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Chinese repos are ruining the GitHub trending page (medium.com)
2 points by balzss 2536 days ago
3 comments

I do a lot of searches like

> https://github.com/search? l=Common+Lisp&o=desc&q=lisp& s=updated&type=Repositories

and while I often get Chinese results mixed in (not to exclude Japanese and a few others!), I actually like seeing what people are up to regardless of their spoken language.

When something interesting shows up, there's an online translator for that.

While there is some value to seeing what is trending in whatever language you speak, that is a specific filter that gets further and further away from the reality of what is actually trending on github. Github is all about programming and not about spoken language, so the filter would be a tad arbitrary (although maybe someone would be interested in knowing how many Rust repos are written in Swahili or Cree).

That filter could be a feature, but on a global platform, the Chinese certainly aren't "ruining" it. They are integral to it.

>Repos already have a “language” property funnily enough which is based on the code contained in it. Similarly they could introduce another property to detect the natural language of the readme/docs/etc and assign it to the project. On the trending tab you already have an option to only browse projects in a specific programming language so you could also set this as well. A “worldwide” option could be the default. I don’t want to hide other people’s projects.

Sounds good to me. Post title is a bit too strongly worded though.

Based on the comments both here and on reddit that seem to be the case. Do you have a suggestion for a better title?
Not really, but better to not frame the page as being "ruined". Something about Github's popularity in China making the case for language options or something, maybe.
Hi everyone, I'm the author. I'm curious what others think about this. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who feels that it's a problem so let me know if you have something to add or correct.
Why would it be a problem to write code and documentation in other languages?

And the way you word your title is a bit too much don't your think?

Have you read the article? Based on your response it feels like you didn't because I added a "disclaimer" section to the top just to address that it's not a problem with foreign repos but with the UX of the trending page.

Edit: the whole article is about this but the disclaimer is there to make this clear as soon as possible. Maybe the title is controversial without context but I really hoped that people read the whole thing before forming an opinion.