17 ms·

Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

430 points by budu 16y ago

tokenadult 16y ago
All anyone needs to do about this is find reliable sources to improve the articles that are being nominated for deletion. Really. If some wikipedian who knows about published, reliable sources about each of the languages simply adds some source citations to the articles, all will be well.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  Fun fact: I left a note for the guy asking why he doesn't do that (hunt up citations and improve articles). His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia. In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.
  - l0nwlf 16y ago
    Because : "He will not reply to senseless accusations any longer. Don't bother nominating him for conflict of interest or vandalism or whatnot, it's already been tried and didn't work."
    - ubernostrum 16y ago
      Funny. I didn't make senseless accusations, didn't nominate him for anything. Just asked, matter-of-factly, why he was putting his energy into AfDs instead of into looking up references and trying to improve articles. At which point (check his history if you care), he wandered over to another user's page to recruit help, saying: One commenter even suggested I search for references to improve the articles in question, as opposed to nominating them for deletion (the sheer irony). So, yeah, apparently asking him to channel his energies into something that's one of Wikipedia's main goals is "ironic" as well as "senseless"? Sticking with my original conclusion that this is not someone who responds well to reason.
  - chrismonsanto 16y ago
    I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no citations exist :(
    - oconnore 16y ago
      That statement is false. Take Factor for example. It has been hosted at several conferences, has an active community of users, and has an academic paper published in ACM. http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf Perhaps what you meant to say is that no citations exist that meet your own apparently arbitrary standards of approval? Edit: It appears that it was another individual who recommended wiki/Factor for deletion. I apologize for my inaccurate accusation, but in my opinion that still does not excuse recommending the removal of Nemerle.
      - jedsmith 16y ago
        Or that he didn't spend enough time looking: > It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437 Reassuring description of the process, there...
      - chrismonsanto 16y ago
        But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...
        oconnore 16y ago
        I apologize for the confusion, but that still doesn't change much. See these papers on Nemerle: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pacholski-moskal.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pachols... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...
    - Locke1689 16y ago
- kevinchen 16y ago
  I don't think the solution is as simple as that, but references do help.
awj 16y ago
I'm not sure what the solution is, but something seriously needs to be done about the requirements Wikipedia has in place. Especially when applied to open source software, the notability requirement, combined with the definition of reliable sources, make invalid assumptions about the common media for discourse.
- mindcrime 16y ago
  Yes, yes, a million times yes. Everybody knows that the existing Wikipedia Notability guidelines have serious issues when it comes to dealing with software and technology issues. I know I fought tooth and nail to get the Steve Yegge article back on Wikipedia a while back, and Steve is pretty damn notable in his community.... to the point that a WP article on him is a no-brainer. Now imagine anybody just a hair less well known, or a project with no celebrity leader or that isn't sponsored by $MEGACORP. Software just isn't cited generally in the New York Times and the kinds of sources that they want... that doesn't mean it isn't notable, it just means that it's "noted" a different way. Notability in our world is based on blog posts, mailing list posts, github commit logs, etc. Now how to get Wikipedia's policies amended to reflect that? Good question... I know it's been tried before and failed, but maybe it's time somebody built a coalition to make a serious, coordinated effort to get something done (no, I'm not volunteering, unfortunately.) Edit: My memory is failing, it was the Yegge article I had that big battle over, not Zed. But the point remains the same.
  - ghaff 16y ago
    Yep. The thing is that just about everything is notable at a local enough level--whether local in the sense of geography or some other community. People who tend towards the deletionist side of the debate tend to try and get around this by falling back on verifiability--but that just, ironically, ends up favoring the sort of things that get printed on dead trees somewhere however obscure. As a result, it's much easier to make a case under Wikipedia rules that some selectman in a small town who is periodically mentioned in the local newspaper is notable than someone who wrote a widely-used piece of software but hasn't been the subject of news stories. (And, of course, there's no consistent practice either. I have to assume that lots of entries about obscure toys, games, and TV shows are largely original research.)
jedsmith 16y ago
I don't remember who said it, but I read something recently which I thought was amusing and not serious (paraphrasing): > All that donation money, and they still can't afford enough hard drive space to avoid deletionism. The guy allegedly doing the flagging has responded on his user page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  I calculated that each article might cost them a thousandth of a cent to store. Let's assume it's Enterprise Grade Storage and quintuple the price. Now it costs them a breath-taking five one thousandths of a cent to store.
  - salvadors 16y ago
    Would you be willing to pay me five one thousandths of a cent for every article I could create?
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      No, because of a clear agency problem. But I'd be prepared to donate the several dozen thousandths of a cent required to keep the deleted articles.
      - salvadors 16y ago
        Several dozen? What about several million? Several billion?
- baddox 16y ago
  Wikipedia already rightfully boasts that space isn't an issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... The problem is, without a notability policy that's decidable, the policy is useless and contradicts the above link.
jacques_chester 16y ago
Here's the main offender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto One of his arguments is that these languages are often only mentioned in conference proceedings. How you get to be a PhD student in computer science without realising that conference proceedings are the leading distribution mechanism for knowledge in the CS research world is a mystery. I may only be a humble honours student, but the central importance of conferences over journals has been drummed into me over and over by my professors.
- j_baker 16y ago
  > We need better criteria for establishing notability of programming languages: for some reason, a number of people seem to think languages are notable if they are mentioned in a book/third-tier academic paper or have a few people who contribute to/use them. My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them.
  - katovatzschyn 16y ago
    My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them. Sounds like furthering a cause. By the specificness of that cause, I would have to bet: - Had an article he wrote on a small programming language, possibly his own, deleted for not being notable enough. - Feels that less notable languages than the one in question were not treated similarly. - Perceives injustice. - Takes action. Hopefully nothing other than some quality encyclopedia writing and anti-deletionist attitude (space is very cheap) comes from this. I don't like how ugly this is already becoming.
    - j_baker 16y ago
      I doubt it. Chances are, he's just taking an "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them" attitude. I'm always annoyed by people who don't evaluate rules critically, but I suppose that's just something you have to deal with in life.
Jun8 16y ago
Ahh, time for another Wikipedia deletionist pie fight! On the one side, elitist editors who are so saddened by even a single unnecessary HD spin that they want to clean clutter. On the other side, fans of (supposedly) esoteric knowledge. The narrator of Foucault's Pendulum, when he decides to be freelance researcher, says that his main principle will be that all information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other.
- cema 16y ago
  all information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other I am glad Google disagrees. Not all information is equal. But all information deserves to exist.
gojomo 16y ago
I'm working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model. The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.
- bostonvaulter2 16y ago
  Sounds like an interesting project. I really don't like the name though.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
w1ntermute 16y ago
It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.
- seancron 16y ago
  http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ archives deleted Wikipedia articles.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them. We just need to deal with deletionism.
  - boyter 16y ago
    I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive. Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patterson http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patt... I was even expanding on the page, and it even had a few other contributions from other people.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      Don't get me wrong, it's a big problem, I'm just not sure the proposed solution is workable.
      - carussell 16y ago
tibbon 16y ago
In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are. I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  The one thing that has always blown my mind on Wikipedia is that they have "votes" all the time where people edit in their opinion, but then a decision is made which may or may not take the votes into account. They're actually pretty clear on this: there's a policy that says something to the effect of "yeah, we'll take votes, but the person acting on the vote doesn't have to listen to the votes because Wikipedia isn't a democracy. You're lucky if we read the votes and take them into account!". Mindblowing.
  - nerfhammer 16y ago
    Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.
  - akamaka 16y ago
    They are not "votes", and the rules are pretty clear about that. The goal of wikipedia debates is to discuss and achieve a consensus, which doesn't work at all when people turn individual debates into anti/pro-deletion flamewars, appeal to outside websites to rally the troops, who then arrive and restate the same tired old arguments (eg. lack of storage space) instead of actually reading the rules and being constructive.
seancron 16y ago
The thing that makes Wikipedia useful in my opinion is not the notable topics I can lookup somewhere else. It's these long tail articles about esoteric programming languages and non-mainstream topics.
- grav1tas 16y ago
  Useful and enjoyable. The idea that there has to be top-tier publications on a language for it to be on Wikipedia will leave us with a lot of boring Wikipedia topics.
protomyth 16y ago
I tend to contribute money to certain projects. I won't give to Wikipedia because they treat conference proceedings with less respect than an episode of Gossip Girls.
Udo 16y ago
The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers. The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because the system is re-enforcing the belief that their only talent, destroying information, is also a valid form of contribution. It is no statistical accident that rampant wiki deletionism is even more intense in ..."strict" countries such as Germany. At the same time it is important to note that a lot of articles have serious shortcomings and are in need of improvement. While deleting them is in my opinion unforgivable as long as they contain useful information, I believe Wikipedia could profit from a more modern approach to article rating and validation. If substandard articles were allowed to continue existing albeit with low ratings and missing validation tags, Wikipedia as a process could focus more on improvement as opposed to gleeful pruning. If they concentrated on more constructive measures and included better ways of gathering user feedback for quality control, they could also provide former deletionist users with a UI option that simply prevents them from ever having to see an article that is below a certain quality threshold. Everybody would win. As it stands today, Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge. Sadly, I don't believe it is possible to change Wikipedia in any way, ever. Someday, someone will have to come along and fork it.
- kprobst 16y ago
  The main problem with deletionism in WP is the fact that the notion of notability is very subjective in some cases. There are situations that are very clear (people who have competed in Olympics are a shoe-in, garage bands that have never charted are not). Then there are cases like these where notability might be tied to a research or theoretical niche for example, and is hard to establish with enough solidity to break through the wikilawyering crud. And believe me, if they can out-lawyer you with WP:THIS and WP:THAT, the article you're trying to preserve will be deleted. Worse, the avenues for recourse are thin and usually controlled or influenced by the same people that you went against to begin with.
  - 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 16y ago
I believe there are specific requirements for something to be considered "notable" on wikipedia. Simply fulfill those requirements for each language page and you're good, no? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
- carussell 16y ago
  Have you read any of the discussion? It's a contentious issue.
nerfhammer 16y ago
The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons . This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no bureaucratic pseudo-procedure for a deletionist to wield against such practice.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  Whoa, hold the phone: List of animals in The Simpsons is notable but Nemerle isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.
  - nerfhammer 16y ago
    Scroll down to the List of One-Time Animals section if you really want your mind boggled
- gwern 16y ago
  A mergist! You guys still exist? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism) But seriously, merging into a list can be a very bad idea when you're dealing with a deletionist. Because 'notability isn't inherited', the list is no more notable than any of its items. Theoretically, you can also claim notability if RSs discuss the list (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_and_stand-alone_lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability... ), but I've never seen this successfully done - what source will discuss 'List of animals in The Simpsons'? How do you show they are discussing your list without engaging in OR? It's basically impossible. So a list just makes life much easier for the deletionist - one easy target to AfD rather than 20 or 30. (This happened to me recently with [[Neon Genesis Evangelion glossary]]. The nominator would have taken months or years to chew through each entry if they hadn't been merged, with any luck burned out before the end, and I might have been able to save individual articles.)
cyrus_ 16y ago
Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high. I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.
Uchikoma 16y ago
Wikipedia is about power and the kick you get out of it.
- cema 16y ago
  Well, it certainly seems to lack sufficient guards against people who are on a power trip.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
grav1tas 16y ago
If the problem is pollution of the main lists of programming language articles by entries that Mr. Monsanto considers to be inappropriate for listing...wouldn't an appropriate compromise be removing them from these programming languages lists? This seems like a shortcoming in Wikipedia's policies? This way the data is preserved, but not related to the main search spaces. If you look a language up on Google, it will still be there because it will be indexed. Otherwise, Mr. Monsanto has every right to push his agenda on Wikipedia insofar as it is within the bounds of legal play on the site. Attacking his character gets nobody anywhere, and probably adds credence to whatever he's doing. If you're really concerned about deletions of your favorite PL articles, sit on them. If a request for removal/deletion (I don't know the wiki-jargon) pops up, just dump all over it. Even better, improve the articles. He can't get something deleted that's not mediocre. Agents like Mr. Monsanto will actually improve the quality of your average article one way or the other. I'm impressed that somebody would bother reading so many articles and post meta-data about them....especially on a topic that so few people engage in. It's curious that pages that don't meet Mr. Monsanto's criterion of having been cited in a 'top-tier' publication. There are so many articles on Wikipedia that do not have ties to anything real. Is it really fair to hold PL topics to academic-level standards? What if somebody considers PL an art, or something other than semantics and formalisms? This does happen, and people who create new languages from languages that aren't considered much in the PL community might actually fall into these categories. I think Mr. Monsanto would do well to spell out his criteria for what isn't desirable in precise and formal terms.
mrphoebs 16y ago
Though, I can see Christoper's Point of view, I wonder about the cost-benefit of this kind a cleanup would be. The main reason seems to be to unclutter the listing of topics in wikipedia. How many people navigate Wikipedia through lists, isn't search more often used? In which case the central argument behind deleting factual information would be more costly than beneficial(even though it doesn't live up to wikipedia' notability standard). BTW, Why the hostility? and the mob mentality. I thought he articulated his arguments clearly and quite well without malice.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jeswin 16y ago
Nemerle has 209,000 results on Google, and the first few pages are stacked with relevant, well-written articles. How is this not notable? I played with this language a few years back and thought it had great promise(when C# was much less capable). I have read the exact Wikipedia page you deleted, and it got me to write some code in Nemerle. * Btw, this might get some publicity for Nemerle (and the other languages).
carsongross 16y ago
@chrismonsanto has this thread (and the reddit thread) caused you to reevaluate what we, the programming community, consider 'notable'? The easy reaction would be to focus on the flamers, harden your heart and drive ahead. The wise man, here, stops and thinks for a bit. Restore Nemerle.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  He's a wikipedia admin. It is commonly recognized fact that all wikipedia admins are on egotistical power-trips, what do you think is going to happen? You will never see an admission of wrongdoing.
  - Aramgutang 16y ago
    Thankfully, he is not an admin.
  - parfe 16y ago
    He is not an admin and he did not delete the article.
petegrif 16y ago
I think this is absolutely appalling.
burgerbrain 16y ago
While reading Nemerle's deletion discussion page, I can't help but notice what seems to me to be some degree of racism on the part of the deletion advocates, particularly Christopher Monsanto. Where the many sources in English, instead of Polish and Russian, I can't help but think that perhaps they would not have been dismissed out of hand. RSDN.ru being dismissed as a "mere tutorial"? Ugh! Read it yourself and make up your own mind though. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...
mukyu 16y ago
Getting people to rally around anything that someone is trying to have deleted is a sure-fire way to get it deleted, protected from recreation, and basically never coming back. It is like some kind of 'defend the hive' kind of reaction.
udoprog 16y ago
The notability requirements do not sufficiently cover "expert" subjects like PLs. Chris mentioned this himself, yet used it as a justification for these articles, this is known as Doublethink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink) and clearly indicates a second agenda. Not anyone can invent a programming language, it's not comparable to your pet rock band. Chris, you clearly displayed that you are not capable of handling this subject satisfactory and you've displayed arrogance in response to peoples distress. Simply put - marking the articles for deletion was rash, and in the larger sense unjustified.
drallison 16y ago
I certainly oppose deleting programming languages, obscure or not, from wikipedia. I went to the site to try to register a complaint but could not find a way to do that. It seems that meta-comments are not really handled well withing the wikipedia framework. Or did I just miss the right link.
- billswift 16y ago
  I think wikipedia (like some other sites I have tried to use) is intentionally obscure; it gives the "Wikipedia is my life" types more control.
  - carussell 16y ago
    Oh, come on, now. It's just that the wiki paradigm is used throughout. Talk pages, for example, are basically no differently editable from their respective articles; Talk:Transport_in_Nagpur is just a plain ol' wiki page that's been created at that name. Hanlon's razor, et cetera, et cetera.
    - drallison 16y ago
      It seemed to me that everything is tied to a particular page or entry/ There did not seem to be any appropriate place to bring up a pervasive action involving a multiplicity of pages.
ilitirit 16y ago
Information on these type of languages is exactly what I expect to find in an encyclopaedia.
Tichy 16y ago
There was a time when I didn't understand the need for Wikipedia, as I figured every kind of information would just be retrievable with Google (or another search engine). Now Google and Wikipedia are failing at the same time. Bad.
tty 16y ago
I find it funny that the guy hasn't made a single contribution to Wikipedia. All his edits either directly remove content or nominate it for deletion. Apparently besides the dislike for programming languages, he also hates it when certain scientists have "Dr." next to their names on their Wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Christopher+Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributi... Examples: >Raj Reddy ‎ (dr. is so unnecessary) >Randy Pausch ‎ (dr is unnecessary) >Benjamin C. Pierce ‎ (Don't need dr.) and so on
- tty 16y ago
  He also apparently thinks that once a dedicated article gets deleted, all mention of that particular subject should be removed (as is evidenced by the fact that he went on a removal spree and removed most mentions of Nemerle from other Wikipedia articles as soon as wiki:Nemerle was deleted - he didn't just delete links pointing to wiki:Nemerle but the actual mention of it). That is not a WP policy.
  - gwern 16y ago
    But it is a guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_creation_of_certain_types_of_red_links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_cre...
    - carussell 16y ago
      Reread the comment. tty is not referring to changes like - …[[Nemerle]]… + …Nemerle… He or she is claiming mentions of Nemerle being completely excised from other articles.
      - gwern 16y ago
        Oh, my mistake. I didn't read carefully and assumed tty was referring to the usual backlink removal done by a bot after AfDs - I saw one of them for Nemerle on my watchlist today before I came here.
rbanffy 16y ago
So, what languages were deleted? How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion? How much bandwidth will that spare? If someone thinks the language is not notable, there is a discussion page attached to the main article where such things can be expressed. The obscurity of the language can also be communicated in the article itself. While lots of us can be pretty sure Nemerle will have no lasting impact in the field, they can be wrong.
- carussell 16y ago
  How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion None, articles can be restored. Disk space is actually consumed by deletion overhead.
tommorris 16y ago
The Nemerle article is up for deletion review (DRV), and there is at least one admin supporting overturning the decision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2...
basugasubaku 16y ago
It's interesting that there is no longer a Nemerle article on the English Wikipedia, but there is one on the Japanese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Tajik, Ukrainian, and Chinese Wikipedias. You can see this by going to, e.g., the Japanese article (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle) and looking at the language links at bottom of the left sidebar. So if you are a speaker of one of those languages, you're still in luck :-P
- Ingaz 16y ago
  I'm Russian and I almost never read Russian wikipedia articles about programming. Reasons: a) Terminology is English and looks very unnatural in Russian. Terminology translation is even worse - when I read in Russian I need to make double translation to understand. b) Most Russian wiki articles - is just translations from English wiki.
cema 16y ago
When a graduate student, a researcher, spends so much effort in order to delete knowledge (or, more precisely, hide it), I find it mind-boggling. It goes against the very essence of science.
- jon_hendry 16y ago
  But it's right in line with the worst petty academic pissing matches. Like the California math professor who was recently arrested for repeatedly peeing on his colleague's office door.
bane 16y ago
This kind of stupid crap is why I and many people no longer contribute to wikipedia.
Perihelion 16y ago
I'm offended on behalf of all of the smaller projects who basically just got told that their work is worthless. I'm also offended that the value of a project seems to be based on how well someone can market it. If your project hasn't made a name for itself, then it's worthless, right? Personally, I'm content to hack away on things that no one has heard of because I enjoy what I'm doing. If someone else happens to find it useful, that's awesome. However, deleting things from the Mecca of knowledge-seekers in an attempt to purify it in this manner is nothing short of crapping on the ideals that Wikipedia was built on.
larsberg 16y ago
I'm sort of surprised by the surprise here. As a graduate student myself, my peers and I have all come to the sad conclusion that Wikipedia is good for breadth and bad for depth, at least in CS (I cannot speak for other areas). The primary issue seems to be the combination of deletionists and campers. The former we see in this case. The latter is something my theory friends complain about. According to two of them who have tried, attempting to expand or correct any of the fringe topics in algorithms and graph theory is futile because of the instant-reverters who will simply revert any change they make. Of course, what's most disturbing to me about this is... dear gods, man, you're at Princeton! If you don't understand what the contributions of Alice ML are to the field, walk down the hall and talk to Andrew Appel! Or David Walker, if Andrew is too hard to track down. I would hope that by this point this student has learned that there is a lack of fidelity in the search engines for anything published in the 90s and earlier, as the scanned PS converted to PDF is neither as well-indexed nor as comprehensively available (e.g. Springer-Verlag work from that time is frequently not indexed in scholar/citeseer due to a lack of non-subscription links, particularly if published by someone who is no longer in academia). Fortunately, most of the work in PL was done in the lifetime of people still working. If you're too busy to do a thorough search of relevant work, you can sit down and talk with the people who were there when concurrency was first being introduced and formally modeled to understand Alice's place and contributions (or lack thereof, if that's the conclusion you come to).
- skew 16y ago
  What is most surprising is the claim on the Alice discussion that Ph.D theses are not reviewed.
cabalamat 16y ago
I recently created an article about Sunder Katwala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala) who is the head of the Fabian Society (a prominent UK think tank). The article had been up for less than a month when someone requested speedy deletion, despite the article having ample evidence of the subject's notability. Deletionists are out of control on Wikipedia, and need to be stopped. I've thought about writing articles and though "no, why bother, some deletionist will just delete it." and I'm sure many others have been similarly dissuaded. To this end I'm building an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. The main difference it will have is there will be no notability guidelines, only verifiability ones.
- tommorris 16y ago
  That's never been tried before. Except with Citizendium, Deletionpedia, Knowino, Wikinfo, Includipedia...
joshfraser 16y ago
Christopher has posted this update on his profile: Dear internet, You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion. I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone. Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :( This was fun. Now back to real work, I guess...
- Tobu 16y ago
  One deletionist got a clue. Nice! But the process or the practice is still broken, and there's a lot more good articles being lost. Hopefully someday we'll have a better wiki (my wishlist: long-term archival, forking, mergeing and fuzzy links) with a less harmful community.
bane 16y ago
Great discussion on wikipedia about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Lets_discuss_notability_.22policy.22_.28again.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...
- TillE 16y ago
  Why not just formalize WikiProject rankings? Instead of being deleted, all articles with verifiable, independent sources should be graded on quality and importance by those involved in the relevant WikiProject(s). I think exposing that kind of metadata would be really, really useful.
  - bane 16y ago
    I think the biggest problem I have with the notability guidelines is that none of the editors (pedantic as they tend to be) understand what the word "guideline" means. Most of the AfD discussions center around WP:N. Yet notability is a scarily vague and personal criteria. In this case, the original deletion discussion appeared to be 100% in favor of keeping the articles in question with only Monsanto against. The only apparent question was WP:N and despite quite a bit of evidence demonstrating notability, the editor appeared to unilaterally delete the articles. In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in at that moment, you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense. So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone. If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?
gaoshan 16y ago
I saw that the language he is working on for his PhD was listed on Wikipedia and flagged for deletion. Then I saw that that page had initially been created that same day solely for the purpose of marking it for deletion. Seriously, person who did this? I thought wasting time browsing news sites like HN and reddit was bad enough but this... this proves that the internet is a very serious business indeed.
bane 16y ago
Somebody just created a new stub for Alice ML and Nemerle. Let's start filling them out! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) edit Nemerle appears to have been frozen and deleted Alice has gone down 3 or 4 times, but it's now up for the last 10 minutes. They're down again, looks like semi-permanently.
mckoss 16y ago
Wikipedia has had deletion issues for a very long time. Note that there are also vague rules that allow admins a procedure called "Speedy Deletion". It lets them remove content w/o debate or public visibility. The deleted page, and all discussions about it just disappear (only an admin on Wikipedia can recover it). One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is: No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d... It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content. The spam problem is very real for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index. Here's what I wrote about this problem in 2007: http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085 http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085
mrmekon 16y ago
The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are: 1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users 2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments. In response to the first argument: Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand. We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough. In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain. Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not

430 points by budu 16y ago

All anyone needs to do about this is find reliable sources to improve the articles that are being nominated for deletion. Really. If some wikipedian who knows about published, reliable sources about each of the languages simply adds some source citations to the articles, all will be well.

ubernostrum 16y ago
Fun fact: I left a note for the guy asking why he doesn't do that (hunt up citations and improve articles). His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia. In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.
- l0nwlf 16y ago
  Because : "He will not reply to senseless accusations any longer. Don't bother nominating him for conflict of interest or vandalism or whatnot, it's already been tried and didn't work."
  - ubernostrum 16y ago
    Funny. I didn't make senseless accusations, didn't nominate him for anything. Just asked, matter-of-factly, why he was putting his energy into AfDs instead of into looking up references and trying to improve articles. At which point (check his history if you care), he wandered over to another user's page to recruit help, saying: One commenter even suggested I search for references to improve the articles in question, as opposed to nominating them for deletion (the sheer irony). So, yeah, apparently asking him to channel his energies into something that's one of Wikipedia's main goals is "ironic" as well as "senseless"? Sticking with my original conclusion that this is not someone who responds well to reason.
- chrismonsanto 16y ago
  I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no citations exist :(
  - oconnore 16y ago
    That statement is false. Take Factor for example. It has been hosted at several conferences, has an active community of users, and has an academic paper published in ACM. http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf Perhaps what you meant to say is that no citations exist that meet your own apparently arbitrary standards of approval? Edit: It appears that it was another individual who recommended wiki/Factor for deletion. I apologize for my inaccurate accusation, but in my opinion that still does not excuse recommending the removal of Nemerle.
    - jedsmith 16y ago
      Or that he didn't spend enough time looking: > It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437 Reassuring description of the process, there...
    - chrismonsanto 16y ago
      But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...
      - oconnore 16y ago
        I apologize for the confusion, but that still doesn't change much. See these papers on Nemerle: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pacholski-moskal.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pachols... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...
  - Locke1689 16y ago
kevinchen 16y ago
I don't think the solution is as simple as that, but references do help.

awj 16y ago

I'm not sure what the solution is, but something seriously needs to be done about the requirements Wikipedia has in place. Especially when applied to open source software, the notability requirement, combined with the definition of reliable sources, make invalid assumptions about the common media for discourse.

mindcrime 16y ago
Yes, yes, a million times yes. Everybody knows that the existing Wikipedia Notability guidelines have serious issues when it comes to dealing with software and technology issues. I know I fought tooth and nail to get the Steve Yegge article back on Wikipedia a while back, and Steve is pretty damn notable in his community.... to the point that a WP article on him is a no-brainer. Now imagine anybody just a hair less well known, or a project with no celebrity leader or that isn't sponsored by $MEGACORP. Software just isn't cited generally in the New York Times and the kinds of sources that they want... that doesn't mean it isn't notable, it just means that it's "noted" a different way. Notability in our world is based on blog posts, mailing list posts, github commit logs, etc. Now how to get Wikipedia's policies amended to reflect that? Good question... I know it's been tried before and failed, but maybe it's time somebody built a coalition to make a serious, coordinated effort to get something done (no, I'm not volunteering, unfortunately.) Edit: My memory is failing, it was the Yegge article I had that big battle over, not Zed. But the point remains the same.
- ghaff 16y ago
  Yep. The thing is that just about everything is notable at a local enough level--whether local in the sense of geography or some other community. People who tend towards the deletionist side of the debate tend to try and get around this by falling back on verifiability--but that just, ironically, ends up favoring the sort of things that get printed on dead trees somewhere however obscure. As a result, it's much easier to make a case under Wikipedia rules that some selectman in a small town who is periodically mentioned in the local newspaper is notable than someone who wrote a widely-used piece of software but hasn't been the subject of news stories. (And, of course, there's no consistent practice either. I have to assume that lots of entries about obscure toys, games, and TV shows are largely original research.)

jedsmith 16y ago

I don't remember who said it, but I read something recently which I thought was amusing and not serious (paraphrasing): > All that donation money, and they still can't afford enough hard drive space to avoid deletionism. The guy allegedly doing the flagging has responded on his user page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'.

jacques_chester 16y ago
I calculated that each article might cost them a thousandth of a cent to store. Let's assume it's Enterprise Grade Storage and quintuple the price. Now it costs them a breath-taking five one thousandths of a cent to store.
- salvadors 16y ago
  Would you be willing to pay me five one thousandths of a cent for every article I could create?
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    No, because of a clear agency problem. But I'd be prepared to donate the several dozen thousandths of a cent required to keep the deleted articles.
    - salvadors 16y ago
      Several dozen? What about several million? Several billion?
baddox 16y ago
Wikipedia already rightfully boasts that space isn't an issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... The problem is, without a notability policy that's decidable, the policy is useless and contradicts the above link.

jacques_chester 16y ago

Here's the main offender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto One of his arguments is that these languages are often only mentioned in conference proceedings. How you get to be a PhD student in computer science without realising that conference proceedings are the leading distribution mechanism for knowledge in the CS research world is a mystery. I may only be a humble honours student, but the central importance of conferences over journals has been drummed into me over and over by my professors.

j_baker 16y ago
> We need better criteria for establishing notability of programming languages: for some reason, a number of people seem to think languages are notable if they are mentioned in a book/third-tier academic paper or have a few people who contribute to/use them. My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them.
- katovatzschyn 16y ago
  My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them. Sounds like furthering a cause. By the specificness of that cause, I would have to bet: - Had an article he wrote on a small programming language, possibly his own, deleted for not being notable enough. - Feels that less notable languages than the one in question were not treated similarly. - Perceives injustice. - Takes action. Hopefully nothing other than some quality encyclopedia writing and anti-deletionist attitude (space is very cheap) comes from this. I don't like how ugly this is already becoming.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I doubt it. Chances are, he's just taking an "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them" attitude. I'm always annoyed by people who don't evaluate rules critically, but I suppose that's just something you have to deal with in life.

Jun8 16y ago

Ahh, time for another Wikipedia deletionist pie fight! On the one side, elitist editors who are so saddened by even a single unnecessary HD spin that they want to clean clutter. On the other side, fans of (supposedly) esoteric knowledge. The narrator of Foucault's Pendulum, when he decides to be freelance researcher, says that his main principle will be that all information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other.

cema 16y ago
all information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other I am glad Google disagrees. Not all information is equal. But all information deserves to exist.

gojomo 16y ago

I'm working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model. The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

bostonvaulter2 16y ago
Sounds like an interesting project. I really don't like the name though.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

w1ntermute 16y ago

It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.

seancron 16y ago
http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ archives deleted Wikipedia articles.
redthrowaway 16y ago
The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them. We just need to deal with deletionism.
- boyter 16y ago
  I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive. Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patterson http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patt... I was even expanding on the page, and it even had a few other contributions from other people.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    Don't get me wrong, it's a big problem, I'm just not sure the proposed solution is workable.
    - carussell 16y ago

tibbon 16y ago

In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are. I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.

jedsmith 16y ago
The one thing that has always blown my mind on Wikipedia is that they have "votes" all the time where people edit in their opinion, but then a decision is made which may or may not take the votes into account. They're actually pretty clear on this: there's a policy that says something to the effect of "yeah, we'll take votes, but the person acting on the vote doesn't have to listen to the votes because Wikipedia isn't a democracy. You're lucky if we read the votes and take them into account!". Mindblowing.
- nerfhammer 16y ago
  Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.
- akamaka 16y ago
  They are not "votes", and the rules are pretty clear about that. The goal of wikipedia debates is to discuss and achieve a consensus, which doesn't work at all when people turn individual debates into anti/pro-deletion flamewars, appeal to outside websites to rally the troops, who then arrive and restate the same tired old arguments (eg. lack of storage space) instead of actually reading the rules and being constructive.

seancron 16y ago

The thing that makes Wikipedia useful in my opinion is not the notable topics I can lookup somewhere else. It's these long tail articles about esoteric programming languages and non-mainstream topics.

grav1tas 16y ago
Useful and enjoyable. The idea that there has to be top-tier publications on a language for it to be on Wikipedia will leave us with a lot of boring Wikipedia topics.

protomyth 16y ago

I tend to contribute money to certain projects. I won't give to Wikipedia because they treat conference proceedings with less respect than an episode of Gossip Girls.

Udo 16y ago

The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers. The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because the system is re-enforcing the belief that their only talent, destroying information, is also a valid form of contribution. It is no statistical accident that rampant wiki deletionism is even more intense in ..."strict" countries such as Germany. At the same time it is important to note that a lot of articles have serious shortcomings and are in need of improvement. While deleting them is in my opinion unforgivable as long as they contain useful information, I believe Wikipedia could profit from a more modern approach to article rating and validation. If substandard articles were allowed to continue existing albeit with low ratings and missing validation tags, Wikipedia as a process could focus more on improvement as opposed to gleeful pruning. If they concentrated on more constructive measures and included better ways of gathering user feedback for quality control, they could also provide former deletionist users with a UI option that simply prevents them from ever having to see an article that is below a certain quality threshold. Everybody would win. As it stands today, Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge. Sadly, I don't believe it is possible to change Wikipedia in any way, ever. Someday, someone will have to come along and fork it.

kprobst 16y ago
The main problem with deletionism in WP is the fact that the notion of notability is very subjective in some cases. There are situations that are very clear (people who have competed in Olympics are a shoe-in, garage bands that have never charted are not). Then there are cases like these where notability might be tied to a research or theoretical niche for example, and is hard to establish with enough solidity to break through the wikilawyering crud. And believe me, if they can out-lawyer you with WP:THIS and WP:THAT, the article you're trying to preserve will be deleted. Worse, the avenues for recourse are thin and usually controlled or influenced by the same people that you went against to begin with.
- 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

EGreg 16y ago

I believe there are specific requirements for something to be considered "notable" on wikipedia. Simply fulfill those requirements for each language page and you're good, no? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

carussell 16y ago
Have you read any of the discussion? It's a contentious issue.

nerfhammer 16y ago

The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons . This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no bureaucratic pseudo-procedure for a deletionist to wield against such practice.

jedsmith 16y ago
Whoa, hold the phone: List of animals in The Simpsons is notable but Nemerle isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.
- nerfhammer 16y ago
  Scroll down to the List of One-Time Animals section if you really want your mind boggled
gwern 16y ago
A mergist! You guys still exist? (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mergism) But seriously, merging into a list can be a very bad idea when you're dealing with a deletionist. Because 'notability isn't inherited', the list is no more notable than any of its items. Theoretically, you can also claim notability if RSs discuss the list (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_and_stand-alone_lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability... ), but I've never seen this successfully done - what source will discuss 'List of animals in The Simpsons'? How do you show they are discussing your list without engaging in OR? It's basically impossible. So a list just makes life much easier for the deletionist - one easy target to AfD rather than 20 or 30. (This happened to me recently with [[Neon Genesis Evangelion glossary]]. The nominator would have taken months or years to chew through each entry if they hadn't been merged, with any luck burned out before the end, and I might have been able to save individual articles.)

cyrus_ 16y ago

Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high. I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.

Uchikoma 16y ago

Wikipedia is about power and the kick you get out of it.

cema 16y ago
Well, it certainly seems to lack sufficient guards against people who are on a power trip.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

grav1tas 16y ago

If the problem is pollution of the main lists of programming language articles by entries that Mr. Monsanto considers to be inappropriate for listing...wouldn't an appropriate compromise be removing them from these programming languages lists? This seems like a shortcoming in Wikipedia's policies? This way the data is preserved, but not related to the main search spaces. If you look a language up on Google, it will still be there because it will be indexed. Otherwise, Mr. Monsanto has every right to push his agenda on Wikipedia insofar as it is within the bounds of legal play on the site. Attacking his character gets nobody anywhere, and probably adds credence to whatever he's doing. If you're really concerned about deletions of your favorite PL articles, sit on them. If a request for removal/deletion (I don't know the wiki-jargon) pops up, just dump all over it. Even better, improve the articles. He can't get something deleted that's not mediocre. Agents like Mr. Monsanto will actually improve the quality of your average article one way or the other. I'm impressed that somebody would bother reading so many articles and post meta-data about them....especially on a topic that so few people engage in. It's curious that pages that don't meet Mr. Monsanto's criterion of having been cited in a 'top-tier' publication. There are so many articles on Wikipedia that do not have ties to anything real. Is it really fair to hold PL topics to academic-level standards? What if somebody considers PL an art, or something other than semantics and formalisms? This does happen, and people who create new languages from languages that aren't considered much in the PL community might actually fall into these categories. I think Mr. Monsanto would do well to spell out his criteria for what isn't desirable in precise and formal terms.

mrphoebs 16y ago

Though, I can see Christoper's Point of view, I wonder about the cost-benefit of this kind a cleanup would be. The main reason seems to be to unclutter the listing of topics in wikipedia. How many people navigate Wikipedia through lists, isn't search more often used? In which case the central argument behind deleting factual information would be more costly than beneficial(even though it doesn't live up to wikipedia' notability standard). BTW, Why the hostility? and the mob mentality. I thought he articulated his arguments clearly and quite well without malice.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jeswin 16y ago

Nemerle has 209,000 results on Google, and the first few pages are stacked with relevant, well-written articles. How is this not notable? I played with this language a few years back and thought it had great promise(when C# was much less capable). I have read the exact Wikipedia page you deleted, and it got me to write some code in Nemerle. * Btw, this might get some publicity for Nemerle (and the other languages).

carsongross 16y ago

@chrismonsanto has this thread (and the reddit thread) caused you to reevaluate what we, the programming community, consider 'notable'? The easy reaction would be to focus on the flamers, harden your heart and drive ahead. The wise man, here, stops and thinks for a bit. Restore Nemerle.

burgerbrain 16y ago
He's a wikipedia admin. It is commonly recognized fact that all wikipedia admins are on egotistical power-trips, what do you think is going to happen? You will never see an admission of wrongdoing.
- Aramgutang 16y ago
  Thankfully, he is not an admin.
- parfe 16y ago
  He is not an admin and he did not delete the article.

petegrif 16y ago

I think this is absolutely appalling.

burgerbrain 16y ago

While reading Nemerle's deletion discussion page, I can't help but notice what seems to me to be some degree of racism on the part of the deletion advocates, particularly Christopher Monsanto. Where the many sources in English, instead of Polish and Russian, I can't help but think that perhaps they would not have been dismissed out of hand. RSDN.ru being dismissed as a "mere tutorial"? Ugh! Read it yourself and make up your own mind though. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...

mukyu 16y ago

Getting people to rally around anything that someone is trying to have deleted is a sure-fire way to get it deleted, protected from recreation, and basically never coming back. It is like some kind of 'defend the hive' kind of reaction.

udoprog 16y ago

The notability requirements do not sufficiently cover "expert" subjects like PLs. Chris mentioned this himself, yet used it as a justification for these articles, this is known as Doublethink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink) and clearly indicates a second agenda. Not anyone can invent a programming language, it's not comparable to your pet rock band. Chris, you clearly displayed that you are not capable of handling this subject satisfactory and you've displayed arrogance in response to peoples distress. Simply put - marking the articles for deletion was rash, and in the larger sense unjustified.

drallison 16y ago

I certainly oppose deleting programming languages, obscure or not, from wikipedia. I went to the site to try to register a complaint but could not find a way to do that. It seems that meta-comments are not really handled well withing the wikipedia framework. Or did I just miss the right link.

billswift 16y ago
I think wikipedia (like some other sites I have tried to use) is intentionally obscure; it gives the "Wikipedia is my life" types more control.
- carussell 16y ago
  Oh, come on, now. It's just that the wiki paradigm is used throughout. Talk pages, for example, are basically no differently editable from their respective articles; Talk:Transport_in_Nagpur is just a plain ol' wiki page that's been created at that name. Hanlon's razor, et cetera, et cetera.
  - drallison 16y ago
    It seemed to me that everything is tied to a particular page or entry/ There did not seem to be any appropriate place to bring up a pervasive action involving a multiplicity of pages.

ilitirit 16y ago

Information on these type of languages is exactly what I expect to find in an encyclopaedia.

Tichy 16y ago

There was a time when I didn't understand the need for Wikipedia, as I figured every kind of information would just be retrievable with Google (or another search engine). Now Google and Wikipedia are failing at the same time. Bad.

tty 16y ago

I find it funny that the guy hasn't made a single contribution to Wikipedia. All his edits either directly remove content or nominate it for deletion. Apparently besides the dislike for programming languages, he also hates it when certain scientists have "Dr." next to their names on their Wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Christopher+Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributi... Examples: >Raj Reddy ‎ (dr. is so unnecessary) >Randy Pausch ‎ (dr is unnecessary) >Benjamin C. Pierce ‎ (Don't need dr.) and so on

tty 16y ago
He also apparently thinks that once a dedicated article gets deleted, all mention of that particular subject should be removed (as is evidenced by the fact that he went on a removal spree and removed most mentions of Nemerle from other Wikipedia articles as soon as wiki:Nemerle was deleted - he didn't just delete links pointing to wiki:Nemerle but the actual mention of it). That is not a WP policy.
- gwern 16y ago
  But it is a guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_creation_of_certain_types_of_red_links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_cre...
  - carussell 16y ago
    Reread the comment. tty is not referring to changes like - …[[Nemerle]]… + …Nemerle… He or she is claiming mentions of Nemerle being completely excised from other articles.
    - gwern 16y ago
      Oh, my mistake. I didn't read carefully and assumed tty was referring to the usual backlink removal done by a bot after AfDs - I saw one of them for Nemerle on my watchlist today before I came here.

rbanffy 16y ago

So, what languages were deleted? How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion? How much bandwidth will that spare? If someone thinks the language is not notable, there is a discussion page attached to the main article where such things can be expressed. The obscurity of the language can also be communicated in the article itself. While lots of us can be pretty sure Nemerle will have no lasting impact in the field, they can be wrong.

carussell 16y ago
How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion None, articles can be restored. Disk space is actually consumed by deletion overhead.

tommorris 16y ago

The Nemerle article is up for deletion review (DRV), and there is at least one admin supporting overturning the decision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2...

basugasubaku 16y ago

It's interesting that there is no longer a Nemerle article on the English Wikipedia, but there is one on the Japanese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Tajik, Ukrainian, and Chinese Wikipedias. You can see this by going to, e.g., the Japanese article (http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle) and looking at the language links at bottom of the left sidebar. So if you are a speaker of one of those languages, you're still in luck :-P

Ingaz 16y ago
I'm Russian and I almost never read Russian wikipedia articles about programming. Reasons: a) Terminology is English and looks very unnatural in Russian. Terminology translation is even worse - when I read in Russian I need to make double translation to understand. b) Most Russian wiki articles - is just translations from English wiki.

cema 16y ago

When a graduate student, a researcher, spends so much effort in order to delete knowledge (or, more precisely, hide it), I find it mind-boggling. It goes against the very essence of science.

jon_hendry 16y ago
But it's right in line with the worst petty academic pissing matches. Like the California math professor who was recently arrested for repeatedly peeing on his colleague's office door.

bane 16y ago

This kind of stupid crap is why I and many people no longer contribute to wikipedia.

Perihelion 16y ago

I'm offended on behalf of all of the smaller projects who basically just got told that their work is worthless. I'm also offended that the value of a project seems to be based on how well someone can market it. If your project hasn't made a name for itself, then it's worthless, right? Personally, I'm content to hack away on things that no one has heard of because I enjoy what I'm doing. If someone else happens to find it useful, that's awesome. However, deleting things from the Mecca of knowledge-seekers in an attempt to purify it in this manner is nothing short of crapping on the ideals that Wikipedia was built on.

larsberg 16y ago

I'm sort of surprised by the surprise here. As a graduate student myself, my peers and I have all come to the sad conclusion that Wikipedia is good for breadth and bad for depth, at least in CS (I cannot speak for other areas). The primary issue seems to be the combination of deletionists and campers. The former we see in this case. The latter is something my theory friends complain about. According to two of them who have tried, attempting to expand or correct any of the fringe topics in algorithms and graph theory is futile because of the instant-reverters who will simply revert any change they make. Of course, what's most disturbing to me about this is... dear gods, man, you're at Princeton! If you don't understand what the contributions of Alice ML are to the field, walk down the hall and talk to Andrew Appel! Or David Walker, if Andrew is too hard to track down. I would hope that by this point this student has learned that there is a lack of fidelity in the search engines for anything published in the 90s and earlier, as the scanned PS converted to PDF is neither as well-indexed nor as comprehensively available (e.g. Springer-Verlag work from that time is frequently not indexed in scholar/citeseer due to a lack of non-subscription links, particularly if published by someone who is no longer in academia). Fortunately, most of the work in PL was done in the lifetime of people still working. If you're too busy to do a thorough search of relevant work, you can sit down and talk with the people who were there when concurrency was first being introduced and formally modeled to understand Alice's place and contributions (or lack thereof, if that's the conclusion you come to).

skew 16y ago
What is most surprising is the claim on the Alice discussion that Ph.D theses are not reviewed.

cabalamat 16y ago

I recently created an article about Sunder Katwala (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala) who is the head of the Fabian Society (a prominent UK think tank). The article had been up for less than a month when someone requested speedy deletion, despite the article having ample evidence of the subject's notability. Deletionists are out of control on Wikipedia, and need to be stopped. I've thought about writing articles and though "no, why bother, some deletionist will just delete it." and I'm sure many others have been similarly dissuaded. To this end I'm building an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. The main difference it will have is there will be no notability guidelines, only verifiability ones.

tommorris 16y ago
That's never been tried before. Except with Citizendium, Deletionpedia, Knowino, Wikinfo, Includipedia...

joshfraser 16y ago

Christopher has posted this update on his profile: Dear internet, You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion. I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone. Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :( This was fun. Now back to real work, I guess...

Tobu 16y ago
One deletionist got a clue. Nice! But the process or the practice is still broken, and there's a lot more good articles being lost. Hopefully someday we'll have a better wiki (my wishlist: long-term archival, forking, mergeing and fuzzy links) with a less harmful community.

bane 16y ago

Great discussion on wikipedia about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Lets_discuss_notability_.22policy.22_.28again.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...

TillE 16y ago
Why not just formalize WikiProject rankings? Instead of being deleted, all articles with verifiable, independent sources should be graded on quality and importance by those involved in the relevant WikiProject(s). I think exposing that kind of metadata would be really, really useful.
- bane 16y ago
  I think the biggest problem I have with the notability guidelines is that none of the editors (pedantic as they tend to be) understand what the word "guideline" means. Most of the AfD discussions center around WP:N. Yet notability is a scarily vague and personal criteria. In this case, the original deletion discussion appeared to be 100% in favor of keeping the articles in question with only Monsanto against. The only apparent question was WP:N and despite quite a bit of evidence demonstrating notability, the editor appeared to unilaterally delete the articles. In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in at that moment, you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense. So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone. If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?

gaoshan 16y ago

I saw that the language he is working on for his PhD was listed on Wikipedia and flagged for deletion. Then I saw that that page had initially been created that same day solely for the purpose of marking it for deletion. Seriously, person who did this? I thought wasting time browsing news sites like HN and reddit was bad enough but this... this proves that the internet is a very serious business indeed.

bane 16y ago

Somebody just created a new stub for Alice ML and Nemerle. Let's start filling them out! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) edit Nemerle appears to have been frozen and deleted Alice has gone down 3 or 4 times, but it's now up for the last 10 minutes. They're down again, looks like semi-permanently.

mckoss 16y ago

Wikipedia has had deletion issues for a very long time. Note that there are also vague rules that allow admins a procedure called "Speedy Deletion". It lets them remove content w/o debate or public visibility. The deleted page, and all discussions about it just disappear (only an admin on Wikipedia can recover it). One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is: No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d... It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content. The spam problem is very real for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index. Here's what I wrote about this problem in 2007: http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085 http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085

mrmekon 16y ago

The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are: 1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users 2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments. In response to the first argument: Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand. We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough. In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain. Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not