If you've been here any amount of time you know that jcwren has done a ton of work on creating a stats page for the site. Although it is not on the same server as the perlmonks site, it is as much a part of Perlmonks as any Section listed

Because of this, I posted this request here for discussion rather than sending it as a single request to jcwren himself. He has the final say, obviously, but I thought that I would see if it sounds useful to anyone else.

I've noticed as of late, a lot of people are looking for win32 information. These folks are usually new, and I find it difficult to remember who the win32 gurus are to point them to better examples than myself. Usually, I go to jcwren's stat page, and look at the O/S listing to jog my menory. Today, I noticed that there are people who list WinNT, NT, Windows, etc. that cannot be grouped together even though they express the same preference. And with respect to the preferences, I can assume that the 1st listed is the primary preference, or area of expertise.

My suggestion is this: Like Longitude and Latitude were agreed upon as standard, numerical representations of where we are located, can we numerically represent the operating systems, and list them in order of experience rather than preference?

We would have to compile a list of O/S's, but at least You could have all the O/S's grouped together for quicker perusal. For example <OS1 number=preference number, OS2=preference number> OS's being like W1 for Win95,98;W2 for NT,2k;D1 for dos; L1=Linux; U1=Unix; etc.

Any thoughts?

P.S. - I'll cc jcwren

-OzzyOsbourne