Talk:English in computing/Archive 1

VFD notification
This article was nominated at Articles for deletion on Aug. 26, 2005. The ultimate result of the discussion was basically "no consensus". For a non-admin, this is a tough call, so I hope I don't get reprimanded too harshly for making it. I closed the VFD, calling the result of the discussion "no consensus, therefore send it back to the drawing board". I feel fairly confident in doing so, since even the nominator noted that the version at the time of closing was significantly different from the version at the time of nomination. I'm going to close the VFD, because I don't see that the later discussion was even mildly contentious, but I've also added a cleanup request to the article, and let those editors working on the article itself decide when to remove it. A record of the VFD discussion can be found here. Tomer TALK 08:02, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * Actually, if you look at it after the changes were made it was basically a keep, 5-2 or something, so no worries. It does need to be rounded out which I'll try to get to. Marskell 08:44, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

English in computing
It seems to me that what's lacking from both this discussion and the English language article is general English in computing. I'd say this page needs that sort of discussion, and should be renamed to the more general "English in computing". I'm referring to the fact that English is ubiquitous in:
 * Programming languages. They are full of English keywords like "if" and "main" and "return".
 * Communications protocols - for example HTTP is made up entirely of English words such as "GET", "POST" and "Content-Type".
 * Simple character encodings - before Unicode (and even now, in many applications), character encodings like ASCII supported only the basic Roman characters, obviously designed for English, making it very difficult to represent text in other languages, especially those that use different characters.

I think it's very closely related to the "English on the Internet" article since it's mainly for the same reasons as cited here. &mdash;EatMyShortz 10:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Richest technical vocabulary?
Someone needs to substantiate the statement that English has the richest technical vocabulary. It is possible that this is true in some spheres but general it is utter rubbish. There is a technical term for every technical term in English in another language say for instance French or German. This is also true for other languages used for technical communication. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.245.28.92 (talk) 20:19, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Early discussion
I was hoping there would be something about the quality of English used on the Internet. For example: http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.173.186.157 (talk) 09:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

for me this article does not provide enough backing for the figures quoted

nobody gives a shit

Low-quality Article
I'm usually not a pessimist but I have to say this article is mostly junk. This page spends more time listing translations (and rather poorly) than presenting the use of english as a primary source of computing terms. Title says "English in computing". Also, why are technical computer terms (slang jargon mostly) being compared with latin-based scientific terms? Completly OT. —Preceding unsigned comment added by DMZ (talk • contribs) 22:12, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

Information/Informations (Infos)
I think it would make an interesting subsection to mention the contrast of the English word "information" (always a mass noun in English) and the extremely common usage of "informations" and "infos" among non-native English-speaking technical and non-technical computers users who are coming from language backgrounds which allow their cognate word to be pluralized. Examples include Spanish, French, and I believe German. This usage is somewhat shocking to English-speakers, but is very understanding in an international context. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.189.245.108 (talk) 02:40, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Inaccurate 80% figure
It has been years since the Web was 80% English - and this "fact" is actually contradicted by the earlier part of the article. Of the citations listed in support of the Web being 50% or more English, only one seems to be reliable, and it dates from 2001. Most sources I've seen estimate around 35% of the Internet is in English. Tyronen 23:22, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_internet_usage there is currently about 35.20% for English, so if other sources repeat a similiar figure then this may be more reliable. 80% seems a tad high. Rai 09:39, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

WRONG. 35 percent of the USERS are english. The 80 percent figure refers to content.

The 80% figure does not cite any research that would support its claim. In fact, I could not find any reliable resource that would give an estimate on how much of the content of the Internet is in English. Quite a surprise. If someone finds a source please update this article ASAP - in its present state it gives an incorrect answer to a question that a lot of people are interested in. - Andras E. Kovacs
 * There's a source from 2004 where they used google and yahoo to estimate what percentage of web pages were in what languages and the figure they came up with for english is 57.95%. I don't know of any more recent figures.  I found the pdf somewhere it's called "Regional and linguistic patterns in Google™ positioning".  One thing I've noticed the last couple years is that a lot of websites which used to be English only now have localizations for almost every major language.  This is especially true for "web 2.0" type sites.  By now I'm sure English represents well bellow 50% of total websites on the Internet just because of this alone.  And with Chinese quickly becoming the largest used language on the Internet it's only a matter of time before english websites become outnumbered by Chinese websites.173.80.102.159 (talk) 23:26, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

"As a foreign language" section: off-topic
A large portion of this section discusses the difference between Standard Chinese and other Varieties of Chinese; however, how is this relevant to computing? The difference between these languages are spoken, and in many cases, one spoken variety of Chinese is mutually unintelligible to another, however all Chinese spoken varieties use the same written language, that is, Vernacular Chinese. It doesn't matter whether the speaker speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Shanghainese, they are all able to write in Vernacular Chinese and understand each other's written works. Since information in computing and on the internet is text based, i.e. written works, how are spoken variants of Chinese relevant to the topic at all? In addition, linking the mutual unintelligible trait of Chinese varieties is WP:OR in itself; the paragraphs discussing such issues are entirely unreferenced and non-verifiable. I have tagged this section with Off-topic for this reason; if there are no objections, I will remove the dubious material. --  李博杰   | —Talk contribs email 03:04, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

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