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Revision as of 13:11, 10 December 2023

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"Bytesex" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Bytesex and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 November 25#Bytesex until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Veverve (talk) 15:39, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

It was relisted several times, ending up at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 December 9#Bytesex, which indicates it was closed as "Keep". Guy Harris (talk) 22:49, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Bytesex?

Does the term "byte sex" deserve to be in the first sentence? It has about 60,000 bing hits, and most of the first page isn't even discussing it in the endian sense. I've never heard the term before. 2A00:23C5:321B:BB01:241C:9873:FD0F:C101 (talk) 21:26, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

As above, it is in active discussion. Yes, I suspect it shouldn't be in the first sentence, if at all. Gah4 (talk) 22:24, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

The removal of the "bytesex" redirect is no longer under active discussion. It was relisted several times, ending up at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 December 9#Bytesex, which indicates it was closed as "Keep". Guy Harris (talk) 22:48, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Just because the term 'byte sex' can redirect here doesn't mean this article should discuss it in the first paragraph. This is a bit of obscure historical jargon which is no longer in current use. At best it belongs in a footnote. –jacobolus (t) 18:18, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

For all practical purposes the term is extinct, most younger practitioners will not recognize it, linux.bytesex.org notwithstanding, and we are WP:NOTDICT, so the lead is a bad place for this synonym (I have no objections against the redirect, and, most likely, some anchor in the text). I agree that even now the term is WP:UNDUE that high in the article, unless the section is expanded to cover much more widespread terms: "network byte order" is currently relegated to mid-article, "host order" is even lower and has no coherent definition whatsoever. Dimawik (talk) 05:28, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

No objection for a month to the removal from the lead. Per Guy Harris I am changing it to an anchor so that the redirect will stay operational. Dimawik (talk) 08:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Bit endianness

Regarding the removal of "bit endianness": the term is easy to find in the literature (e.g., , a book by Springer). The deleted text about the error-correcting codes was also factually correct (I expect it to be hard to find a source for the latter, though). I happen to like the new text more, and think that the error correction minutiae are out of scope here altogether, but, probably, it is worth adding back the "bit endianness" term somewhere in the text (not in the section header)? Pinging @Kvng: Dimawik (talk) 03:58, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Bit endianness is less of a problem, but still exists. Some hardware has the ability to address bytes. Even when it doesn't, hardware descriptions don't always number bits the same way. Yes it happens at a lower level, but for those working at that level, it is important. Gah4 (talk) 05:06, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, anyone who tried to code bit fields in a portable way knows the problem well. The issue here is a terminological one: should we mention the term "bit endianness" or be happy with a more popular "bit order"? Dimawik (talk) 07:25, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. We do have a Bit endianness redirect (which I broke) so I should restore that (with a ref). There is Dimawik's question about preferred terminology here. Any opinions?

There is discussion of bit order (and byte order) at Cyclic redundancy check so I think it would be valuable to restore that tie in. ~Kvng (talk) 13:49, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Potentially problematic edits

Thumperward has recently made some bold edits. Some of these don't appear to be well justified. I have not reverted any of this yet.

• cite quotes are almost always pointless. I assume they're helpful to readers who don't have ready access to the cited source. What's the harm?
• one day people will get over this completely wrong-headed notion that any time a term might ever possibly refer to the current article, it needs to be bolded. Some of the boldface is per MOS:BOLDSYN and should be restored.
• ascii art is a bad way of representing anything, and the text should be clear enough already, likewise. text does a perfectly good job here. These are tables, not ASCII art. It is very often useful to have both visual and written descriptions as different presentations work better for different readers.
• just link this. I don't see a problem summarizing a closely-related topic here.
• more jargon file crap. A quick search finds NUXI problem in fairly widespread use. This may need to be tagged for a better citation. I don't think it should be removed. This bold edit also draws into question some of the work done a little earlier in ...remove "byte-sex" nonsense from ESR's jargon file, which is nothing more than ESR's own list of personal neologisms.
• cite needed, not code. So let's find a citation. Meanwhile, let's keep the code as provides some level of verifiability to anyone who knows the language in question. WP:DEMOLISH.

~Kvng (talk) 15:37, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Let's go through some of these.

• The "harm" is massing up both wikitext and article text with large paragraphs which by definition simply repeat what is in the article. A citation should point the reader to the relevant source. Unless it is lost to time, including the actual content here is overkill. There may occasionally be grounds for this but that should be the exception.
• BOLDSYN refers to the article's lead, and very very very very very very obviously does not justify bolding the phrase "big" 75% of the way through this article.
• Any table content not intelligible with a screen reader is harmful, and the meaning of these tables can (as demonstrated) be perfectly encapsulated in text form without causing readability issues to unsighted readers.

Feel free to attempt to suggest alternative solutions to the issues highlighted. I do appreciate that they weren't reverted. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 04:25, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

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