Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bogosort

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was KEEP. Bill C. Riemers (talk) 01:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Speedy Keep - The article has been updated with sufficient references, so I withdraw my nomination. No other people are in favour of deleting this article.Bill C. Riemers (talk) 01:04, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Bogosort

Bogosort (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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This article fails to meet the relevant notability guideline. (See also WP:NOT Wikipedia:NOTTEXTBOOK Wikipedia:NOTESSAY). If this page was noteworthy for educational use, it would be referenced by text books and other educational material. There are no reference that indicate this idea is being used as notable educational topic. Bill C. Riemers, PhD. (talk) 16:06, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

• Keep Mentioned in Eric S. Raymond's The New Hacker’s Dictionary, the NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures and a paper published in a volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Probably sufficient to establish notability, unlike sleep sort. —Ruud 21:06, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
  • A few more books mentioning bogosort. I think the Jargon File has been at least somewhat successful in popularizing this term in hacker culture. —Ruud 22:02, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Now that is an impressive enough list, I would agree it is noteworthy in terms of educational use. I wonder if there is a way to withdraw my request...Bill C. Riemers (talk) 23:21, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Nope: It looks like I could do a Wikipedia:Speedy Keep to withdraw the nomination if an only if there are no other Delete votes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Docbillnet (talk • contribs) 23:21, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Delete Entries in a couple of dictionaries and one brief mention in a not very notable paper do not establish notability. JamesBWatson (talk) 21:13, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

• Keep No, but I have now established that there are many more and better sources. JamesBWatson (talk) 19:36, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

• • For completeness sake, Wikipedia should in my opinion cover all entries in the NIST DADS. —Ruud 21:17, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Although it does include other worthless entries such as Lucky sort... —Ruud
      • Lucky sort proposed for deletion as well, but his is just a discussion on Bogosort. Once and awhile someone has to go through and try and prune these things. There are thousands of possible sorting algorithms, but only a few actually worth referencing in a encyclopaedia intended for laymen. Really, I don't mind if someone proves me wrong and finds a reason why this in noteworthy. I just don't see one yet.Bill C. Riemers (talk) 22:02, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Comment The first two are just dictionaries, which Wikepedia is not a dictionary WP:NOT. While the conference lecture published in LNCS does have merit, there are millions of professional lectures and articles published every year. 24.716 articles where published in LNCS in 2007. . A single publish reference is not sufficient to establish noteworthiness, unless the algorithm itself is actually somehow noteworthy.24.36.199.169 (talk) 21:32, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
  • Subject-specific encyclopedias are often titled "dictionaries". They are however not dictionaries in the Oxford English Dictionary sense intended by the WP:NOT essay. —Ruud 21:47, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • Good point. Since the references are not online, I cannot actually see the contents. Do they actually give something beyond the name and a short definition like you would expect from a classical dictionary?Bill C. Riemers (talk) 22:02, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
    • I second this argument from Ruud. I consider the article to be more substantive than a dictionary-like entry, and that the current references reflect more than just mere descriptions of the algorithms they describe. I Jethrobot (talk) 22:03, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Comment I think of all the "ineffective" sorts, this has the most potential to be an article. It doesn't help that Bogosort is a newer and only used for educational purposes-- it makes the task of finding reliable sources inherently more difficult because it simply isn't used in actual programming. Is there more evidence that Bogosort is used in education, since that is the stated notability in the article? I Jethrobot (talk) 21:57, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep There are two additional scholarly articles where bogosort is implemented and described in a way consistent with the educational demonstration of a bad sort as described by the current article. Multiple, independent, published usages of the sort by members in the academic field for should satisfy notability guidelines. I Jethrobot (talk) 22:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep The above references are good enough for me. I added some of them to the bogosort article. Bill C. Riemers (talk) 22:48, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
• Weak keep per I Jethrobot's sources, in particular the first, which analyses the algorithm's average running time. This is a long-standing fun meme in the analysis of sorting algorithms, and any good encyclopedia should provide information on it. Merging with other inefficient or fun sorting algorithms might make sense, though. Hans Adler 23:23, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. — • Gene93k (talk) 01:09, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

• Weak keep. Coverage is fairly minimal, but does exist. FuFoFuEd (talk) 08:35, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep It does have sources and some notability and the article is fairly reasonable. Dmcq (talk) 08:38, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. It appears sufficiently notable to be included. Its current purpose is educational, and serves as a simple example for Las Vegas algorithms. The motivation for such an abysmal algorithm might not only be education, but also to be a descendant to an algorithm called "slowsort" that appeared in a 1984 paper by Broder and Stolfi on Pessimal algorithms and simplexity analysis. The topic of Pessimal algorithms apparently never caught on; according to Google Scholar, the paper has only been cited 3 times, the first being in 2006. Justin W Smith ^talk/_stalk 15:26, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. Adequately referenced. At most, the infinite group of rubbish algorithms could be merged into one article to save space. That would need sorting though! :) Widefox (talk) 19:34, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
• Keep. I think we have sufficiently many reliable sources for WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:58, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.