
Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles - bendmorris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto
======
Osmose
Trying to delete stories? He nominated them for an open discussion to be
decided by an admin. But that doesn't sound nearly as malicious. There are
valid criticisms about the AfD process, but most people are blaming Chris as
if he just walked by and deleted the articles on his own.

I fear that this issue has become less about fixing broken Wikipedia policies
that encourage people like Chris to delete articles, and more about "teaching
him a lesson".

The amount of ad hominem attacks in the original story is much higher than
anything I'd expect from HN. And, considering HN is self-policed in a lot of
ways, I think the issue needs to be pointed out.

~~~
j_baker
The thing that _does_ annoy me is that he seems to agree that the policies
need to be changed, but he followed them anyway. Sure, the policies are what
ultimately need to be changed, but we also need to discourage blindly
following the rules without thinking critically about them.

~~~
diN0bot
only after there was a backlash: he did was felt right, people failed to
counter, an admin deleted stuff, people bitched and moaned --> therefore, fine
if the system is not yielding the right results let's change it.

Chris seems to be really decent. even if he had a lapse in judgement, he
embraces pleasant discussion. i'm embarrassed by the juvenille response: the
meanness most of all, but also the unwillingness to see someone else's
perspective or view efforts as a collaboration rather than a fight.

if a teammate messes up, you help them, you don't shoot them down.

~~~
bane
His user page now has a passive-aggressive self congratulatory quote from a
supporter.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto>

Lesson not learned. He's still seeking self-justification for removing
knowledge from the public sphere. It's almost 1984-esque.

------
chris_j
"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?"

Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true:
Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather
annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the letter of the law
but yet seemed so wrong. There is no way that the likes of Factor or Clean
should be deleted from Wikipedia so the question becomes how can the
guidelines be changed so that they don't allow it to happen.

~~~
bendmorris
The most important rule of all:

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

i.e., if something seems to fit in with the "letter of the law" but has no
real benefit and lots of reasons not to do it, don't do it!

~~~
ErrantX
Sadly the mostly widely mis-used rule :) IAR is for daily usage, no real
application in this case (because unfortunately the wider community will
probably agree with deletions)

------
mfukar

      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.
    

I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place
saying "Christopher, we are upset".

~~~
chrismonsanto
No, my understanding was that a small, but vocal, special interest group was
upset for nominating their favorite programming language. The vast majority of
angry people seemed unable to come up with a rational reason for saving the
article. The vast majority of calm people seemed to agree with the deletions,
and agreed with me for labeling the others as a small-but-vocal-minority. If
you felt you were doing something right and no one who thought you were wrong
had a convincing case (as convincing as "nazi dickwad deletionist we're gonna
e-mail your professor" is), wouldn't you try to push through the intimidation?
It wasn't until the wider reddit and HN communities caught on that I
understood that it wasn't an annoyed minority, yet I would have caught on
earlier if someone had actually tried to reason with me (and maybe brought up
the citation argument).

I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software
stops me from making too many posts.

~~~
srean
Your understanding is wrong. It is this attitude of yours, that of ascribing
fictional motives to those who criticized you, and the failure to comprehend
the impact of your actions, that had a role to play in precipitating the
outrage in the first place. I am no fan or user of any of the language that
you helped delete. But that does not mean I would be ok with those deletions.
See my other comments for an elaboration. I know enough that important
knowledge also exists as folklore and it is important to preserve them on
Wikipedia, precisely because they are not represented adequately elsewhere.

You are clearly disingenuous. You complained about: if only people had told
you that you were doing wrong. People did, and you came up with snarks and
smileys and gratuitously appointed yourself the position of a judge that
decides which citations had impact and which did not. And when it went out of
hand, you played the victim and you changed your excuse to 'if only _more_
people did, more reasonably etc. etc'.

``I only recommended a deletion, did not delete it myself``, is another
exhibition of dis ingenuousness and irresponsibility. Same for the shuttling
between, "I am sorry" and, ``I was right in every case``. (Things between ``
`` aren't actual quotes)

I believe you are an adult, everybody expects adults to possess some degree of
understanding of what is being told to them and act and apply rules with
ownership and responsibility. What is specifically galling is that when push
came to a shove you took up the excuse that notably rules are broken. But,
earlier, had no problems argumentatively enforcing them blindly. No one had a
gun to your head to do whatever you went about doing, you went about doing it
anyway and then hid behind a straw-man.

Nobody has the time an energy to, as you indicate, to reason with someone at
length. Especially when the other person is being unreasonably pedantic and
obnoxious. Most people have a real job and more important things to do.

Edit: @runjake your point well taken and upped.

~~~
runjake
A wise man once said "Do not feed the troll."

Edit: before down-arrowing me, you may want to examine the situation. It's
pretty apparent this guy has an agenda.

------
ramanujan
The first public victory of inclusionism over deletionism. Perhaps it is not
too late for Wikipedia. If only similar mobs could mete out rough internet
justice to the top ten most notorious deletionists, casual contributors may
once again walk the hallways of Wikipedia.

[only partially tongue-in-cheek here...]

~~~
prodigal_erik
Deletionism is the reason Wikipedia has only a moderate shortage of editors
curating content, rather than an utterly insoluble maintenance nightmare. If
this farce means the inclusionists are winning, it's the beginning of the end
for Wikipedia. They will get what they seem to want—a mirror of the entire web
hosted at wikipedia.org, with just as much outdated, useless, and actively
misleading crap.

~~~
steveklabnik
Deletionism is also one of the major reasons that I only contribute to the
Hackety Hack and Shoes articles on Wikipedia, and nothing else. (oh, and I
fear the day when I have to try to prove Hackety Hack 'notable.' I'm pretty
sure that it isn't by the letter of the law.)

They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.

~~~
Retric
With the current model there needs to be some line because editors are a
finite resource and people do occasionally deface articles etc. I would
suggest having Wikipedia’s deleted articles end up on another website (using
the same backend) which is then ignored by the editorial community to avoid
annoying people.

PS: There are already plenty of other wiki's with different focus. There is
little need for ex: naruto.wikia.com content on en.wikipedia.com.

~~~
steveklabnik
The notability guidelines don't address this at all. If the article about
AliceML got defaced, the people who obviously care about it would fix it.

And if nobody cares about the article, why does it matter if it's been
defaced? And why not delete it once it's been defaced, rather than pre-
emptively?

~~~
Retric
AliceML is an edge case where arguments can be made on both sides (I would
have kept it). However the rule is more setup to avoid people adding their
family tree and favorite recopies to Wikipedia etc resulting in 10 billion
articles and no way to manage them. Overall I think it's a fairly loose
standard ex:(Random article) gave me

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookpeople_(distributor)
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Nash_(basketball)
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Holme_Larsen
    

I can see keeping the first and possibly the second, but why not delete the
third?

PS: A different option might be to build a custom AI to validate things, but
for now balancing Notable around the size of the community seems reasonable.

~~~
steveklabnik
I see this as a UI problem, not a 'real' problem.

~~~
Retric
Heh, I see it as more of an organizational issue, but I suggested a UI
solution. Wikipedia is a moderated wiki that seems un-moderated to most users.
The Notability rules bother people, but they are really part of a larger
tradeoff and scrapping them is risky.

------
silverlake
As a fan and user(!) of Factor, I agree that it fails the notability test on
Wikipedia. I can't find any mention of the language, beyond that by the
author, which might convince a 3rd person that it is more notable than my own
pet PL projects. But this might be true of many implementations of well-
defined languages like Smalltalk, Scheme, or C. Take a look at the big list of
Scheme implementations[1]. How many of them are "notable"? Is Ikarus or
Chicken notable? Many PL papers describe some minor tweak in a homegrown toy
language. Are all those languages notable?

I think Factor deserves to have a Wikipedia page (it still does), but I don't
know by what general criteria I'm including it. It has a complete, robust
implementation and is still actively developed, which is more than could be
said of 90% of PLs out there. But how do we codify that into a notability
test?

[1] [http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-
standards#implem...](http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-
standards#implementations)

------
burgerbrain
The damage is already done. _"I'm sorry (but I was still right!)"_ is the kind
of apology I would expect to hear from a child. If you're sorry, then _make it
right_ and undo the harm that you did. Otherwise, just shut-up, you're not
sincere.

~~~
nicelios
He didn't say he was sorry. He just said he will stop.

~~~
burgerbrain
Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.

~~~
j_baker
So? Isn't the most important thing that he's stopping?

~~~
copper
The important thing would be restoring the articles. As far as I can see, that
isn't happening (yet).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language)>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle>

I might just be seeing a cached version, though.

edit: grr, I cannot reply to you, but yes, that was my point exactly: he could
request a deletion review.

~~~
j_baker
Chris is just another Wikipedian though. He has the same ability to undo the
changes as you do.

~~~
rst
He's not "just another Wikipedian", he's the _particular_ Wikipedian that made
this mess. So he has a particular responsibility to clean it up.

~~~
j_baker
Ahem... Let me rephrase my above comment. Anything Chris can do, you can do.
Perhaps rather than complaining about who "should" clean it up, you can
actually do it yourself?

------
shekmalhen
Even after this "reversal", I'm not sure he understands why people were angry
about his AfDs.

~~~
T-R
Judging from his comments, I'd wager this wouldn't have blown up if it weren't
for his attitude toward the whole situation. His use of smileys coupled with
his tone leaves the impression of condescension, obliviousness, or apathy
toward the people he'd upset.

------
teyc
Right... notability guidelines are broken, but he doesn't mind following it to
the letter.

------
yzhengyu
Notability is broken, since it is usually subjective and wielded mercilessly
as an axe by the Wikipedia mafia to cull material which they deem as not
notable. Inclusive? Haha, don't make me laugh.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There is, however, nothing stopping articles deemed as not notable by
consensus at Wikipedia from being included in other references.

------
Programma
What I think is funny: this guy seems to point to a problem with the internet
and Wikipedia. But the actual problem is that he is not a programmer
(obviously) so he has a skewed view of what is notable when it comes to
programming language. In other words, he has _no clue_ what he is talking
about.

He then blames 'the internet' for calling him out. That is the problem with
the internet: this newbie comes into the scene and has no idea why his actions
are annoying and detrimental. He says he's looking for 'policies' but he's
just a newbie.

Hopefully in 5-10 years these dramas will end when we all collectively grow up
a bit and stop with the ignorant drama queen games.

Good to see that some aren't letting him rest until he acknowledges that he
was deleting articles he had no business deleting. Ignorant editor is no
excuse.

------
chmike
Pruning knowledge is a dangerous process.

~~~
justincormack
Regarding this as pruning knowledge is rather exaggerated. First wikipedia
deletions are not deletions, they are just hidden from most users but can be
viewed or restored. Second this is not primary knowledge it is a very short
and incomplete summary of the primary sources.

~~~
teyc
I didn't realize that deletion is not permanent.

In what manner is the content hidden? Will it show up in search engine
results? Will an anonymous user like myself see the content?

~~~
steveklabnik
Check it out for yourself:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_language&action=edit&redlink=1)

> A page with this title has previously been deleted. If you are creating a
> new page with different content, please continue. If you are recreating a
> page similar to the previously deleted page, or are unsure, please first
> contact the deleting administrator using the information provided below.

~~~
bendmorris
Minor correction here: the "Alice programming language" page was deleted, only
to be moved to "Alice (programming language)". The one you want is here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_\(programming_language\))

~~~
steveklabnik
Nice catch -- it still illustrates what a deleted page looks like though.

------
slouch
chris blanked his talk page on wikipedia. here's the content he removed:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christop...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christopher_Monsanto&action=historysubmit&diff=413834782&oldid=413833989)

------
davidhollander
> _Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I
> care about deleting them, I'll stop._

That's how these things work Chris.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
1993

------
j_baker
Has this page been changed since it was posted? Perhaps I'm missing it, but I
don't see anything that indicates that he's giving up.

~~~
thechangelog
I couldn't see the change on the mobile edition of Wikipedia. It's there on
the full version.

------
yaix
He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules
then. In an open system, once you start ignoring the rules, everybody will
want their exceptions and you end up in chaos. Anyone remember the Wikipedia
from ten years ago? Today, it aims to have a good standard regarding its
content, that is only possible with rules. So just update the rules and
everything is fine. More importantly, it will still be fine ten years from
now, when nobody remembers this incident anymore.

~~~
loewenskind
>He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia
rules then.

Everyone is responsible for _their own action_. You should not follow rules
that are bad, you should ignore them or try to change them yourself. "Just
doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse and if I had the power I would punish
that defense more severely than any other because it's the most dangerous.

------
Flenser
Stack Exchange process for deleting content > Wikipedia process for deleting
content.

Having nominations be anonymous until a consensus is reached stops this kind
of issue arising. Sometimes complete transparency isn't the best policy.

------
latch
Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real
tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

~~~
afterburner
Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt
follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.

~~~
_delirium
In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists.
The _exact_ same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and
someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how
this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and
Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they
don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the
article for deletion and harass him, etc.

When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a
better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when
it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!

And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a
fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up
pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information
somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead
of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article
about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but
usually no mobs.

~~~
iwwr
If there is a band out there with an active online community numbering in the
hundreds (which means their offline following is a few orders of magnitude
greater), I don't see why they shouldn't have a wikipedia page.

~~~
_delirium
If there are good sources to write an article from, sure. But if there aren't
any sources besides the band's website, their MySpace, and a few fans' blog
posts, what goes in the article? The usual result is that fans just write a
bunch of stuff about the band they like, which doesn't make for the best
article. I don't personally care that much, but I don't think the world is
greatly harmed by not having those articles, either; for that kind of stuff,
there are always fansites and fan wikis, so they don't _have_ to go on
Wikipedia.

~~~
shin_lao
Just basic information, which is better than nothing.

If you enquire about the bank in wikipedia you'll get something like

"Awesome Band is a neo-dark-fusion-hip-hop jazz Slovenian band formed in 2002.
They have produced one album called and are currently active."

Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia,
isn't it?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia,
isn't it?

No, it's not. Wikipedia is a knowledge repository not _the_ knowledge
repository. It's not there to hold every little bit of trivia, if you want to
find "what is Awesome Band" then use a search engine. Wikipedia is there to
house notable instances and information that has wider application than mere
trivia.

Unless Awesome Band started a new genre, influenced well known bands, is a
well known band (eg number 1 tracks, headlining particularly large events,
etc.) or is known for something else then it's probably enough to mention them
as a footnote as a band that played at Event X or possibly as a notable
example of a genre or whatever.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not>
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_conte...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_content_criteria)

~~~
bane
You have a basic, fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia is then.

 _Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing._ \- Jimmy
Wales

[http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...](http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipedia-
Founder-Jimmy-Wales-Responds)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That's clearly not what is being done if you either assess the linked content
guidelines or look at Wikipedia itself.

One can either contest that this is simply a soundbite for the press or look
at the definition of "knowledge" being used if one cares to square the
apparent contradictions.

Why would Wikipedia even attempt to record all information about everything,
who wants to know what I had for breakfast or what image is on my son's
pyjamas; I contend that everyone that really needs that information already
has it.

~~~
bane
_Why would Wikipedia even attempt to record all information about everything,
who wants to know what I had for breakfast or what image is on my son's
pyjamas; I contend that everyone that really needs that information already
has it._

Who knows? I _needed_ information on Alice ML today, but alas that was not to
be. You are not the personal arbitrator of what I need to know any more than
Chris Monsanto is of what languages are notable!

For at least the first half of it's life, wikipedia grew at an astonishing
rate precisely because it wasn't being moderated by pedantic self-appointed
editors. The rise of the editor class in wikipedia may have irreperably broken
it as a compendium of knowledge. Imagine, people who know nothing about a
subject telling you weather that subject is important to you!

Ridiculous? That's the current state of affairs. One could argue there is even
a growing movement of people, like minded with yourself, that it should simply
be reduced until it contains no more information than any other run-of-the-
mill encyclopedia.

I have news for you, we have plenty of free, scope-limited, hand curated
encyclopedias.

Here's what I came up with in 30 seconds. Go entertain yourself with these if
you think having articles on obscure, but important topics is simply too much
for you to handle.

<http://www.encyclopedia.com/> <http://www.britannica.com/>
<http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/>
<http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Main_Page>

The point of Wikipedia is to go far beyond these approaches by crowdsourcing
the content. So that people can add what they personally know about obscure
subjects. If I happen to be an expert in Korean clam harvesting operations,
should I be able to write an article on that? Who the hell cares if you don't
personally take an interest in it.

You're right if your response is "well we don't want to just copy what's on
the web!" An encyclopedia is supposed to provided a summary of a subject, a
launching off point, a confirmation of a subject's existence. It should
provide exhaustive breadth. In wikipedia's case, it was even able to provide a
bit of depth through external citations, and through hyperlinking to other
parts of itself. But the number of subjects should be virtually unlimited.
Wikipedia _should_ provide the long-tail. As a pedagogic device, limiting what
I'm allowed to look up limits what I can learn about.

To your example, it might be of fantastic importance to me to know what are
popular breakfast foods in your country or what kinds of logos kids are
wearing these days. A page about Breakfast practices or marketing to children
then would be fantastically important to _me_ , but maybe not to you.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _Who knows? I needed information on Alice ML today, but alas that was not to
> be._

Are you seriously telling me you sat down with an internet browser and
couldn't find any information about that specific programming language? It's
far less notable than I assumed in which case (it took <30s to find
<http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2007/1262/> which suggests to me
you're lying).

> _Imagine, people who know nothing about a subject telling you weather that
> subject is important to you!_

That's not what is happening - Wikipedia uses a democratic process to
determine if something is considered notable by the community. We/They say
nothing about whether something is important to you. If something is
considered not to be sufficiently notable for Wikipedia that doesn't mean you
can't write about it, blog about it, even create your own wiki about it.

> _If I happen to be an expert in Korean clam harvesting operations, should I
> be able to write an article on that? Who the hell cares if you don't
> personally take an interest in it._

Of course, I'd be interested in that, I'm also interested in obscure
programming languages too.

However, if Korean clam harvesting is no different to Japanese clam
harvesting, which is more-or-less the same as Chinese clam harvesting, then
they should be noted on a general article about clam harvesting you don't need
a separate article for each country (given the imaginary constraints I've set)
nor do you need a different article on each company that does clam harvesting,
each location, each person working in each location, ...

> _To your example, it might be of fantastic importance to me to know what are
> popular breakfast foods in your country or what kinds of logos kids are
> wearing these days. A page about Breakfast practices or marketing to
> children then would be fantastically important to me, but maybe not to you._

And there you have it, AFAICT you just argued for my point-of-view.

The point is that it is largely irrelevant what _I_ had for breakfast, what
the design on _my son's_ pyjamas are but a general page about breakfast is
apposite, a general page about use of cartoons in merchandising is apposite.

Similarly it's not important to list every programming language and variant
ever. If it's important to you then you'll find the information in a relevant
place that gives fine esoteric information about this specific field.

~~~
bane
_Are you seriously telling me you sat down with an internet browser and
couldn't find any information about that specific programming language? It's
far less notable than I assumed in which case (it took <30s to find
<http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2007/1262/> which suggests to me
you're lying)._

good, then let's just get rid of Wikipedia altogether. Since I _can_ just get
whatever information I need by googling there's really not a point to the site
anyways. Is that your argument? At this point I'm 50% thinking that you're
just trolling.

 _That's not what is happening - Wikipedia uses a democratic process to
determine if something is considered notable by the community. We/They say
nothing about whether something is important to you. If something is
considered not to be sufficiently notable for Wikipedia that doesn't mean you
can't write about it, blog about it, even create your own wiki about it._

That is _exactly_ what happened in this case. One person flagged, one person
deleted. The community voted consistently against the deletion. Check the AfD
discussions yourself if you don't believe me. There was not a single vote
agreeing the the AfD flag. You can carry on all you want about how WP has
various procedures and policies and what not, but that is not what happens _de
facto_ with shocking regularity.

 _However, if Korean clam harvesting is no different to Japanese clam
harvesting, which is more-or-less the same as Chinese clam harvesting, then
they should be noted on a general article about clam harvesting you don't need
a separate article for each country (given the imaginary constraints I've set)
nor do you need a different article on each company that does clam harvesting,
each location, each person working in each location, ..._

But I should be able to create a page if any of those things are interesting
or notable enough, if there's enough information on it. Korean clam harvesting
may be special and unique in the world. It may have hundreds of thousands of
adherents, it may have it's own culture, equipment, techniques etc. It may
appear prominently in Korean culture, movies, newspapers or other media. In
fact, there could be an entire musical genre of clam harvester music.

But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and
so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging", and
none of that information ends up compiled and summarized in an article like it
deserves to be because some overzealous ignoramus decided to flag it as an AfD
and the community who could discuss its importance generally doesn't speak
English and even if they did and could vote to keep the article, would
probably just get ignored by the editors anyways -- just like in this case.

 _Similarly it's not important to list every programming language and variant
ever. If it's important to you then you'll find the information in a relevant
place that gives fine esoteric information about this specific field._

I personally think that listing top-40 pop stars is esoteric information about
a specific field I could care less about. But since lots of people seem to
like it, we end up with countless pages to that dreck. These languages
actually _are_ important to computer science in the same way Fra Angelico is
important to Renaissance art. Is Fra Angelico considered a notable master of
painting in the same way well known artists are. No. But it's important to
have his information summarized and presented, with notes regarding his
influence and hist works.

Similarly, Alice ML is the Fra Angelico of the functional programming world.
To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's
page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability and then a
similarly ignorant editor agrees and BAM! it's gone for all time.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Since I can just get whatever information I need by googling there's really
not a point to the site anyways. Is that your argument?

Absolutely not, and you clearly know it. That's like me saying your argument
is that we should get rid of the rest of the internet because one can post
lolcats to Wikipedia as notable examples of, er, lolcats.

>But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and
so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging"

No I don't. But you're getting sidetracked by the fabricated analogy and
forgetting that the removed articles don't have the [fictional] notability of
the subject of your story and would have been very unlikely to have been
removed if they had and would have certainly been reinstated.

>To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's
page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability

Let's try this as a first approximation on notability. The internet is
probably the main repository of CS info - 120 Google Scholar articles mention
"'Alice ML'" (appear to be some false positives). Arguably art history is
better represented in works that are yet to be fully integrated online - 17000
Google Scholar articles mention "Fra Angelico".

How about books as a further approximation. 33 book results for "'Alice ML'
programming" (18 are obvious false positives too). "'fra angelico' ~painting"
(I don't think it's ambiguous without the addition of "~painting" but for
equivalence ...) gives 133000 book results.

Popularity and plurality don't dictate notability of course. Notability in
this case is a function of the appearance of notability to the authors and
editors too, hence pop-stars, etc..

-

On the subject of the AfD (articles for deletion). I've looked now at the one
for Alice ML,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Alice_%28programming_language%29)

The oppositions are clearly poor. Most of them are based on the false
assumption that Alice (software) is what is at question. A couple mention
notability based on being in a book and the proposer convincingly counters
these IMO. Vorov2 is the only dissenting voice that appears to know what they
are talking about and gives a reasonable argument. Again, it seems clear that
the proposer was most knowledgable about the subject, knew the relevant
reference works (so had researched) and knew the WP policy well. SarekOfVulcan
makes the deletion.

So in summary, one flagged, another gave good opposition, yet another deleted.

In many ways the fact that there was no other decent opposition to this
deletion leads me to believe that it was the correct course of action. Note
that Alice ML is still present in Wikipedia in _a priori_ relevant places
([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksH...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Alice_%28programming_language%29&limit=999)).

~~~
bane
I'm now 100% convinced that you are just trolling. No reasonable person could
come to the conclusion that you just came to without ignoring nearly all of
the evidence because it doesn't fit some arbitrary criteria that you've
decided to use to make sure your contrarian view is right -- in precisely the
way Monsanto did in ignoring the evidence thrown up in opposition to him.

The opposition is strong, they cite references to the language (a few cite
references to the software, true), but all are summarily ignored because, just
like you, Monsanto decided they don't fit into whatever arbitrary set of
requirements you woke up and decided to use today.

And, as of today, it turns out you were wrong anyways since the page has been
reinstated.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>And, as of today, it turns out you were wrong anyways since the page has been
reinstated.

If you read what I wrote you'll note that I argued that if a sufficient
argument for notability was pressed that this would be a reason for inclusion.

So, by your account that I am wrong I'd have to assume that the article was
reinstated without presentation of evidence of notability or logical argument
for such?

------
rkalla
I wonder how many people got up in arms when they saw the "Monsanto" and
thought a patent-hoarding Satan was running around Wikipedia erasing
programming language articles.

This wasn't really a valuable comment, but I couldn't help it.

------
daxelrod
The permalink for this is
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_Monsanto&oldid=413834663)

------
VladRussian
that is the outermost danger of tomorrow - the youngs today are made believe
in the rule of rule. They will be cutting each other's fingers (of course
after due process presided over by the millenium judge) for pressing a button
on their own hardware they aren't licensed to press by the EULA or for not
using real name on Facebook/Quora.

------
jackfoxy
Thank you, Chris. You did the right thing.

------
Charuru
This problem is hardy unique to this instance alone, or even to wikipedia
alone. This is a question faced by All publications, that of target audience
and market. Obviously on a tech forum like HN we're more likely to be
interested in langs like factor. But imagine a journalist looking through
langs to report on computer sci or a teenager looking for something new to
study... It would be a waste of time.

Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined
clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites,
except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For
eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page?

We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything,
as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.

