I recently (read "a while ago finished") reworked the Cross-site leaks article to a significant extent adding a bunch of context regarding the history of the attack and currently available defences. Do you y'all think the article has a chance of passing a Good article review in it's current state ? If not is there how should I should improve on so that it can pass a Good article review ? (My theoretical plan is to work towards making the article a Good article and hopefully a FA eventually once the DYK process is over). (Cross-posting over from teahouse per feedback)Sohom (talk) 22:21, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

I've updated the assessment to B class so next step is WP:GA. It appears to be well sourced. In GA review, you get dinged for having sources in the lead. I haven't reviewed the content carefully. ~Kvng (talk) 19:58, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
I will try and restructure the prose over the week to eliminate references in the lede, most of the data should be cited later in the article, except for the part that talks about the impact. Sohom (talk) 08:39, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Someone may want to take a second look at V (programming language). Though I do suspect some level of notability, many of the sources are blog posts, etc. and the editor may have a close connection with the subject. I don't know if high quality sources are even available. I did a substantial amount of cleanup so far, more eyes/opinions would be welcome. Caleb Stanford (talk) 15:16, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

@Caleb Stanford I have replied on the talk page, I would agree with your rewrite in most places, the sourcing issue can probably be remedied by using the independently written books as sourcing. I do find your allegations of COI to be unfound though unless you can provide off-wiki evidence to the contrary of the user being involved in the development of the said language -- Sohom (talk) 08:46, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
Agreed and I retract that claim. Thank you for the edit. Caleb Stanford (talk) 17:28, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
Almost every time I encounter an article of uncertain notability in which the first sentence of the article mentions the creator, there is a COI editor behind it, because what better way to get your name in lights than to put it in the very first sentence of the article? Otherwise it is bad form--the creator rarely so important to a programming language that they must be in the first sentence of a substantial article. So I would have shared Caleb's suspicion. Thanks for pointing out that this is a rare counterexample. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 17:50, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello,
Please note that Human-centered design, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "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, 20 November 2023 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

It has been proposed to split Explainable artificial intelligence into Explainable artificial intelligence and some variant of Interpretable artificial intelligence. There has been discussion, but it is so far inconclusive and the discussion has been stale for 10 weeks. As this is likely to be of interest to members of this WikiProject, participation is solicited here. Felix QW (talk) 15:04, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Soft oppose. Wrote a comment on the discussion page. Caleb Stanford (talk) 16:58, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi, I've updated this draft article that was previously rejected about Odin programming language: Draft:Odin (programming language)

I've added additional sources that don't go to the language's own website and cleaned the article up, so it reads better.

I hope it is a good contribution to this wikiproject! Karl.zylinski (talk) 14:06, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

This draft has already been rejected, which means that it won't be considered again. I'm afraid you have been wasting your time. MrOllie (talk) 14:20, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused by this. If a draft gets rejected, with reasonable feedback for how to improve it, and I make those improvements (could mean a substantial part of the article is completely changed!), then it won't be considered again? So if I make a lot of changes to a draft in order to get it accepted, then it's better to copy the whole draft to a new new draft, loosing the edit history?
What also confuses me is that, since this article draft got rejected, it has been re-reviewed several times (and rightfully rejected again), but it does seem like re-reviews happen. Karl.zylinski (talk) 14:57, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Drafters get a few chances, in those cases the draft is 'declined' rather than 'rejected'. At some point it becomes clear that no version of the draft could be approved - in this case that is because the required sourcing isn't there to support Wikipedia's minimum requirements for inclusion (as given in WP:N). You'll have to wait a few years, and if people start publishing books and peer-reviewed journal articles about it have another go then. Don't copy the draft to a new title, that will not help. MrOllie (talk) 15:18, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Safari (web browser)

Safari (web browser) has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Sohom (talk) 01:36, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Peer review of Cross-site leaks

Hi! I've requested a peer review of the article Cross-site leaks. You're welcome to improve the article and/or leave comments at Wikipedia:Peer review/Cross-site leaks/archive1. Sohom (talk) 01:11, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Doubly logarithmic tree

The lemma Doubly logarithmic tree is an orphan for ten years now. No other lemma refers to it. This means something is seriously wrong. Could someone please have a look? Should it be part of the template on tree data structures? Ruud Buitelaar (talk) 02:28, 6 October 2023 (UTC)

It's not really a data structure. It appears to be used only to describe the structure of a specific parallel algorithm: All nearest smaller values#Parallel algorithms. Maybe it should be merged there, since it does not appear to be independently notable? —David Eppstein (talk) 23:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Information processing (psychology)#Requested move 7 January 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 19:13, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see proposal at: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Make Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer science/Manual of style into Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computer science.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  13:54, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for PHP

PHP has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Sohom (talk) 08:25, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Artificial intelligence art/Archive 1#Requested move 28 February 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 08:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

(Not an experienced editor, if this is the wrong place/if you have advice let me know!) In 2022, there was a request to move the article Associative array to Dictionary (data type). (Also see the previous sections on the talk page.)

The result of the move request was: (non-admin closure) NO CONSENSUS User:力 (powera, π, ν) 23:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

There is quite a bit of discussion here, but nothing resembling consensus for any particular move -- and the discussion is too broad for a re-list to solve this. This should be discussed on a WikiProject before there is a re-nomination, but no prejudice against a re-nomination in March. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 23:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd like to start said discussion. The 2022 renamings involved other things; I just want to focus on Associative array. This is important because a map/dictionary is not an array; for instance, while the PHP associative array is ordered, while general map/dictionaries are frequently unordered. In functional languages, a map may not even have an underlying Array/List, but is frequently a tree.

The obvious question is that this datatype has 2 common names: Map and Dictionary. Both are, in my view, better than the current, and I'd be happy to see it changed to either. To propose one (just to get the ball rolling), I'd like to suggest renaming Associative arrayDictionary (abstract data type) and Comparison of programming languages (associative array)Comparison of programming languages (dictionary). The (abstract data type) is in keeping with most other data types articles:

(Tree (data structure) and Array (data type) are the exceptions to this pattern.)

My argument for changing Associative Array:

  • Popularity. Dictionary and Map are both more popular searches. (Using "python dictionary" and "HashMap" to underestimate their popularity and exclude the normal uses of the words.) StackOverflow has 3,200 questions tagged associative-array and 85,949 questions tagged dictionary (of which "map" is an alias).
  • The aforementioned accuracy issue. Arrays are ordered, while maps (AWK & Bash's associative arrays included) are frequently not.
  • "Associative arrays" seem most common in languages where the map and list/array data types are collapsed into one object (e.g. AWK and PHP), where {0 =>"cat", 1=>"dog"} is the representation of ["cat", "dog"].

Briefly, considerations of Map (again, I like both.):

The arguments for/against Dictionary:

("Association table"/"Symbol table" is potentially a 3rd alternative that appears in some algorithms textbooks, but I'm not fond of it.)

KenyonP (talk) 06:46, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I created a topic on Talk:Associative_array mentioning this. Question of wiki etiquette: Would it be polite/appropriate to ping the people who participated in that discussion(s) (and if so, is there a bulk-notify template?) KenyonP (talk) 06:57, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
This topic has many names, as our article makes clear. The one I typically use is "dictionary", but that may be out of familiarity with Python. That said, WP:NCDAB appears relevant: "When there is another term (such as Apartment instead of Flat) or more complete name (such as English language instead of English) that is unambiguous, commonly used in English (even without being the most common term), and equally clear, that term is typically the best to use." Here, "dictionary" and "map" are clearly ambiguous, while "associative array" is not. That suggests that we should continue to use it rather than changing to a title that would require disambiguation. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:22, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
That's a fair point (and I'm happy to go with it if that's what people decide), but I think that "associative array" is sufficiently uncommon and less clear that those priorities might win out.
It's also arguably still ambiguous: NIST's page says If [a linear search of key-value pairs] is too slow, and you access the array by number, too, you must create and maintain an index into the array. The index is a dictionary, organized by the content, of indexes into the array. That seems to indicate some people use "associative array" to mean specifically an array of (key, value) tuples, like Association list. (I also think the fact that "Association array" is nothing close in meaning to the array-equivalent of "Association list" is a source of confusion.) KenyonP (talk) 08:57, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

As pointed out on the talk page, renaming Associative array to Dictionary (...) is problematic:

  • Dictionary (data structure) is problematic since there is a possible correlation to implementation structures of the dictionary concept. That is, the term might incorrectly suggest (at least to some computer scientists like David Eppstein) that the article is concerned with data structures that implement associative arrays, or even that there is just one such implementation structure.
    Note: The NIST's page referenced by the article is subtitled "(data structure)".
  • Dictionary (data type) is problematic because the article does not provide a definition (or description) of such a data type so that dictionaries from Python (or JavaScript / Ruby) would be compliant with such a definition.
  • Dictionary (abstract data type) is problematic for similar reasons like Dictionary (data type). Moreover, such a term might incorrectly suggest that the article is about a "value domain" where dictionaries are devoid of identity (i.e. distinct dictionaries must represent different maps - in particular, there must be exactly one empty dictionary).

Hundblue (talk) 20:07, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm trying to avoid getting bogged down in the naming of the (...) part by going with existing consensus. A Set feels like the closest analogy, since it's conceptually a Map without keys. In that case, we have Set (abstract data type), and I think all your concerns about the structure/type/ADT distinction apply there as well, right? (I'm happy to discuss a broader renaming in a separate thread, though.)
KenyonP (talk) 02:38, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, you are right, my concerns about the "abstract data type" terminology are applicable to other articles as well. In particular, I have objections against statements of the form

In computer science, a foo is an abstract data type ...

At present, this is the introductory sentence for the following foos: list, stack, set, associative array, graph, tree. First and foremost, a list (, stack, ...) in computer science is NOT a data type. Instead, it is an instance of a data type. This is what the Data type article says at present:

In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is [...] usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these values [...].

Is a list (, stack, ...) specified by a set of values plus operations? No, it is just one of the values or a representation of one of the values.

One can point out that the exact term used in the articles' introductory sentence is "abstract data type" rather than just "data type". But this makes things even worse. Quoting from Abstract data type:

In computer science, an abstract data type (ADT) is a mathematical model for data types [...]

This would mean: In computer science, a list (, stack, ...) is a mathematical model for data types. Which sounds nonsensical. Moreover, the qouted definition of Abstract data type raises doubts about whether an abstract data type is a data type in the first place.

On the whole, the term "abstract data type" is not established enough to provide a suitable base for definition or description of other terms. Until the issues are settled, IMHO, references to ADT should be avoided as much as possible. In this regard, the term Associative array provides a protection against the ADT mess.

Perhaps the key question about the proposed renaming to Dictionary (abstract data type) is whether a Python dictionary should be a prominent exemplar of the notion described by the article. If so then ask whether there is an ADT so that Python dictionaries are instances of that ADT. The description of an ADT as provided by the #Properties section has the following issues:

  1. The description is based on NIST's dictionary which cannot be regarded as a reliable source.
  2. The description lacks input-output signatures of operations. What kind of entity is returned by insert(j,v,D)?
  3. It is not clear whether identity of dictionaries is supported. Is new() = new() satisfied? Are there more than one empty dictionaries?
    Note: In an old version, the Properties section contained an E symbol that denoted "the empty dictionary". This was later removed in favor of the new operator.
  4. It is not clear whether dictionaries with circularities are supported. In Python (or JavaScript / Ruby) executing x = {}; x["a"] = x results in a circular dictionary. Is such a dictionary an instance of the described ADT?

Until these issues are settled the connection between Python dictionaries and ADT should be regarded as not yet established. Hundblue (talk) 16:11, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm not claiming that a Python dictionary is the exemplar of the map/dictionary. (In particular, Python dictionaries are explicitly order-preserving.) Python is maybe the most notable modern user of 'dictionary' as a term, but other languages/libraries/textbooks use it too. Again, I'm happy with Map as well if it feels more language-agnostic.
I don't think we should hold off on changing the name because the current one avoids the "(abstract data type)" name--if that's an issue, we should make a new thread and discuss what a proper parenthetical would be and (if supported) apply it to ALL such pages. (Including Associative array.)
I'd be happy to work on the Properties section, but that's not something I need WikiProject consensus for. KenyonP (talk) 22:13, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

If I understand you correctly, you don't regard a Python dictionary as the exemplar of the notion described by the article. This is surprising. Does it mean you disagree with mentioning Python as one of the languages that support associative arrays? Quoting from the Language support section:

Most modern scripting languages, starting with AWK and including Rexx, Perl, PHP, Tcl, JavaScript, Maple, Python, Ruby, Wolfram Language, Go, and Lua, support associative arrays as a primary container type.

If a Python dictionary is not the exemplar of the article's subject then all my objections to the proposed name change are pointless. Hundblue (talk) 18:43, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I've nominated Cross-site leaks (a while back) for promotion to a Featured article. Reviews, comments and suggestions are welcomed at the nomination page :) Sohom (talk) 21:35, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:TACL#Requested move 12 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Brusquedandelion (talk) 01:04, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Invitation for discussion

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § AI for WP guidelines/ policies. ExclusiveEditor Notify Me! 14:39, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

There is a requested merger discussion at Talk:List of fictional computers#Merger proposal 18 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Dash77 (talk) 22:53, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Synchronous conferencing#Requested move 25 April 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Wikiexplorationandhelping (talk) 00:48, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

There is a requested merger discussion at Talk:Online chat#Merge to Synchronous conferencing and move usable content to various articles that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Helpful Raccoon (talk) 18:25, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for COBOL

COBOL has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 15:38, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Uncited statements at 0#Computer science

A few statements at 0#Computer science need support from manuals, textbooks, and/or histories. XOR'easter (talk) 02:40, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

State Machine Replication a subtopic of Replication but does not reference it

Add a link from replication (computing) to state machine replication. The other direction is covered. This is also an opportunity to improve consistency between these two related articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.173.242.91 (talk) 09:06, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

I have nominated Microsoft Security Essentials for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets the 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" in regards to the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Sohom (talk) 15:29, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

(programming) vs. (computer programming)

Is there any significance to articles distinguished with (programming) (e.g, Property (programming)), and those distinguished with (computer programming) (e.g, Method (computer programming))? Is there any consensus around a preferred distinguisher, such that I might bring articles into conformance? Thanks all! Tule-hog (talk) 20:57, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello,
Please note that Keygen, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "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, 19 August 2024 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team