Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion/User/Wikipedians by programming language/Archive/2007

Sub-Page discussion

This turned out to be more in depth than just fixing caps.

So I'm starting the sub-page for discussion so that we can hammer out the details before listing at UCFD. - jc37 10:24, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Thoughts and additional information are most welcome. - jc37 10:24, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Discussion of this and Wikipedian cats in general

Jc37 asked me on my talk page for assistance, and I replied. He then asked me to post the comments I made here. Here they are.

I'm not exactly sure what Category:Wikipedians by computer skill is for, except allowing like users to commiserate with one another, or helping them to receive unsolicited requests for programming advice from complete strangers! A can of worms best left unopened? I understand what you are trying to achieve, but I don't think worrying over whether it should be Category:User asm or Category:User assembler, Category:User awk or Category:User AWK is the best way to improve Wikipedia! And Category:User latex (the name of which might give a somewhat misleading idea of the nature of its members) is missing from your list. Best wishes, RobertG ♬ talk 10:52, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

allowing like users to commiserate with one another, or helping them to receive unsolicited requests for programming advice from complete strangers I got "corrected" recently for pointing out the exact same thing. User said he had no problem with contacting many random people in the category for help, even though he had no idea how much knowledge or willingness to help the people have. I pointed out that a wikiproject would be better, as someone who needs help has one place to ask, rather than wondering who to ask in the category, and possibly getting no or the wrong answer. I have a feeling he was just at UCFD because "his" category was up for deletion. I have the same problem with these categories. Just because someone is in User X, or Wikipedians who can program/understand X means absolutely zero other than "look at me, I think I'm important!" It doesn't mean you edit articles related to X, it doesn't mean you are willing to help others with X. Again, a wikiproject, if there isn't a programming one already, will cover the collaboration aspect much better than any of these categories can. Of course, if you try to delete them, even if just to replace them with something better or more useful, you'll get a thousand fly-by UCFD'ers showing up to point out how it sure has helped them/others, but no they can't remember who/when oh and by the way, keep. --Kbdank71 (talk) 11:56, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Comment Hmmmm, I hope it wasn't my comments in UCFD that prompted this discussion.... I am really not qualified to discuss some of the nuances between languages, so I will not discuss the merits of merging some categories into others. (My programming experience is limited to BASIC 25 years ago, Fortan 21 years ago, and ATLAS, which is not on the list; I don't plan to add it.) However, I do support de-babelization of less-populated or outdated langauges, and I definitely think that all of the categories should be renamed to match their associated categories, including the use of mixed case where appropriate. (The plethora of three-letter abbreviations and lowercase orthography appears to be an attempt to match them to the Babel language and writing systems categories, without the underlying ISO-assigned conventions used to categorize them. Additionally, the use of three letter abbreviations occupies slots that should be reserved for ISO 639-3 recognized languages; all five of the three letter categories beginning with the letter A are codes that could be used for specific languages, as are one each for the letters F, L, P, S, T, and U.)
I am neutral on the question of renaming them to eliminate the "User xxxxx" format, although I support the idea of removing the parent category from one of the two categories to which it is currently assigned (Category:Wikipedians by language and Category:Wikipedians by computer skill). My personal choice would be to remove it from the former, but that might be more contentious than the latter. While I am sympathetic to Kdbank71's reasoning, I think that it's a bit futile; the sense of ownership that has been engendered by some of the categories that have been nominated over the past month has been astonishing, and while it tends to be grasping at straws, the "It could be useful" argument tends to sway a lot of people. In this particular case, moreso than most; even User:Tony Sidaway supported their retention at the last UCFD, and we all know how fond he is of the whole user categorization system. </snark> Horologium t-c 13:30, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• My 00010 cents: I support the keeping of these categories by utility, and I (probably unreasonably) hate the Babel system. So I would favor real words, and then if necessary using subcats with the same phrasing with a -1 or -2 after it (but I'd collapse those too). I think the best phrasing would be an active Category:Wikipedian programmers in <x>, making it a straight subcategory of Category:Wikipedian programmers. This presumes that all computer languages can be programmed in; that is, it presumes that there aren't any that are "read-only," where reading is a useful skill. I don't think that'll be a problem, but I could see the objection.--Mike Selinker (talk) 15:41, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• I think the categories have a certain utility in allowing editors to make "unsolicited requests for programming advice". Of course, those requests should be related to Wikipedia rather than a term paper for Programming 101: Programming for Beginners. (As I mostly use WP:VPT and Wikipedia:Help desk to solicit advice on technical matters of coding, I wouldn't know how effective the programming language categories are in this respect.) Still, it's probably ill-advised to randomly contact people will requests for programming help; one should at least check the contributions history of users to see if they have any demonstrated interest in the subject of programming languages.
• As for this issue in particular, I weakly support capitalisation to distinguish these categories from the human language ones, and am neutral on the idea of moving away from the Babel format. As a purely technical note: Category:Wikipedians who program in NewLISP and Category:User SmallTalk are currently nominated for renaming. Also, if we're to keep the Babel format for now, Category:Wikipedians who use Yabasic ought to be renamed to Category:User Yabasic. – Black Falcon ^(Talk) 17:11, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Well that above confirms that most of the "CFD regulars" have a bit of burn out from the last two months. As the nominator of quite a few of the discussions which resulted in revealing how deep that sense of "ownership" and "identification went with some Wikipedians, I have no problem with apologising. Though to be honest, if I had it to do over, I would likely "do it again", though perhaps nominating in a different order, spacing the noms out differently, etc. (I was rather taken aback at how disruptive the discussions started to become - but sometimes discussion needs to be attempted).

And I strongly am empathetic to Kbdank's last sentence above: "Of course, if you try to delete them, even if just to replace them with something better or more useful, you'll get a thousand fly-by UCFD'ers showing up to point out how it sure has helped them/others, but no they can't remember who/when oh and by the way, keep." - Only to add: "And this is just another attempt by deletionists abusing their "powers" to separate us (me) from my category. Why don't you find something more productive to do with your time like edit the encyclopedia, instead of making these "bad faith", invalid nominations, trying to delete the Wikipedian categories on some page where no one seems to comment. So, yes STRONG KEEP, and the nominator should be horsewhipped, blocked, desysoped, and just generally ostracised from all existance. Oh and note the AN/I discussions that I've started about this."

I noticed Mike S and Kbdank (and others) pretty much took a WikiBreak from UCFD the last time this happened. and now After Midnight recently said the same thing. What's somewhat ironic to me is that I also took about a month WikiBreak from it (well, I let RL take priority, anyway), but due to some of the reasons that I've been accused of.

I think it's fair to say this here, since I believe that those of you that I've requested help from know me fairly well - It's been more than generally annoying to be accused as such. And what's also nearly driven me nuts is that it's like pulling teeth to get most of the commenters to actually discuss the categories. Here I'm trying to help and I repeatedly am gettig slapped in the face for it. But all one can do is pick themselves up and continue on, I suppose.

(I should say that I've greatly appreciated the personal support I've received in the midst of this. Not that I considered any comment minor, but when I was at my "lowest" points - Mike's comments at an AN/I discussion, and especially the barnstar from Kbdank were very much appreciated.)

And I should also note that those who I asked for help with this either expressed opinion in such topics recently at UCFD (Horologium for example), or were those who I felt were knowledgeable about bots/programming/etc, and had recently been involved with CFD/UCFD. (I wanted to ask David Kernow, but he's been on WikiBreak since June - sigh. RobertG was probably the least active of late, but I wanted to ask him anyway : )

Anyway, as cathartic as this discussion may be for us, I suppose I should get back "on topic" and discuss the "by pl" cats. I'll start a new sub-section for it, moving the notes below. - jc37 23:54, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• Just to clear something up, I didn't take a break from UCFD because of the stridency of some comments. I took a break (what I thought would be a close-to-permanent one) before any of that happened, because I thought it was both done and uncontroversial. And shortly thereafter, the roof hit the floor. But that wouldn't have chased me away.--Mike Selinker (talk) 07:48, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

  "And shortly thereafter, the roof hit the floor." - I need to find a way to convey laughter besides "ROFL", it just doesn't seem to convey it anymore : ) - jc37 07:55, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

To start with...

Some misc notes I made along the way:

• Active Server Pages
• Category:User a68 - ALGOL 68; ALGOL68; Algol 68; Algol68;
• Category:User asm - Assembly language; Assembler language; etc.
• See: Assembly_language#Related_terminology

• Merge Batch and CMD?
• Maple is a software package

• Standard ML of New Jersey

• MediaWiki - not an individual pl?

• Mobile programming - ugh!

• NWScript - Neverwinter Nights

• Regular expression - another command line one

• TCL - which one?

• Delphi = Object Pascal ?

• Several of these seem duplicative, such as the variations of BASIC or C.
• And some seem to just be applications or development packages which have some internal scripting language of some kind.
• I think we should subcat all the scripting languages that are kept, reserving "programming language for subcats and "higher order" programming languages.
• Quite a few of these should probably be "de-babelised".
• Should we retain the user languages naming convention, or just spell these out entirely:
  • Category:Wikipedians who can program in <x>
  • Category:Wikipedians who understand <x>

- jc37 10:24, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Several of the cats need discussion, rather than just capitalisation renaming. RobertG brought up a good point that not all the cats are directly under By pl, either. Anyone willing to help expand/sub-divide the noms on the main page? - jc37 23:54, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I say all programming categories should be de-babelized at minimum, and I wouldn't mind seeing them all deleted either. As mentioned above, the utility of these categories for Wikipedia is suspect at best. I think these were originally created by someone who went "Hey! Real languages have a category! Why not programming languages?" And didn't really think of why real langauge categories help Wikipedia while programming categories don't. IMO these essentially only exist right now for people to display on their page as an achievement of sorts, rather than something geared towards helping Wikipedia. For barnstars and such no problem, but categories should have some utility for Wikipedia to be kept. Since such a proposal is likely to result in no consensus, however, a mass-renaming is certainly a step in the right direction and is better than nothing. VegaDark (talk) 02:56, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Comments

• Comment Is there a reason why some of these are suggestions to rename to themselves? If not, could we remove these? (Feel free to remove this comment, jc37, if you choose to remove them.) Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 20:23, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• If I'm not mistaken it has to do with capitalization. --Kbdank71 (talk) 20:29, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• I'm referring to the ones that have the exact same capitalization before as after. E.g., Rename Category:User ABAP to Category:User ABAP. These are readily identifiable as having categories associated with the after rename option that already exist (i.e., are blue instead of red on default settings). Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 20:32, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• I believe jc37 went through and listed all of the child categories. Some don't need to be renamed, so he just listed it under the original name. I could be wrong, though. Horologium t-c 20:36, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• That was my assumption as well. I'm just suggesting that we remove those in order to slightly cut down on the list size. If jc37 agrees, I'd also suggest he remove this entire discussion. Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 20:53, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

• Yes and no. Some also need to be discussed for other reasons. I think it's better we list them all, even if, in the end, next to an entry is: "no action suggested". I'd prefer to reduce confusion than to worry about how long the list is. (I'm taking my lead from a number of nominations by Mike Selinker last year.) - jc37 07:10, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Questions

Question #1: Shouldn't we ask some of the category creators why they used lower case when creating them? Perhaps some of them have reasons for that based on conventions among the language users. I can't think what those reasons would be. The question just crosses my mind. Doczilla (talk) 05:43, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Re Question #1: In all likelihood, the categories were created with lowercase letters because that's the convention for human languages. Of course, human language categories follow ISO 639-3 standards, whereas no such standard exists (that I know of, at least) for programming language. – Black Falcon ^(Talk) 06:13, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Waaay back in yesteryear, naming of Wikipedian categories followed the babel system of "User abbrev" with the "abbrev" typically in lower case. Since then, after many nominations and standardisations, only the language categories retain that system. SO now the question is to whether the PL categories should stay "babelised" in naming, stay "somewhat" by retaining "User abbrev" but allowing clearer caps, or be expanded as per all the other Wikipedian cats. In addition there are other questions, such I listed above. - jc37 07:17, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Question #2: Looking for precedents relevant to this discussion, I found a previous CfD on Native language programmer categories. What would be the level 4 version of these categories? Are these user categories even necessary? Doczilla (talk) 05:43, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

The -N ones are gone (I presume). And I only listed the parent cats for each PL category tree. Though I think that most (if not all) of these sub-trees should probably be UpMerged to each parent. (Which is another thing to discuss). - jc37 07:17, 29 November 2007 (UTC)