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Talk:Index to OEIS: Section Rec

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subsection titles and wiki structure

I wanted to bring the following two issues to be discussed:

  1. I don't understand why "order 01", "order 02", ... would be more readable than "order 1", "order 2",... Personally, I'd be in favour of changing this. Note that since "hand made" anchors (id="order_01", etc) have been implemented and thus used so far in OEIS, this would not break any of these links ("/index/Rec#order_01", which of course can and should remain of that form).
  2. I'd be in favour of making ("true" "wiki"-)sections of these subsections (through ===...,order 1=== etc, or another appropriate subsection level), having the 2 advantages of providing automatically a mini "table of contents" on the top of the page with direct links, and, more important, with the possibility of editing each subsection separately instead of the whole (quite large) page. — M. F. Hasler 16:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
The reason for the 01 is historical: the index was ordered alphabetically (ASCIIbetically, actually) line-by-line and so 01 was needed so that 10 would sort to the right place. There's no need to keep it that way now.
I have no thoughts on the second suggestion.
Charles R Greathouse IV 17:09, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

order

I observe that currently the signatures are ordered as (ASCII) Strings, which means character-wise with "-" < "0" < ... < "9". Thus "(-11,...)" < "(-199,...)" < "(-2,...)" < "(111,...)" < "(12,...)" < "(9,...)". Wouldn't it make much more sense to order them according to absolute value of their components? Then (0,...) would come first, followed by small coefficients, and large coefficients (negative or positive) would come last. — M. F. Hasler 22:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Ordering on the signed (natural) value might be worth doing, whereas ordering by absolute value might be confusing. As this is another non-automated and huge task, and as we have no feedback on whether anyone has ever looked into that index, I'd rather leave the current (historical) ASCII-order and focus on improvements in other sections of the index. R. J. Mathar 07:59, 6 September 2012 (UTC)
Ordering on absolute value has both the benefit of easy understandability and it places the most common sequences first. As I'm working on the index atm I can just change the ordering on the fly. - Ralf Stephan 07:20, 19 August 2013 (UTC)