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Welcome to the Administrative Assistance reading room
You can request assistance from administrators for handling a variety of problems here and alert them about problems which may require special actions not normally used during regular content editing. Please be patient as administrators are often quite busy with either their own projects or trying to perform general maintenance and cleanup.
Reporting vandalism
You can deal with most vandalism yourself: fix it, then warn the user. If there is repeated vandalism by one user, lots of vandalism on a single page, or vandalism from many users, tell an admin here, or in #wikibooks (say !admin to get attention).
Non-administration matters
For more general questions and assistance that doesn't require an administrator, please use the Assistance Reading Room.
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Please title your request and sign your name and date (by adding four tildes thus: ~~~~.

[edit] Beta feedback

Where can I view all Beta feedback?--Launchballer (talk) 10:28, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

I don't know that you can. Whoever worked on the Beta probably sees it, but I don't know who is part of that group. -- Adrignola talk contribs 12:49, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Undeletes

Request for undelete of pages. (Thanks to [1])

Also Talk:Chess Opening Theory/1. d4/1...Nf6/2. c4/2...g6/3. Nc3/3...d5 (Cannot quite make out why this talk page was deleted given that there is a page of matching content. SunCreator (talk) 00:54, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
That talk page shouldn't have been deleted, I would agree. I believe I tried to delete a talk page redirect that was orphaned after a double redirect was fixed to point to the destination page, but then got redirected to the destination talk page and didn't notice that before deleting.
It's been pointed out that the other pages are linked from Wikipedia. They've been restored. I'd like to fix the links on Wikipedia to avoid redirects when people jump over to Wikibooks, now that I've been made aware that there is such a heavy relationship between the two, and since the book's been renamed as well. -- Adrignola talk contribs 02:57, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Browsing category

I was just browsing under the Science>biology category and noticed that there was no ecology category. For the past two years my 300-level ecology class has been writing an ecology wikibook that has grown quite considerably (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ecology). How do I get it to show up in the browsing categories? Thanks, Paul --PaulWLepp (talk) 15:58, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

The ecology book is currently under Science → Physical sciences → Environmental sciences → Ecology. Both the introductory chapter of the book and the wikipedia article on w:ecology refer to ecology as the study of organisms as they interact in there environment. Where/how does ecology fit into biology? Is it wrong to consider ecology an environmental science? --darklama 16:17, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
"Biology is the science of studying living organisms" w:Biology. Does that answer your first question? "Environmental science is a field encompassing the wide range of scientific disciplines that need to be brought together to understand earth systems and the many interactions among physical, chemical, biological, and human components" w:Environmental_science. Thus, most of these scientific disciplines (e.g. ecology) should not be classified as environmental sciences. Instead, only interdisciplinary approaches classify as environmental scienes. Thus, I would say, ecology is used by environmental science but it is itself not an environmental science. --Martin Kraus (talk) 12:57, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Naming convention maintenance

I changed Template:naming convention today to add an mbox to it so it will stand out a little better. Darklama reworded it and made it point to the current policy (thanks dl). Then I changed it again so that any page including it be added to a new category I created: Category:Pages violating the naming policy. I dunno which category that category should be added to, but I assume it should be added to one somewhere. It would be nice if we could also make this category show up as a place where people could do maintenance tasks. It might have been easier to just move the pages instead of adding this template to them, but you know the saying - "Build a man a fire and you keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you keep him warm for life." Maybe we should add some instruction to the category page (how to rename, what links here, edit pages that link to it, remove template, etc). I don't have time ATM, and I'd also like input from others. --Jomegat (talk) 17:52, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

I altered the template to point to the existing category for this sort of thing, Category:Naming convention change (also referenced by Template:Cleanup-NC) and filed the template in Category:Moving (rename) templates. -- Adrignola talk contribs 19:03, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
Cool. Thanks. --Jomegat (talk) 20:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] 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)

Symbol question.svg Question: 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 "f97", 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)

[edit] 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)
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