Wikipedia talk:Missing science topics/NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Generated from the index on Fri Aug 12 13:59:57 2005. --R.Koot 14:47, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Considerations for worldwide perspective

The terms listed in the NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures can be very limited to only the algorithms as defined in that U.S. document, rather than necessarily representing a global view of algorithm descriptions. Hence, the terms in the list might be inappropriate as notable topics for Wikipedia, where perhaps "Crochemore-Perrin string matching" might fail to get much coverage in mainstream media. Beware dictionaries prepared by the U.S. Federal Government, because at times, a word-tyrant will come to power in a U.S. agency and command a lot of people to start documenting his vocabulary (to keep their jobs), and most people will let it happen because no one really cares enough about "nerd-words" to risk confrontation. Years later, history often reveals that the tyrant's compedium of nerd-words has become some sort of twisted, de facto standard. For example, when the World Wide Web was first created, font sizes were called "1, 2, 3 and 4" rather than "12-point" or "pica" or "elite" fonts. Of course, typsetting experts would want to wretch and puke at the naive, juvenile, and yes, infantile, notion that font-sizes should be called "1/2/3". Also, consider the monumental design flaw to use the 6-character connoction " " to represent a non-breaking space, used thousands of times in webpages. A savvy computer scientist might have selected the symbol "#" to be activated for "words#stick#together" by the technique of setting metacharacters; or even try "&n;" but instead, " " has become the standard for spacing now, violating the rule against "committing perverted acts of gross indecency with a computer language". Similarly, there is little resistance to tyrants naming other stuff "ga-ga" or "goo-goo" or "wah-wah" or "discrete interval encoding tree" because dictionary watchdogs are extremely rare in society, and easily fired or "promoted" out of sight. Bottom line, beware thousands of peculiar nerd-words as article topics. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:27, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Is this list important?

I came here from WP:Computer science as it was number 3 on the list of things to do to help the project. However looking through the list (and the site in the external lists) it appears that most things on this list seem pointless to create an article about. It seams most of these red links are just general terms or specific cases, which are should be covered in other (already existing) articles, or which simply warrant a dictionary entry... after all isn't Wikipedia not a dictionary?

Isaac Oscar (talk) 15:36, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it is possible that they should be simple redirects to sections in other articles, to whole articles or just not exist on WP. They should be thought of as "candidates for articles". All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 18:08, 6 April 2014 (UTC).