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

See also: 2007 discussion.

Starting again

Based on the previous discussion, I'm presuming the following:

• Previous "babelisation" by having numeric subcats was presumably only due to the convention of WP:BABEL for spoken languages.
  • In general, all numeric subcats should be upmerged to the parent.
• Previous usage of lower-case was presumably only due to the convention of WP:BABEL for spoken languages. And we should not be held to that convention for programming languages.
  • In general the reference to the programming language in the category name should match the article name.

At the moment, if we follow these guidelines, then I'd support retaining the "User <proglang>" convention for programming languages.

The alternate options are:

• "Wikipedians who program in <proglang>"
• "Wikipedians who use <proglang>"

What do you think? - jc37 10:02, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I would support any of these changes individually, but my first preference would be to rename all to "Wikipedians who program in <proglang>" (without the "can"), where proglang matches the article name, and upmerge all numeric subcategories. –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 17:01, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Adjusted.

My apologies if you've said it previously, but I'm curious as to your preference. (Not necessarily opposing, just curious.) - jc37 20:30, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

In general, I would like to see the WP:BABEL convention restricted to the alphabet and spoken languages categories only. One reason is aesthetic preference and another is clarity in naming (the scope of Category:Wikipedians who program in <proglang> is immediately clear to everyone, whereas Category:User <proglang> may not be immediately understood by all). A third reason is tied to my desire to upmerge all of the numeric subcategories. I'm afraid that as long as the programming language categories follow the BABEL convention, editors will imitate Category:Wikipedians by language and create numeric subcategories.

That said, I would support even a limited change, such as renaming to match article titles while keeping the "User" prefix. –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 21:12, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Black Falcon pretty much 100% on what he said so far. I would also go so far as to propose deletion for all programming language categories that cannot reasonably be linked to improving the encyclopedia in some way, which I would suspect is a great many of them. Further, I don't support the babel convention for any category type (including alphabet and spoken language categories) so making the transition with this set of categories is a good step towards getting rid of that. VegaDark (talk) 21:40, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Split into sections

I've attempted to split the list into rough, topical sections. Help would be appreciated : ) - jc37 09:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I found the splitting of the list to be quite helpful. It makes it much easier to compare the relative merits of categories. For instance, there seems to be a certain degree of overlap between the use of Category:User Wikitext and Category:User mw. Even though Wikitext and MediaWiki are distinct, they seem to be used to express essentially the same information (namely, ability to edit Wikipedia and other websites with MediaWiki software). –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 01:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)