Wikipedia:Wikifun/Answers/Task 2

Answer

Though one. From the size (26 x 26) I immediately guessed that it had something to do with the 676 possible two-letter combinations of the letters of the alphabet, but I just couldn't find any image looking like these two. I was thinking about ccTLDs and ISO 639 and—because you said "as of 27 Oct 2004"—about any Wikipedia statistics, but nothing came up. For some time I was tempted to answer that these two matrices were uploaded by User:Ravn, represented a mysterious puzzle, and could be found at here and here and were both shown here. A quite corect answer, but obviously not the one you had in mind :-)

But then I finally found it: they're here, but only if viewed as a logged-in user with his preference for stub display set to 300 characters! They represent all possible two-letter combinations as Wikilinks (blue=article, violet=stub, red=nonexisting). The first one is for upper-case/lower-case combinations, the second one for upper-case/upper-case combinations. Aa or AA is in the top-left corner, Zz or ZZ in the bottom-right corner. Lupo 12:57, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

(Frankly said, that task was a bit unfair. What if somebody had created an article for Zz in the meantime? And what if I hadn't thought of adjusting my stub threshold preference? Lupo 12:57, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC))

(As the answer is indeed more than correct from what I can see, I think I can answer this question right now.) I admit that the violet squares were not the best idea of mine - but I noticed this too late. I hoped the similarity would be striking enough to make the answer recognizable. (Oh, and how right I was ;-) ) The same goes for newly edited articles.. Wikifun is very easily affected by someone creating new articles links or removing information, whether with good or malicious intent, which can make tasks more difficult or tremendously easy. I try to keep an eye on significant changes, but still everything flows. Congratulations on this answer - what did it take you to find the correct stub threshold? Ravn 15:34, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, that actually was easy. Mine was set at 200, and the similarity was very close. I then tried 500 (way too much violet), and then 300, which looked about right. But the things I had checked before stumbling upon this list! I even thought for a while it might be some example of a cellular automaton! Lupo 15:40, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I was lost looking through articles on codes and ciphers. the 26x26 grid had me thinking that way. Good task, good job finding it!!!Pedant 23:21, 2004 Nov 1 (UTC)