Esolang:2026 topicality proposal - Esolang

We are currently working on new rules for what content should and shouldn't be allowed on this website, and are looking for feedback! See Esolang:2026 topicality proposal to view and give feedback on the current draft.

Esolang:2026 topicality proposal

From Esolang

Jump to navigation<br>Jump to search<br>Moderating this wiki has become hard recently due to the guidelines about what is on-topic and off-topic being unclear. Likewise, the wiki has gradually become less useful as a result of a large number of similar pages making it hard to find the interesting or unique ones, with no clear guidance on how to resolve the issue.

This page contains proposals for rules going forwards about what is and isn't permitted on the wiki (which might not necessarily match historical practice).

This is not enforced policy yet – whether or not it becomes policy will depend on community feedback. You can help shape the policy in two ways – by editing it directly, or by discussing it on the talk page. Note that edits to this page should ideally edit it so that any changed rules are explained, and not just stated (both so that people understand why you want the rule and so that, if it becomes policy, future users will understand why the rule exists). Changes to this page are quite likely to be reverted by people who disagree with them; this doesn't mean that the original change was disallowed or rule-breaking, just that someone disagrees with the change (and if changes are disputed in this way, it would make sense for the changer and reverter to discuss the disagreement on the talk page).

Contents

1 Pages about esoteric programming languages

2 Pages about art that resembles a description of a programming language

3 Pages about esolang-adjacent topics

4 Pages about the wiki itself

5 Pages used for discussion

6 Mass deletions

Pages about esoteric programming languages

The original and primary goal of this wiki is to document esoteric programming languages ("esolangs"). That means that we would like to have content describing each such language that exists – ideally full details about the language, but if only partial information is available, we list what is known. This is not just a language specification, but also information about implementations of the language, computational properties of the language, programs written in the language, techniques for thinking about / writing in / analysing the language, etc. (as well as links to related languages).

Information about a language can be presented in three ways – either literally on the page, via a description sufficient to reconstruct the information (e.g. "The hello world program for this language consists of 142,209,095,870,573,693,396,245,504,627,320,468,349,603,549,841,832,242,891,887,476,756 0 characters"), or via a link to an externally hosted web page or reference to externally known content. In most cases, one of the first two options is preferable because it reduces the chance of information about a language being lost due to an external webhost going offline. The third option is preferable in cases where the information is copyrighted (thus not legally allowed to be hosted here) and would be destroyed by being paraphrased, where it consists of large amounts of code (this is better hosted using The Esoteric File Archive than written on the wiki), or is offtopic (it is not unknown for esolangs to depend on external data files which are not themselves esolang-related). For example, it is preferable to describe the behaviour of a command as "prints the lyrics to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'" than it would be to actually copy the lyrics in question onto the page (both because they are copyrighted, and because they are not an esolang). Likewise, if an image used as a language's logo was not created specifically for the language or embeds substantial amounts of content from existing images, it should not be uploaded to the wiki (but instead should be described or linked externally).

However, there are some caveats when it comes to describing esoteric programming languages:

It is not uncommon for essentially the same language to be discovered multiple times, and if there isn't an interesting distinction between two languages (either in terms of the language's behaviour or in terms of consequences of the language's choice of syntax), it makes sense to describe both languages on the same page (in order to avoid needing to write the same information on every page, and in order to help visitors find distinct languages rather than finding lots of copies of the same language). It likewise also makes sense to put variants of a language on the same page as the language itself (or onto a page for variants of that language). For example, Unary, Lenguage, and Ellipsis are all essentially the same language (even though Ellipsis is three times as long, and Lenguage does terminal I/O rather than standard-stream I/O), so it...