Talk:Random number book

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook articles

Cryptography: Computer science Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cryptography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Cryptography on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CryptographyWikipedia:WikiProject CryptographyTemplate:WikiProject CryptographyCryptography articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Computer science (assessed as Low-importance).

Restoring content

This edit deleted the entire content of the article, replacing it instead with a redirect to an article that at the time of writing does not even mention the topic of random number books [1].

While still a stub, this article does already contain verifiable material on a notable topic. To simply remove this material from Wikipedia is unjustified IMO.

A case could perhaps be made to merge and redirect this article into random number table or even to merge and redirect both to random number, currently a DAB page, but certainly not to random number generator which does not cover this topic even in theory. In either case, after the merge we'd need to end up with a section Random number book and a redirect to this section from here.

Another possibility would be a redirect and merge to A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. This would be valid if there are no other significant examples published (in any language), for example. I don't know one way or another, but such a claim would need to be verified and a source cited, and I'm a little skeptical. But if it turns out to be true, then the material from this article could be merged to the more specific one, and a person who comes to Wikipedia wanting to put on an authentic performance of Vision would know exactly what they're looking for (and even in 1969 when I helped perform this piece such books were hard to find).

But as I found it, what we had was a redirect to a rather poor article flagged with multiple issues, an article with a particularly poor rambling lead which often strayed off-topic, but an article that as I said did not even mention this particular topic, let alone cover it. It's hard to see this as any sort of improvement over the current stub. Andrewa (talk) 18:54, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]