Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Lua Programming

Lua Programming
I suggest deletion of the all the pages in :­. I would say that this isn't as much about deleting as it is about merging. There are two books about Lua programming, one which is called Lua programming and another which is called Lua Programming. I have written most of the former, while the latter is a collection of very short articles about different topics related to Lua. I have either merged directly or moved all content in the latter that could be useful. Almost all of what is left overlaps with the former book, and the rest is things that it either would be very difficult to merge and don't have much content (basically, it'd be easier to rewrite those than to merge them), or that are empty articles that mention that Lua doesn't have this or that feature (which could be useful in a list of features Lua doesn't have, which I will probably add to the former book at some point, but could not really be useful anywhere else).

There are 100 articles in the category, but they are all very similar: just look at two of them and you'll notice that all the others are similar. I have looked at all of them, one by one, and think they could all be deleted. --Mark Otaris (discuss • contribs) 04:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The naming convention we use is that the name of a book uses title case, i.e., all important words capitalized; while the name of a subject category uses sentence case, i.e., only the first word and proper names capitalized. A book category (category of pages of the book) has the same name as the book, thus uses title case; while a subject category (category of books in a subject) has the same name as the subject, thus uses sentence case.


 * So there absolutely should not be a book called Lua programming. It's possible to have more than one book on a subject, but all books should have names using title case.


 * I'm not (yet) taking a position on this nomination; just providing background information. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:46, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I should have mentioned that the major reason I am nominating the pages in this category for deletion is in fact because I am thinking of renaming the book Lua programming to Lua Programming for consistency with other books. I wouldn't have created this nomination otherwise because while deleting the other content could have been useful for maintenance, it wouldn't have been as necessary. I think it would be better to first clean up what is there before moving it, to not end up with an unmaintainable number of articles, hence this nomination. I wasn't aware that book names could not use sentence case at all, but I see many advantages and no disadvantage to using title case. I also found the following excerpt in the manual of style:


 * "Some people prefer to use title casing like books often do, while other people prefer to use sentence casing like Wikipedia does. Title casing is recommended for book titles as it reduces the potential conflict between title- and subject-categories. Casing on subpage names and sections is entirely a matter of style. Whatever combination of schemes for book titles, pages and sections, please be consistent and follow the existing style for books you are editing."
 * That excerpt, while it doesn't indicate that sentence case should not be used for book titles, does recommend against using it for book titles. Perhaps it should be changed to make the recommendation stronger or to make it a guideline, though this probably isn't necessary (and should be discussed on the manual's talk page, not here). -- Mark Otaris (discuss • contribs) 21:50, 23 September 2013 (UTC)


 * [[Image:Symbol comment vote.svg|15px]] Only cleanup I totally support you, Mark Otaris. Cleaning the two contents is great. Now let's see what to do with those two books. I think you should move all the good content of Lua programming by renaming Lua programming/... to Lua Programming/... . If a page already exists, copy/paste the content to the page in Lua Programming and transform the page in Lua programming into a redirect. Then transform all the old pages of Lua Programming into a redirect, either to an appropriate page or to the book page. Doing this, you will have a single book called Lua Programming with only the right pages, invisible redirects that point to the right content and in Lua programming only redirects. Alright? So why requesting a deletion? It is not needed. And again thanks for your work! There is not enough cleaners over here. Ftiercel (discuss • contribs) 17:51, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I have already merged all the useful content from Lua Programming (some of it was pretty useful, especially the page on iterators since I wasn't very comfortable with iterator functions), which means there isn't any useful content there anymore that doesn't overlap with Lua programming. No page that I'd need to move to already exists, and I'm planning to move stuff by just using the move tool, which creates redirects. The problem is that there is already a lot of very small pages containing one or two paragraphs. I'm requesting a deletion so that the space can be cleaned before moving, as all the useful content has been merged already. There is more than a hundred of very very small pages (less than stubs, in many cases) in Lua Programming and these pages don't use the same structure as Lua programming. Many of those pages are pages that mention that Lua doesn't have a feature (see Lua Programming/How to Lua/bitwise, Lua Programming/How to Lua/conditional compilation and Lua Programming/How to Lua/empty statement, for example). Lua programming is a book about Lua programming while Lua Programming is more of a short wiki that contains many articles on different Lua-related topics, so they're really not compatible, and having a hundred redirects to other pages in ways that are not very relevant, especially if these redirects also don't have name structures that would make sense here, is really not something ideal. The books can be merged in content, and already have been, but they cannot be merged in structure because one (Lua programming) is a book with a flow while the other (Lua Programming) is a sort of mini-wiki with many less-than-stubs articles about particular topics. --Mark Otaris (discuss • contribs) 23:18, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

assuming what Mark Otaris says has been done. Not having worked with Lua, I'm not able to judge; but if the cleanup is done, it only makes sense to toss the disorganized pile in favour of the organized book, and then rename the organized book to make it title case if that gripes people. Chazz (talk) 00:00, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

I have skimmed through the content on both pages. The 'Lua programming' content as a formatted book is superior to the content of 'Lua Programming' which is hard to navigate, does not have a narrative--more of a catalogue of various topics, and is poorly formatted. I support the merge of Lua programming and Lua Programming, with Lua programming's content largely superseding Lua Programming's. My only suggestion is that Lua Programming does have a section called 'solutions' which suggests there should be pages about writing Lua components in C and C++ and embedding and embedding Lua in C and C++. Hackbinary (discuss • contribs) 13:16, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:29, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

bulk deletion - the older book's pages are apparently used by some, and are even receiving recent updates (cf. How to Lua). To avoid breaking inbound links: better to turn those into a section-level redirect for either a page in the new book that mentions the same topic, or a new appendix of the new book that combines all of these stubs. Sj (discuss • contribs) 02:10, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
 * That’s a very unclean solution, though. There are (exactly) 100 pages in Lua Programming, most very small stubs (one sentence for most of them), untidy, many with improper formatting. Lua programming is almost complete: all there is left to add is literally around 5 paragraphs to describe some of the standard libraries that aren’t described yet. It can also include information about the C API or using Lua outside of an embedded environment, but I’m not planning to add these to the book, although I would be glad if someone else did it.
 * It is of course possible to make section redirects for some pages, but I doubt they are actually linked to from elsewhere on the web. Furthermore, it won’t work for most pages because the books were designed very differently: one (Lua programming) is a book which covers various topics in order while the other is a mini-wiki with a lot of small articles about various functions or keywords. I specifically designed Lua programming to cover topics rather than functions or keywords, in such a way that there isn’t in fact a single section covering a specific function or keyword. Therefore, it is just not possible to make equivalences with section redirects for most of the pages.
 * My opinion is that it would be better to leave the two books separate as they are now than to merge them with section redirects and an appendix to contain the stubs at the end, because that’d make it untidy and would make it harder to maintain. It’d be a lot of maintenance work for practically no benefit. --Mark Otaris (discuss • contribs) 05:01, 17 February 2014 (UTC)