RodionGork's blog

By RodionGork, 12 years ago, In English

Friends, Colleagues and Comrades!

Today we found that wikipedia lacks an article on Competitive Programming - our beloved branch of sports and engineering.

We are to fix it.

I wrote very short stub page here. But my English is poor and my knowledge of Competitive Programming facts and history is not great. Also I do not know wikipedia rules very well (though I like this resource, as many of you).

Please help to improve it. You may edit an article itself, or write to me useful links on the subject or proposition on what to add/improve here.

UPD: Thanks to unknown colleagues who significantly improved existing four paragraphs. Now I want to add another two: sample of the problem statement and list of some most notable contestants.

For first I need the allowance of someone of the authors to post some nice, easy to understand and, possibly, funny problem. For second I need some links to personal pages of notable sport programmers (not only Petr and tourist), may be links to ones already mentioned on dedicated wikipedia pages.

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10 years ago, # |
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Great idea! Wikipedia might be a great resource to attract new enthusiasts.

I've started the list of notable contestants (with the only articles I knew existed: Petr tourist ) and redirected a link from Mind sports to this article instead of Computer Programming, which I think is less appropiate.

For me, it's important to highlight is the idea that solving means creating a program that solves it completely for you for any possible input. When I explain what I do, people without programming background (the majority of the population) fail to understand this idea.

A possible idea to show this that has served me in the past is sudoku: you explain how you can write a program that tries every possibility until it finds the correct sudoku (there are more efficient ways to do that, but that's not important); it would take several minutes for a human to solve a sudoku but once the program is written it takes less than a second to solve any sudoku.

Another problem that might be useful is shortest-path, since nowadays everyone is familiar with GPS.

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    and redirected a link from Mind sports to this article instead of Computer Programming

    Yes, there are some wrong links and redirections. recently I've found that "Programming Challenges" leads to article about some book. I've made redirect to "Competitive Programming" and moved the book-related article to other name.

    However probably there are more such nasty links and titles.

    According to statistics currently this article still have relatively few visitors daily:

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      10 years ago, # ^ |
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      Programming Challenges makes much more sense as the book title than as a redirect to CP, I've never seen someone refer to CP with a generic title such as "programming challenges" before.

      The fact that you left completely no link to the book page is terrible. If you do this again in the future, either make "Programming Challenges" a disambiguation page or add a note in the CP article saying "Programming Challenges redirects here, for the book see...". Otherwise someone looking for the book will never be able to find it.

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        10 years ago, # ^ |
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        The fact that you left completely no link to the book page is terrible.

        It is not so. I've just renamed the page:

        Programming Challenges book

        You see it was not full of information.

        I also think it is usual convention in Wikipedia to add (song), (book) or (film) to titles which are titles themselves.

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          10 years ago, # ^ |
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          I know you did not delete the page, but you made it unreachable unless the person knows the address beforehand.

          Take for example Royals (song), if you just access "Royals" you get a page that clearly points to it, so that anyone looking for it can easily find the correct title: Wikipedia:Royals

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            10 years ago, # ^ |
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            Well, if you really care of this article you can easily add disambiguation page.

            However it would be good if you can expand the stub-orphan page about the book before it. Since it does not look proper to create disambiguation page pointing to the article which contains almost no info and have not been fixed since 2010.