User talk:VanishedUser sdu9aya9fs787232

Notability of the Ptolemy Project, Software Projects and Programming Languages

Doing a cleanup is a good idea, there are plenty of vanity pages in Wikipedia. I manage the Ptolemy Project, so your placing of a notable tag on the Ptolemy Project (computing) page is of interest to me. I'm not a big fan of people who are too intimately involved in a page editing that page, so in general, I've stayed away from editing that page.

One question I have is that the Ptolemy Project is more of a software project than a programming language. Ptolemy II is a software laboratory for exploring modeling of concurrent systems using Agha's Actor model. Are you interested in cleaning up just programming languages or also cleaning up software projects?

You raise a good general point, so rather than focusing too much on the specifics of the Ptolemy page, we could discuss the general idea and see where we end up.

Wikipedia:Notability_(academic_journals) says not to use Google Scholar but searching Google Scholar for '"Ptolemy II" Berkeley', comes up with "about 2000" hits. Searching IEEE Explore (a better managed collection of papers) at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ for "Ptolemy II" comes up with 33 hits and "Ptolemy" comes up with 106 hits. What sort of metric about notability are you interested applying? To me, notability is connected to Impact factor. It might be interesting to do an impact factor analysis of articles that you find to be not notable.

I've seen lists of programming languages that are actively used, see http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html for a list of 50 most popular languages. However, popularity and notability are different. In the Tiobe list, ALGOL is listed as #51, so it is not very popular, but it is very notable. SNOBOL does not make the Tiobe list, but it is also notable in part because it was widely taught. The SNOBOL wiki page should remain, even though it is not popular because SNOBOL is historically interesting.

With regard to the notability of software projects, there are various metrics. http://www.ohloh.net/p has a list of a projects and measures things like the amount of activity in the source code repository, the number of contributors and the like. Coming up with a list of metrics for notability for software projects would be intersting.

Anyway, thanks again for raising this issue. I agree that marking pages as being non-notable might not earn you friends, but having a discussion about notability will likely earn you the respect of the community. I'm more than happy to have a civil dialog about the topic and look forward to your response. Cxbrx (talk) 19:39, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

The notability tag doesn't always mean the article in question is not notable. I usually give my judgment on its notability in the edit comment -- for the Ptolemy project I only said that the article did not assert its notability (which it didn't, it only had a link to the Berkeley page). I've heard of Ptolemy, but I don't know much about it; I got to the page by following the "visual programming languages" category. If it isn't a programming language, it probably shouldn't be tagged in a PL category. Since Ptolemy is an academic project, there should be notable academic sources that cover it. I would count a paper with hundreds of citations to be a notable academic source. Since you added a reference to such a paper, I have no further qualms with the article with respect to notability! :)

I have a couple of metrics in mind for establishing notability of programming languages. First, there's no question about popular languages. If a language is popular, it is probably also notable. It shouldn't be hard to find secondary, non-random-blog sources discussing the language.

So the problem then is: how do we establish notability for non-popular languages? One way would be to find credible (e.g., highly cited) academic sources. However, many academic papers introduce languages to introduce or explain concepts; I think in this case the novelty is more in the concept, not the language and therefore discussion of the language should be a section of a Wikipedia article about the concept. For instance, in my research area, "functional reactive programming" was introduced in a highly acclaimed (best paper award, highly cited) paper. That paper also discussed a domain-specific language called Fran. Is Fran notable? In my opinion, no. It is functional reactive programming that is notable, and the article on FRP should discuss Fran. Really, they could have not given a name to Fran and the paper would have been just as good. In other words, languages are not necessarily notable because they implement notable concepts. However, if a highly cited paper was about the myriad design choices that led to the creation of a language that embodied those principles, then I would say the language is notable. If the paper is ABOUT the language, then the citations reflect the language's influence on computer science.

I think the corner case is where a language has no credible academic sources, but is still notable. SNOBOL is a good example. It isn't popular in academia or in the mainstream, but it was clearly a very influential language. In this case we just need to make precise the ways in which it was influential on computer science. I'm not sure of any hard and fast criteria for doing this, but I'm open to suggestions!

I don't think metrics such as code size or number of contributors is a good idea. First of all, an article created by someone else without my knowledge about my website was deleted, when it is a collaborative project with hundreds involved -- clearly there is precedent against this idea. Second, what would you actually write about a project with a large code base but isn't notable for other reasons? All you could discuss is the project itself, which isn't good enough in my opinion -- we have to establish some continuity! What influence does this project have on the rest of the world? Why should anyone care? For instance Factor (programming language) is a big project (or so I hear), but I wouldn't call it notable by any stretch of the imagination. All of that source code could be deleted, and nobody aside from the contributors would care very much (sorry guys!)

I think it would also be a good idea to say what things DON'T establish notability. Here are some ideas:

• Relation to Google. Just because Google was in some way involved doesn't make it notable. The Factor page lists a tech talk given at Google as a source. Who cares? Google is huge -- people talk there all the time, people come up with non-notable projects at Google all the time, etc.
• Publication in an academic journal/conference. There are a lot of mediocre academic sources.
• A novel combination of language features. If there isn't a reliable source to back this up, it's original research.

Thanks for your comment! Christopher Monsanto (talk) 20:51, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Please, could you make a research about an article subject before mark it as non-notable. --Sergey Shandar (talk) 11:40, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Anything that I marked for AfD I most certainly did research on. Any article I marked with the notability tag does not assert its own notability. Perhaps you are confusing Alice (programming language), which you commented on the AfD of, with Alice (software), a very notable project? :) Christopher Monsanto (talk) 14:47, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Firstly, I'm about Nemerle. Sorry but you did non make a research. Stack overflow has more than 100 questions, not 2. Microsoft Research is official reliable source. RSDN is not a tutorial. Do I need to show more proofs that you did not make a research? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sergey shandar (talk • contribs) 22:34, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Please forget about wikipedia, remove yourself, if you keep deleting stuff from wiki we will email your professor ^__^ nCdy