Talk:Random number book

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)