Wikibooks:Reading room/Administrative Assistance/Archives/2009/October

Request for un-delete or request for additional feedback
Greetings, I am working on a programming language comparison book AnyLang_Programming_Language_Comparison/Introduction.

Part of this book requires me to examine different programming constructs and compare how they operate in different programming languages.

I have several hundred pages of content already, but they are not yet uploaded to the book, they are on my local machine.

Apparently Random-named pages: One unique aspect of the book is the naming convention for individual pages. Instead of naming the page according to a known language construct, the pages are named using a "unique ID" that does not correspond to the actual information on the page.

Why would I do such a thing? Because it gives a way to permanently reference a page regardless of whether the programming construct in question changes or has an ambiguous or non-fully-agreed-upon name in the computing references. The trick here is to apply a guaranteed unique name that will persist for as long as necessary regardless of how the different programming languages (or different versions of the same language) choose to name the underlying concepts.

Recently I did a bulk upload with all the pages, and I had intended to do another bulk upload with the content for the pages that have content already, and placeholders for pages that do not yet have content.

Apparently this was viewed as a runaway process that was spitting out gibberish, but (for the most part) it was not gibberish, and only about five or so of the pages were actually unusable content that I had produced by mistake.

Alternative approaches: If this approach I have chosen is viewed as unfavorable for whatever reason, I welcome alternatives if anyone wishes to provide them. The main goal is for me to get the content into the book without having to make hundreds of individual edits and without having to break the unique naming scheme that prevents the content from becoming out of date whenever the underlying programming constructs change. Thanks for reading this and thanks for any additional feedback. Dreftymac (talk) 22:59, 12 October 2009 (UTC)


 * For those of us on the sidelines, what is an example of one of the "random" page names that was used here and was deleted? It might be possible to suggest an improved naming technique if it were clear what one was trying to improve upon. (The general principle here is... probably... that page names are used both by the wiki software and by the presumably-human audience of the book, so they ought to make sense to both &mdash; but to judge what that means in this case requires, at least, an example or two.)  --Pi zero (talk) 10:09, 13 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Here are some examples (there are more than 100 in total)....
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/adamant lancer dynamic" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/kneads temper wincher" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/insert heaven valdivia" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/dockyard jester ruby" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/chapter surge lowly" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/thus councils unfading" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/island measure vividly" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/swing marcy blame" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/sensory fatality firmly" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/lend taking eater" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/lapels beats leak" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/hankow cults hey" ‎
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/frogs award juicily"
 * "AnyLang Programming Language Comparison/trash yashmak judith"


 * The pages were deleted as having no meaningful content - they were all blank except for the word "blank". Given they were all created in sub-seconds of each other, it was clearly an automated process and appeared to be an error ("frogs award juicily" does on the face of it look like nonsense!). I'm neutral on this at the moment as I don't understand yet why it is necessary to have the odd names. Agree with Pi zero though - they need to be human readable in some way. Unusual? Quite TalkQu 10:28, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

(BTW, lest I forget to mention it: IMHO this is a fascinating idea for a wikibook!)

If one were going to give the pages names that have nothing to do with their content, the worst possible choice IMO would be to give them names that are made up of humanly readable words that have no correlation with the content &mdash; which seems to be what was being done.

However, I don't see any reason why one would want to use names that have nothing to do with the content. On the contrary, randomized names are guaranteed to be harder for people to keep track of than any other naming scheme. The implication seems to be that coordination between pages is expected to be maintained only by computer &mdash; that is, by generating new (or modified) structure using software probably only available to the original author, defying the concept of a book that "anyone can edit". It won't be just new structure, either; sooner or later, structural changes will be wanted &mdash; planning for "permanence" in a wikibook is a doomed strategy.

A somewhat similar "initial automation" technique was used over at wikibook False Friends of the Slavist, where most of the anchors within the pages were automatically generated with names like " ", resulting in a maintenance nightmare that might, just possibly, have been avoided entirely by arranging for anchor names to coincide more naturally to the way the pages interrelate. I spent some time a while back laboring, largely in vain, to decrease the entropy of that book. (I may get back to it someday, too, but only if I can come up with a plan to streamline its organization for human maintenance.)

What sort of humanly meaningful page names might work for AnyLang Programming Language Comparison depends on what sort of content the pages are expected to have. At that point, my instinct is to take my further questions and comments to the book's talk page. --Pi zero (talk) 14:58, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

User:Kyleenstar
The user is engaged in spamming the project, check the User contributions, administrative action is needed to put a stop to it. --Panic (talk) 06:01, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Indefinitely blocked for creating attack pages. Thanks. Unusual? Quite TalkQu 08:30, 19 October 2009 (UTC)