
Steve Yegge is a "non-notable programmer" - helium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Steve_Yegge
======
DanielStraight
It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The
purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience
and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any
importance and get a quick overview of it.

Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species
on Earth (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnanensis)),
but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well
known within their niche.

I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to
reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in
Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole
thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem
to make a difference.

~~~
reynolds
Isn't there a syndrome that describes people who try to exert as much
control/authority over a small but unimportant aspect of life?

~~~
dasil003
I once saw a guy go into a juice bar that sells 12 and 16 ounce smoothies and
ask for a 14 ounce smoothie.

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hugh3
Honestly, who _is_ Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from
his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical
details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see
what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.

Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him
therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.

~~~
btmorex
As far as I can tell, he isn't notable outside of blogging (I had no idea who
he was either). I can understand why his wikipedia page got deleted.

On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous
bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is
having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it
would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people
know him (blogging about programming presumably).

~~~
tptacek
Wikipedia thinks it's an encyclopedia, not a search-engine aid or a "who's
who"-style directory.

~~~
philwelch
Wikipedia _thinks_ it's an encyclopedia, but fairly often, I use it as a
Doctor Who episode guide or something.

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patio11
You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal
arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a
community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus
policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world
is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally
fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.

If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way
to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone
your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the
other guys.

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phrotoma
He seems to be notable enough to be considered a "reliable source" for several
other articles ...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yegge)

~~~
shod
Well spotted, do references have to meet the same notability requirements as
articles themselves?

~~~
kenjackson
Almost certainly not. You will often find reference to papers by authors not
listed in Wikipedia and not notable enough to be listed.

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kqr2
I think the real debate is what it means to be a _notable_ programmer. The
criteria for inclusion in the list is debatable:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers>

Discussion:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers>

~~~
growt
I agree. Is Bill Gates really a notable programmer? A notable business man and
a notable altruist, yes. But a programmer?

~~~
gaius
Yes. He wrote MS Basic for example. He was a hands-on coder throughout
Microsoft's early days.

~~~
growt
Hands on, yes. But "notable"? It's really a fuzzy criteria. I mean would you
still know Gates for MS Basic if he didn't succeed with Microsoft?

~~~
gaius
He was certainly famous at the time - MS Basic was good enough that they could
charge for it to people who already had a free Basic with their hardware.

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protomyth
Well, the featured article today is "Degrassi: The Next Generation", so I
guess I know where their priorities are.

~~~
_delirium
I think if you were to order topics by importance for inclusion in an
encyclopedia, _Degrassi: The Next Generation_ is much higher than Steve Yegge,
though there's certainly an argument for including both. Certainly it's had
more cultural impact on a much larger scale than Yegge. Encyclopedia coverage
isn't a judgment of _quality_ ; it's not like the criteria for covering a
novel or a film is the reviews they get from literary critics or film critics.

~~~
protomyth
I think you hit what I believe with the phrase "cultural impact". Wikipedia
doesn't deal well with a people/concepts/projects that have a technical impact
on the lives of people. Look at how many video bloggers have pages then look
at the technical people that influence the way we work.

~~~
_delirium
Some of the problem is that Wikipedia's supposed to be a tertiary source, so
it can only really follow what other people choose to cover. Technical people
who have had good biographies written about them, or are mentioned in history
books, or anything else similar, certainly get Wikipedia articles (e.g.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Physicists>), and those who don't yet
have Wikipedia articles should get them.

But if someone claims a particular technical person is important, yet they've
never had a biography written about them, never even had a newspaper article
written about them, never been mentioned even for a page or two in a history-
of-technology book, and have basically gotten no writeups anywhere, Wikipedia
shouldn't really be the _first_ place they get a bio. The problem is really
with the rest of the world: if indeed the person is important, why haven't any
historians or journalists ever written about him/her? Once they do, Wikipedia
can easily follow, citing those sources. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia's
goal is to just summarize the existing literature, but if the existing
literature _itself_ is deficient, that's a problem that needs to be fixed
elsewhere, in the primary and secondary sources. Someone in history, or in
journalism, or in some similar field, needs to ask, "why aren't we writing
about [x]?"

Some might just be patience. Pop culture is very time-sensitive, so is covered
almost immediately-- books, journal articles, and newspaper articles appear
within months or even days, which the Wikipedia article can cite. Important
computer scientists do eventually get mentioned in biographies and history of
technology books, but it sometimes takes years--- nobody is rushing to put out
biographies _right now_ covering "Important Computer Scientists of 2010" or
anything.

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illumin8
Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to
the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough
to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.

~~~
sgt
I think it makes perfect sense. If one allows articles that have little
interest, you'll pretty soon end up with a massive amount of articles that
very few people are interested in reading, and even worse: articles that
nobody is interested in maintaining.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high
standards as opposed to the rest of the web.

~~~
tomjen3
But that is exactly the error - Wikipedia is no more an encyclopedia than
nytimes.com is a newspaper. You cannot ship a 200 page newspaper or a 2000
volume encyclopedia, for entirely practical reasons having to do with physics.

It is therefore sensible to assume limit what you put into the encyclopedia,
but since the same limit does not apply to the online edition of wikipedia, it
does not make sense to apply it there.

~~~
hugh3
Space is not the limitation. The limitation is the number of people willing to
put in their spare time to maintain the encyclopaedia.

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GiraffeNecktie
I used to love editing Wikipedia to the point of obsession, but after going
through a grueling process of defending an article from deletion I decided I
had better things to do with my life. The subject of the article in question
was the author of at least half a dozen highly influential books in his field,
the subject of a biography published by a mainstream publisher, cited in
publications by his peers probably hundreds if not thousands of times over the
past thirty years, interviewed and quoted in mainstream media around the world
etc etc etc. Unfortunately there was a clique of editors who didn't like his
ideas. Essentially they thought he was a quack and therefore couldn't stand
the idea that he'd be given exposure in Wikipedia. I have no opinion on
whether he's a quack and it really has nothing whatsoever to do with his
notability. Eventually I was able to establish that the guy is influential and
the article is still there, but the stupidity of having to endlessly argue the
point made me say to hell with it and I haven't edited anything since.

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protomyth
I wonder how many hack poets or writers are on Wikipedia that have less of an
influence or body of work than programmers they have rejected.

~~~
Semiapies
Or slavishly detailed write-ups of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.

~~~
hugh3
While individual Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes would seem to be only of
borderline notability, any Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in existence has
been seen by many millions of people. Do a comparable number of people know
about Steve Yegge?

~~~
Semiapies
I thought the value of a reference work was that it had things one might _not_
know, not that it made a convenient place to engage in one's fandom.

------
simplegeek
Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he
doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their
standards for inclusion, any ideas?

~~~
wmf
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)> I guess
programmers are counted under "creative professionals". (There may be a meta-
lesson here that there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars but
not for programmers.)

~~~
hugh3
The only reason there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars was
because somebody was at some point writing thousands of articles about porn
stars. I know this, because I used to press the "random article" button a lot.

~~~
dasil003
Suuuuure you did.

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mindcrime
My big problem with Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that they're too
general. I don't accept that "notability" has to mean "known worldwide" or
"known by a large number of people regardless of their domain." I believe that
notability within a given domain (say, programming) should be enough. And I
don't think there's much - if any - question that Steve is "notable" within
programming circles.

Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project
is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time"
versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."

Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough
and _everybodY_ is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think
the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people
expect and want to use Wikipedia.

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mindcrime
F#@ng Deletionists. Grrrr....

Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from
reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC,
Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an
interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that
that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited
to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."

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mindcrime
And he's back. Right after I re-created the page, somebody tagged it - again -
for "speedy delete" but the admin rejected the speedy delete request.
Thankfully. With the citations and references I included, I hope that
particular article will be safe from deletion now. But if anybody else feels
like working on it a bit, have at it.

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bena
Both Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have Wikipedia pages and consider Steve
Yegge to be important enough to have as a guest on their podcast.

~~~
dasil003
They consider him _smart and insightful_ enough. Notable (or "important") does
not necessarily follow.

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astine
Actually, the quote is "None-notable programmer" :)

~~~
helium
Yea, but I thought I would be forgiving....

------
ax0n
Steve Who?

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motters
Non-notable programmers of the world unite! (and take over)

