3 ms·

Only 17 new languages in last decade? Why such dramatic slowdown in contrast with earlier decades?

munificent 9y ago
Honest but cynical answer: deletionist Wikipedia editors rained down the delete hammer on most new languages a while back. They now have very high requirements for notability, so unless a language is old enough to be mentioned in print sources (which are increasingly not relevant to the advancement of human knowledge), then it's unlikely to have its own page on Wikipedia.
- ghaff 9y ago
  In all fairness, although I'm pretty much solidly in the inclusionist camp, lists like this on Wikipedia can turn into this vast laundry list of everyone's pet hobby project or master's thesis. You could probably delete 75% of that list and not remove anything that was commercially important or historically significant.
  - d33 9y ago
    I guess that one could solve this by making Wikipedia more semantic-driven: imagine being able to filter through the laundry list by measuring relevance using Github statistics (is it still maintained? was it starred by more than 100 people?) - you could have a lot information and still be able to digest it by prioritization. What do you think?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      That's just one example. There are all sorts of lists like "Notable people from X city" that get pretty ridiculous.
      - d33 9y ago
        One could add queryable criteria there as well.
    - Can_Not 9y ago
      But this goes back to notablility. Wikipedia's policies are to cover content that is notable. It sounds like what you are looking for is discoverability. GitHub already does this. People are making, sharing, and forking "awesome lists". You can make a PR to learnxiny's languages list. Wikia will vendor lock and host your programming language dedicated mediawiki for free. Mediawiki is free and open source software that powers Wikipedia that you can run on almost any cpanel based web host.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

Honest but cynical answer: deletionist Wikipedia editors rained down the delete hammer on most new languages a while back. They now have very high requirements for notability, so unless a language is old enough to be mentioned in print sources (which are increasingly not relevant to the advancement of human knowledge), then it's unlikely to have its own page on Wikipedia.

ghaff 9y ago
In all fairness, although I'm pretty much solidly in the inclusionist camp, lists like this on Wikipedia can turn into this vast laundry list of everyone's pet hobby project or master's thesis. You could probably delete 75% of that list and not remove anything that was commercially important or historically significant.
- d33 9y ago
  I guess that one could solve this by making Wikipedia more semantic-driven: imagine being able to filter through the laundry list by measuring relevance using Github statistics (is it still maintained? was it starred by more than 100 people?) - you could have a lot information and still be able to digest it by prioritization. What do you think?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    That's just one example. There are all sorts of lists like "Notable people from X city" that get pretty ridiculous.
    - d33 9y ago
      One could add queryable criteria there as well.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    But this goes back to notablility. Wikipedia's policies are to cover content that is notable. It sounds like what you are looking for is discoverability. GitHub already does this. People are making, sharing, and forking "awesome lists". You can make a PR to learnxiny's languages list. Wikia will vendor lock and host your programming language dedicated mediawiki for free. Mediawiki is free and open source software that powers Wikipedia that you can run on almost any cpanel based web host.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]