Talk:Informatik

RFV discussion: June 2022–January 2023

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Informatik

German. Rfv-sense: informatics, information science — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 16:33, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha: When computers were a bit expensive, and bulky, even for Central European universities, and especially when communication was analog in general, this was the only meaning, and the students were dealing e.g. with analog telephones and safe communication in general (consider also the history of cryptography), so this is still is the understanding of older Informatiker; often it was also only theoretical, without those real or alleged scientists having to do with computers! You will also find, I suppose, that “computer science” is a newer term than Informatik. I don’t think we should have three different senses, anyway: Information science deals with information technology and computers. At worst it is an amorphous mass of a meaning that one could write long-winded books about (indeed, the history of a whole science, that won’t be depicted in a single definition line). Fay Freak (talk) 20:16, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Here is one explicit definition of the most famous German bloggers calling himself Informatiker, and I have no doubt he always uses it this way. It is also interesting that w:de:Informationswissenschaft links w:de:Informatik as somehow vaguely linked and basically a subbranch particularly concerned with processing of data, and I think this is true and the latter Wikipedia article is not congruent with the English article w:Computer science linked in the interwiki section, which defines its name as “the study of computation, automation, and information.”

In the end it will boil down to various curricula marketed by colleges in different countries forming the alleged sciences. Even computer has meant different things in English and in German, when exchange was slower.

To avoid complication, we should only have a one definition line to define a science name, unless we are very sure there a contravening usages, since it is very usual for sciences to be of controversial definition (prime example of course being philosophy, the dictionary entry of which is a sore hot potato, and those thinkers make up a lot of these controversies) Fay Freak (talk) 22:53, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

See also, on the English Wikipedia, the section Informatics § Different meaning.  --Lambiam 23:08, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Cited from older journals. Information science as such is nowadays generally called Informationswissenschaft however, AFAIK, and it's easy to find sources that explicitly distinguish the two: "Der Wettbewerb zwischen Informationswissenschaft und Informatik begann" [1]. So the "information science" sense might need to be marked as dated. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 18:46, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

RFV-passed. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:35, 13 January 2023 (UTC)