Talk:List of computer science conferences

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[edit] Alphabetization

The categories, if not the conferences themselves, need to be alphabetized. Personally I disagree with basing the order of the conferences on their "ranking", as this list serves to index the Wikipedia, not to publish a Top 10. In addition, if the rankings were established using subjective and non-obvious criteria, the order of the list may be a copyright violation. And finally, the list may contain entries not included in the source. Ham Pastrami (talk) 23:56, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rank-based listing

I'm doing research aimed at speeding up computer simulations for large power systems. I'm very happy with the ranking system, it has saved me me a lot of time, and it will probably continue to do so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.207.137.220 (talk) 15:18, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with alphabetizing. The sources used as a general ranking guidelines are authoritative (Citeseer and MSRA's Libra). I repeat, they are used as a general guideline and one with objective opinion should feel free to change the order.

Wikipedia should be used as a source of information, and the importance/impact of the listed conferences is such information. We have the opportunitiy here to actually provide a non-biased impact-factor-based listing of those conferences and leverage the opinions of the community to reach a general consensus.

What help would this list be to a Computer Scientist if it lists unknown/low-impact conferences in the same order as highly prestigious? There is absolutely no copyright violation, this claim is ridiculous.

Of course the listing contains entries not included in the source, we are not copying citeseer's and libra's listing which may be outdated. If someone knows about a non-indexed conference, she should feel comfortable to add it, as long as it is sufficiently reputable and most importantly academic.

But neither of those lists arrange conferences by category, which this article does do. Since you freely acknowledge that additional items, which do not appear in the sources, are added to this list, how then do you propose to order them consistently and objectively? First of all, the list should be pruned so as to contain only noteworthy items, as is policy at WP:SAL. Indeed, SAL also provides examples of list formats, of which alphabetization is the first, and "rank of importance" is not even mentioned. Pruning the list solves any question of how "useful" the list is. Wikipedia does not judge importance, only notability. Either a conference is notable enough to carry an article or it isn't. If you want to provide a list that allows lookup by importance, it already exists at the source, which can be linked to externally. There's no need to copy and paste it here. Do you have an actual policy argument in favor of rank-based ordering? Ham Pastrami (talk) 10:16, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

This list contains only noteworthy conferences. It is up to us to clean it from conference spamming that occasionally takes place. AFAIK this all listed conferences are included in citeseer and libra, however it is possible that this will change in the near future as new noteworthy conferences are created. It is up to the community (knowledgible CS researchers) to place them in the list according to their perceived quality. Citeseer's and libra's ranking are only used as a general guideline, to ensure that low-cited conferences are not listed up there with the most prestigious one. This is why the ranking is described as rough and non-authoritative

For the record, here is the determination of rank from Citeseer: Impact is estimated using the average citation rate, where citations are normalized using the average citation rate for all articles in a given year, and transformed using ln (n+1) where n is the number of citations. I don't know if that measurement qualifies as an obvious fact or not. I'm not a copyright lawyer. Are you? In any case, it's just a possible issue with any copy-paste list, but this is on top of all the other problems that this list already has. Ham Pastrami (talk) 10:35, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Citeseer's method is not obvious neither is Libra's (which is much more complicated btw). This does not mean we cannot use them as a guideline. The fact that they do not categorize per field and that we do not exactly follow their order protects wikipedia from copyright violation. Besides this article heavily cites them and offers more visibility to them. If they have a problem with that let them complain first, but I am certain this won't be the case. Using them as a guideline means that you won't see a conference that has 0.001 impact factor or 1/100 citation ration being listed among the top in a field. So from Libra all we use is the citation ratio of each conference, which is publicly available, non-secret and non-copyrighted information. If this was copyrighted, then Libra and Citeseer would be infringing on the copyrights of ACM, IEEE etc just because they analyze their conference' statistics. I really do not understand why you insist on removing useful information from an article based on invalid copyright concerns.

Is this because you would rather the readers have no valid references and have to go to the likes of conferencebay.com instead? This is a computer science article, not an opportunity for spammers to advertise generic search engines. If you are just a conferencebay.com's affiliate, please just leave this article as is to be handled by real computer scientists.

[edit] listing

Quote from the article "ranking of their quality and impact based on ...".

• libra and citeseer (did't check Harzing) use different "metrics" to rank conferences. Which metric is used in the article? Your own? Could you give it to us?

Libra and citeseer are used as a general measure of the citation-based impact of a conference. They are used only to distinguish high impact conferences from low impact conferences. High impact conferences are almost always high quality conferences. Nevertheless citation-based ranking has several flaws and cannot be accurate. For example one cannot conclusively infer that the #1 cited conference is an overall better conference than the #2 or #3. One can infer however that a conference is better than another if it has 3-10 times higher citation impact factor.

Given this rough ranking the community is able to rearrange the ordering of conferences as it feels appropriate. This will lead to an informed community-driven conference ranking. Still, this ranking should not be taken at face value, i.e. using the example you mention below, the ordering should not be used to infer that POPL is a better conference than PLDI or vice versa. However, one could use it to infer that POPL is a better conference than TACAS, which is in complete agreement with the vast majority of PL researchers' view.

• how are the conferences chosen for this article? libra's top three ranking on "software engineering and programming languages" is

1. POPL 2. PLDI 3. ECOOP

For instance, I don't see ECOOP in the article.

You should feel free to add ECOOP and improve this article, it was an inadvertent omission

• Is listing conferences in their fields a good idea? Many conferences are multi disciplinary. Look ASPLOS - International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems. You could list it under "programming languages", "operating systems" or "computer architecture".

By listing such conferences in one field distorts the picture of the other fields.

71.131.196.254 (talk) 20:35, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Update: I've just seen that ASPLOS like 32 other conferences, are listed in several fields, but there are other conferences like CASES - Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems which could/should be listed in several fields as well.

Please feel free to improve this article by listing other multi-disciplinary conferences in their respective additional fields

71.131.196.254 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 22:38, 20 May 2008 (UTC)