
Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia - budu
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/
======
jacques_chester
Here's the main offender:

<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.

~~~
chrismonsanto
No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were
either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count.
Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper
and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact.
Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability?

None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back
them up. I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I
nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a
superficial overview of syntax.

I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a
shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on
my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for
nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...?

But seriously. Anyone could have commented on the AfD. Anyone could have
provided reliable sources. The only thing anyone did was bitch and moan. I
didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. Thumbs down,
internet.

~~~
zedshaw
My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to
the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and
you _just_ erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer
science to the general public. You just made it _harder_ to get people
interested in programming. Amazing.

Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student
could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally.
Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers
because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't
"notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I
also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate
puts out, no matter how idiotic it is.

Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because
of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like
Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor.

So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in
person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now,
you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.

~~~
jacoblyles
>"...you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement
of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge"

Correction: a professor is a profession devoted to advancing human knowledge
and then locking that knowledge behind expensive paywalls so that only elites
with institutional subscriptions can afford to read it. Academia couldn't care
less about the knowledge available to the average internet user. You could
burn all the books in the world and they wouldn't care as long as the copy in
their affiliated-persons-only library stayed safe.

~~~
Lewisham
...and this is why almost all academics put their papers as PDFs for free on
their web sites. Have you even looked? It is times like this when I wish there
was an appropriate emoticon to express an eye roll.

~~~
fhars
In another comment in this thread our deletionist actually mentioned being
behind the ACM paywall as a relevant criterion for notability.

------
Udo
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.

~~~
wvenable
> Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for
> the world's knowledge.

 _This_ is the problem. Most of us just assume that Wikipedia's mission is
being the repository for all human knowledge. But it's not. The last time
rampant deleting happened (and I lost a page related to one of my projects)
they clearly made the argument that being an endless repository was _not_
their goal. Their goal is simply to be an encyclopedia. And even I had to
admit that the page on my project is useful information but it would never
belong in an encyclopedia.

If anyone wants to start a project that contains all human knowledge, on all
subjects, without any constraint -- I think that would be a very interesting
idea -- but that project is not Wikipedia.

~~~
jessriedel
Well, that project _could_ be wikipedia if the community so decided. They
would just need to seriously loosen/eliminate the notability criterion.

------
tibbon
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:What_Wikipedia_is_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia)

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
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
Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.

------
awj
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
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
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.)

------
seancron
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
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
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.

------
jedsmith
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>

_Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll
reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'._

~~~
dustingetz
lets not confuse the issue. Deletionism has nothing to do with storage
capacity.
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism#Rationale_for_del...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism#Rationale_for_deletionism)

edit: meta: the broken-down score on this post is something like +27-20, what
an emotional topic!

~~~
jedsmith
Missed the _amusing_?

Nobody would rightfully assume that storage is the problem. I know how much
storage costs. The commenter I'm quoting wrote that tongue-in-cheek, and I
thought I had given enough of a hint there that I was repeating it in jest as
well.

------
joshfraser
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
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.

------
gojomo
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> and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Sounds like an interesting project. I really don't like the name though.

------
larsberg
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
What is most surprising is the claim on the Alice discussion that Ph.D theses
are not reviewed.

------
jeswin
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).

------
Jun8
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

      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.

------
tty
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:Contributi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Christopher+Monsanto)

Examples:

>Raj Reddy ‎ (dr. is so unnecessary)

>Randy Pausch ‎ (dr is unnecessary)

>Benjamin C. Pierce ‎ (Don't need dr.)

and so on

~~~
tty
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
But it is a guideline:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_cre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_creation_of_certain_types_of_red_links)

~~~
carussell
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
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.

------
nerfhammer
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> .

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
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
Scroll down to the List of One-Time Animals section if you really want your
mind boggled

------
grav1tas
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.

------
burgerbrain
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:Art...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle)

------
udoprog
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>) 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.

------
tokenadult
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
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.

~~~
chrismonsanto
I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no
citations exist :(

~~~
oconnore
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>

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.

~~~
chrismonsanto
But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...

~~~
oconnore
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/pachols...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/events/sscli2005/pacholski-moskal.pdf)

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc.pdf)

------
cyrus_
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.

------
carsongross
@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
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
Thankfully, he is _not_ an admin.

------
w1ntermute
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.

~~~
redthrowaway
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.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap."_

So fucking what?

Bits are so cheap they're damn near free, and we have pretty good search
technology these days. Who gives a shit if there is some crusty data that
nobody cares about lying around?

Who _precisely_ is hurt by this?

~~~
tommorris
There's a big difference between CSD ("Criterion for Speedy Deletion") and AfD
("Articles for Deletion") here.

Something like Nemerle is obviously an interesting article and a failure of
the AfD process. I've never done a DRV (Deletion Review) before, so I might
look through Christopher Monsanto's deletions.

But there ARE good reasons to delete content. I new page patrol on English
Wikipedia and see thousands of articles created which are nothing more than:

"asdfasdfasdf tim in year 6 of somesuch high school is teh GAY!!1"

and they should rightly be deleted. Usually they are CSDed within minutes and
usually deleted very quickly thereafter.

The CSD process works for this kind of thing. And occasionally things slip
past the CSD process and need PROD/PROD BLP/AfD. But I do think the Nemerle
deletion was definitely an example of the fallacy of deletionism.

~~~
burgerbrain
Yeah, because 65 bytes is a hell of a thing to waste.

~~~
tommorris
It isn't a hard drive space issue. All deleted articles are kept in the
database.

Are you seriously advocating that if someone comes and posts an article in
main-space which is nothing but an advert for a crappy little garage band or
some kid creating an article about how his friends are gay or whatever
shouldn't be deleted?

~~~
burgerbrain
Yeah, so what? No harm is done. Revert bad changes to articles people care
about, and ignore articles that nobody cares about. If people actually someone
start visiting these 'bad' articles, that means nothing more than you've just
identified another avenue for expansion.

~~~
redthrowaway
That turns Wikipedia into geocities, which is not its role or purpose. There
have to be criteria for inclusion. If you have a bunch of articles with
unverifiable information, you aren't doing your job as an encyclopedia.
Quality matters.

------
mukyu
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.

------
basugasubaku
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>) 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
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.

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

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

------
cema
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
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.

------
drallison
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
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
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
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.

------
cabalamat
I recently created an article about 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
That's never been tried before. Except with Citizendium, Deletionpedia,
Knowino, Wikinfo, Includipedia...

------
tommorris
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/2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14)

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

------
Tichy
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.

------
bane
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/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.

------
rbanffy
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
_How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion_

None, articles can be restored. Disk space is actually consumed by deletion
overhead.

------
mckoss
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_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion)

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>

------
EGreg
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>

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

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

------
Perihelion
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.

------
mrmekon
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:No_original_research>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not>

------
mrphoebs
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.

------
gaoshan
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.

------
petegrif
I think this is absolutely appalling.

------
bane
Great discussion on wikipedia about this

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)#Lets_discuss_notability_.22policy.22_.28again.29)

~~~
TillE
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
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?

~~~
mckoss
Can you please not use undefined Wikipedia terminology here? I have no idea
what AfD and WP:N are referring to.

~~~
bane
Apologies, it's terribly easy to drop into jargonland when discussing
Wikipedia.

AfD is "Article for Deletion".

WP:N are the notability guidelines Wikipedians are supposed to use when
deciding if something is notable enough to be included and to keep out one-off
topics.

~~~
mckoss
Thanks!

