User talk:Comps

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!!!

Hello Comps! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. If you decide that you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. You may also push the signature button Image:Wikisigbutton.png located above the edit window. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. This is considered an important guideline in Wikipedia. Even a short summary is better than no summary. Below are some recommended guidelines to facilitate your involvement. Happy Editing! -- Kukini 15:48, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Getting Started
Getting your info out there
Getting more Wikipedia rules
Getting Help
Getting along
Getting technical

[edit] WP:ANI report of IP vandalism at Serializability

Hi. In the future, you can just warn the user yourself. See WP:UTM for all the current user talk page warnings and instructions on how to use them. As well, I have tagged Serializability as unsourced, because it is completely unsourced. Please do find and add references per Wikipedia's policy of verifiability. Regards, Flyguy649talkcontribs 05:10, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't have access to the reference, so I'll just assume that it meets the guidelines. However, as a person not in that field, (in my opinion) Serializability is written too technically, and perhaps should be edited to make it comprehensible to a general (i.e. encyclopedia) audience. At a minimum, you could have a non-technical explanation at the top. Also the definition in the lead isn't great. "...serializability is the property of a schedule (history) being serializable." -- you are defining a term with the same term. Flyguy649talkcontribs 02:43, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. Let me first quote what I wrote in a discussion about a related article, where I tried to explain the nature of the article, which is also applicable here:

This is a technical-mathematical article. It is not an easy reading. An effort has been made to write it completely without mathematical notation and to reduce mathematical terminology without harming accuracy, while capturing the main results about the subject (in the reference). This, to make it accessible also to people not fluent in the language of mathematics. However, some mathematical terms like graph, cycle in graph, necessary condition, serializability, etc., could not be eliminated. As such every sentence and every word are important, and have been carefully considered. Comps

BTW, I access Math and Physics articles on Wikipedia often, and most of them, the specialized, are impossible to be understood by general audience...

Background and context material are given by articles linked in the very beginning: Databases and Transaction Processing.

This material is typically not even studied by undergrads, unless highly specialized in database systems. To my opinion it is harder to study this from the reference, or any other book that I know. To me this article looks the clearest and the most compact, and frankly, I view the fact that nobody has tried to change it in over a year, though it is VERY fundamental, a sign of approval by and satisfaction of others. One person even wrote a compliment IN the article, by mistake, and immediately erased it...

The opening sentence includes both a characterization and a connection to related term that is also used in a different meaning. I presented it in a way that makes the connection clear immediately and also put a link to disambiguation. I think it well serves the purpose of the article, to convey the subject in the most effective way. Comps 13:46, 16 May 2007 (UTC)