Talk:Number sign

Featured in NY Times Crossword Puzzle on 7/26/18

Hello. Perhaps this qualifies as a mention or something on the main page - the multiple uses of this symbol were a primary feature of today's NY Times crossword puzzle! They included: 1) number, 2) space, 3) sharp, and 4) pound. The puzzle also included 2 names for the symbol: hash tag and octo thorpe. Would more info be useful or anything, for any editors interested? I'm still very much in learning mode, so don't feel up to tackling that addition myself. Regards, ClarityKTMpls (talk) 21:42, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Alternate Name

I recall some data processing people whom I knew in the 1970s pronounced it "box" when reading it aloud in a string of characters. It was one of just two (along with "@") non-letter non-numerals that was permitted in computer program and file names in the IBM-360 era. WHPratt (talk) 06:53, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Fragment

¨Occasionally used in the UK (e.g. sometimes in BT publications and automatic messages) – especially during the Prestel era, when the symbol was a page address delimiter.¨ This is not a sentence. Is it supposed to mean ¨Ït is occasionally used...¨?

Ancient history now but the missing verb is 'was' and belongs in front of 'occasionally'. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:35, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Other Uses

One Stephen “Luigi” Mullen, who me history in the closing overs of the 1970s, used it as shorthand for “versus”. Was this commonplace thing or just something he made up? I've certainly not encountered it anywhere else. Mr Larrington (talk) 11:35, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Character information tables

About a month ago, Spitzak deleted two 'character information tables' as "information that people can work out for themselves". I agree: these tables are unencyclopedic clutter.

• WP:Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal: if anybody really wants to know the codes to use on an IBM mainframe, they will look in an IBM manual or web page, not here. The same goes for the other entries.
• wp:Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information: speaks for itself.

Hym3242 wants to reinstate that material. Per wp:BRD, let's see a solid case to do so. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:17, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi, JMF, I am sorry it took me so long to leave a reply here. WP:NOTMANUAL seems to be somehow over-used sometimes. The problem is that argument also applies to many other cases, such as many "list of" and "table of" articles. One of course can argue that users can always go to the statistics office of each and every country to compile those table themselves, but doesn't that result in a lot of wasted time? While wikipedia is not a manual, it is also not a paper encyclopedia, which means it can collapse things if they are cluttering up the average reader's screen space, or we can have an external tool that generates all code points in all encoding systems ever existed, and link it in the infobox, just like the chemical infoboxes! There are many alternative ways to avoid throwing information away while still reducing what you regard as "clutter". I personally prefer a collapsed structured box in the infobox, maybe we should even build a template for this, and use it on every character's page. Hym3242 (talk) 15:41, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Those tables are bloat and provide zero information. The entire contents of the table can be determined by knowledge of which Unicode code point it is (which takes 6 letters including the "U+") and knowledge of the transformation formats (fully documented on other wikipedia pages). And certainly there is no need to tell people both the decimal and hex value of the same numbers, especailly in a format that obscures the fact that they are equal. Spitzak (talk) 16:06, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

@Hym3242: The big problem with your solution is that the majority of readers do so on mobile and the collapse function doesn't work on the mobile interface. Screen after screen of that kind of detail fails WP:Think of the reader. It really is not Wikipedia's role to reproduce the Unicode.org, the IBM, the Apple, the Microsoft etc manuals. I don't think they are difficult to find via Google etc but IMO it would not violate WP:ELNO if you were to link to these external sources. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:15, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

If you are more concerned about mobile experience you may should have pointed that out though. I am primarily on desktop.

I still think these information are much like the chemical boxes. If wikipedia can contain those, these info are equally justifiable.

When you say Think of the reader, remember to think of the readers that are relatively new to this field. Certainly experts would consider some info in their article bloat, because they are so common place in their field they consider them common knowledge and are beyond surprised when they find out otherwise. But what are the odds for the average readers to discover them if you don't link them? We know how to google tech problems, we know what websites to look for, we know where the manuals are. Not so much for others outside of computer science. In one sentence: don't remove info just because you don't need it.

Wikipedia is not a manual, but it can be a manual aggregator. At least we should supply ref to manuals after the general description.

If collapse does not work on mobile, then don't you think the only way to urge Wikimedia people to support it is to keep them? With all cruft gone, they just can't see the need for such a function.

Spitzak continues his assertion that they contain zero information, which is obviously a bias from experts. Hym3242 (talk) 14:23, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

My remark re mobile view was in addition to Spitzak's response, essentially to say that hiding it is not a realistic middle way solution. I concur with his analysis. The only people who might ever be interested in this information (such as it is) are those working with operating systems, for whom it is (mathematically) trivial, the equivalent of telling them that 20 is next number after 19 in decimal, after 1F in hex, 17 in octal. Gee whiz. Directions to manuals belong in the wp:See also WP:External links list. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 18:55, 22 March 2024 (UTC)