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

message: 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)
thread_title:  Sub-Page discussion 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  To start with... 

message: *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)
replies: text: *If I'm not mistaken it has to do with capitalization.  --Kbdank71 (talk) 20:29, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: *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)
replies: text: *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)
replies: text: *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)
replies: text: *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)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: :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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Questions