Raising Perl awareness on Tiobe + Wikipedia, etc.

[Richard Foley]

I think the original proposer is suggesting that it has more to do with one of
the many things we might be able to do to help to raise the perception of Perl
in the wider world. WE all know what "Perl" is, but when someone does a
specific search on the 'net, for instance relating to this Tiobe ranking, it's
possible that having the wiki page entry, title/header/page/keywords, read
"Perl (Programming Language)" might be more helpful.

This is what Tiobe says:

    The language should have an own entry on Wikipedia and it should clearly
    state that it concerns a programming language. This is the reason why (Ruby
    on) Rails, Excel, Android, Boost, Cocoa, ASP and AJAX are not considered
    programming languages for the index. 

    ...

    The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search
    engines. The search query that is used is

        +"<language> programming"

WE know Perl is a programming language, and yes, the important words are on the
page, but they are NOT in the title, and they are NOT in the name of the page.
These criteria are also used by Google for deciding how to rank search results
by relevance. The knock-on effect of this omission could be inestimably high.

Looking down our noses and saying "WE don't need to disambiguate because WE
know what we mean", (capitals are mine), is all very well, and I for one
understand that there is no NEED for us to disambiguate Perl the programming
language. However, the question is probably better put as to whether we would
like to explicitly associate "Perl" and "programming language" whenever
Wikipedia and Google and Yahoo and Facebook and blablabla are searched, perhaps
by stupid robots, or even by blissfully ignorant people.

It's not about what we deem necessary to our usage of what is clearly the best
programming language on the planet, it's about what we can do to raise Perl's
profile "out there", right now, and for future generations.

-- 
Ciao

Richard Foley

http://www.rfi.net/books.html

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 09:19:33AM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> Quoting Richard Foley <richard.foley at rfi.net>:
> 
> >We need people with voting facilities (accounts) on Wikipedia to vot up Perl.
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Perl#Move_to_.22Perl_.28programming_language.29.22
> 
> The proposal here seems to be to rename the Wikipedia article "Perl"
> to "Perl (Programming Language)".
> 
> I don't agree with the proposal. If there's no need for
> disambiguation then none should be used.
> 
> Dave...