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lvoudour 11 hours ago [-]
I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?
People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori:
I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:
Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...
voidifremoved 4 hours ago [-]
Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.
mistrial9 4 hours ago [-]
except for hundreds of early actors who put themselves and their pet projects in, early days. Some grifters like Bernt Wahl in Berkeley for example..
source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing
willdr 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, I tried saying this to both GingerBill and Casey on Twitter but they were unreceptive. I understand their frustrations and I think Wikipedia does have sourcing gaps for projects like Odin. But you can't really understand the spam problem until you've seen it firsthand, and general case notability requirements are one of the first lines of defence against bad actors.
tux3 7 hours ago [-]
And notability isn't just for spam, the core difficulty with Wikipedia is that people disagree about what should be written in articles. The site only functions because of a masterful Jiu-jitsu move where we redirect heated arguments about what Wikipedia should say into heated arguments about which Reliable Source to cite.
That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end.
Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
stymaar 9 hours ago [-]
Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person?
Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...
DiogenesKynikos 4 hours ago [-]
Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it.
Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
close04 4 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia’s strategy is to offload the risk of wrong information to sources which can absorb the hit rather than have it reflected back. It’s “safer” for Wikipedia even to knowingly publish inaccuracies or misinformation from a reputable source than the truth from an unknown source. A lie from a reputable source is unavoidable, a lie from an unknown source is unforgivable.
DiogenesKynikos 2 hours ago [-]
It's also that letting editors argue based on their own original research would be a recipe for chaos.
"Use reliable secondary sources" is a simple rule that limits the scope for possible conflict and chaos. For an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's very important.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
At this point everything on Wikipedia is suspect, even programming topics, given this Odin situation.
Dubious "secondary sources" write hit pieces on individuals, which then get quoted by alleged "newspapers of record," which then get looped into Wikipedia.
I tried looking for reliable secondary sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any.
That's not Wikipedia's fault. It is a bit weird that people are insisting that Odin is such a big deal that it must have a Wikipedia page, but apparently no tech website of note has ever mentioned it.
stymaar 4 hours ago [-]
I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago [-]
I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!!
I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.
But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.
wavemode 3 hours ago [-]
After reading through several pages of their comments, I'm roughly 100% certain that the user you're referring to is not a bot and is not karma farming. They just post a lot.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for independently confirming I actually seem human, I had my own doubts about it at times too so helps a lot :)
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.
5 hours ago [-]
dismalaf 3 hours ago [-]
They do have products you can buy, download and use... And plenty of people on YouTube have made videos reviewing or showing how to use their products.
"The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves.
If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.
kemayo 2 hours ago [-]
Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?"
The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.
I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
minraws 1 hours ago [-]
Just to be clear Brainfuck was built popularized and has been part of the nerd programming zeitgeist for longer than JangaFX has been around as a company and before the internet culture was less noteworthy.
The fact that you are pointing that language out specifically is reason enough.
Rules should be treated as such, strict guidelines that exist because the easier options failed and they will punish or hurt the innocent but that's the price we pay for living in a rules based system.
I think they could surely be more forgiving to programming domain but then everyone will ask for similar benefits.
If your best sources for a project are that you and people you work with use it that isn't very conveniencing and the fact that supposedly you have a lot of fans on twitter shouldn't make it any different.
strenholme 1 hours ago [-]
>Apparently [Brainfuck] is "notable" but Odin is not
Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers:
If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion.
I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it.
Rules are only “good” or “bad” in the context of the alternatives. What’s the alternative?
ozgrakkurt 5 hours ago [-]
But is trusting the CEO worse than trusting newspapers?
Argument of Casey was that it is not.
pwdisswordfishq 4 hours ago [-]
Trusting a rando who claims to be the CEO of a company nobody heard of is worse, yes.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
But anonymous editors on Wikipedia are trustworthy?
svat 2 hours ago [-]
No they are not, which is why Wikipedia doesn't rely on them. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be verifiable via a reliable secondary source (books, newspapers, etc from publishers with a reputation), so anything written by any editor can, if unverifiable, be removed by any other editor, anonymous or not.
baranul 54 minutes ago [-]
Agree. That's what some people seem to not understand or overlook.
DiogenesKynikos 5 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth. If you put a factual statement into an article, you're required to have a written source that Wikipedia can cite. "Someone who says they're the CEO said so on the talk page" doesn't cut it. If the CEO really wants to get this info into Wikipedia, they can go give an interview to a reputable newspaper, news website, magazine, etc., and then Wikipedia can cite that.
Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
Anonymous editors are truthful?
mopsi 2 hours ago [-]
> Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth.
That is, things that a tiny clique of topic campers decides to be verifiable and truthful, are verifiable and truthful on Wikipedia. Once a decision has been made, it's close to impossible to overturn it, no matter how poorly it was justified, because that would be "disruptive".
Layers and layers of policies and guidelines are there only to obscure the fact that Wikipedia reflects what only a very small circle of chronically online weirdos want it to reflect, even if their position is utterly indefensible.
In this case, Wikipedia's policy is reasonable. I tried looking for any articles in reputable sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any. Not one article in any tech magazine.
amiga386 7 hours ago [-]
I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.
I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.
Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.
> If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
amiga386 5 hours ago [-]
So Odin is a proprietary language used by a startup company that makes graphical effect tools, one of which is popular with vfx artists? I can see why Wikipedia's washing its hands of it.
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable"
Notability is not transitive. If you make a notable thing using a non-notable thing, it doesn't make the non-notable thing notable unless somehow the notable thing sparks a wave of public interest and thus reporting on the non-notable thing.
Also EmberGen doesn't seem terribly notable either.
How many SIGGRAPH papers go in-depth into EmberGen? As far as I can tell: zero. A Google Scholar search shows a single paper where EmberGen is not just a passing mention, and it's in a journal with low reach: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22e... -- also somewhat damning in its conclusion that EmberGen is faster than Blender, but if you need "precise artistic control", keep using Blender.
Has EmberGen won the Academy Scientific and Technical award, like, say, Houdini, Renderman, After Effects or Dragonframe? No it hasn't.
Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on Houdini's HScript.
strenholme 3 hours ago [-]
>Odin is a proprietary language
What do you mean by “proprietary language”? To me “proprietary” means closed source, where one can only download binaries, not source code. “proprietary” can also have source code available, but with a license which is not open-source.
Odin, however, is an open-source language with an open-source license:
I knew nothing about this language, despite being a programmer, until today. My takeaway from TFA was this language's claim to relevance is the fact that it's used to produce a product, and the CEO of the company producing the product was trying to vouch for it.
Having looked more, this is not right. It seems more like one person who wanted to make video games developed a programming language instead, and now makes their living developing this programming language. And has built up some community of users, and one of those users is a small company making VFX software which has some usage but it's not making headlines anywhere. But this is so significant to the language author that they have a huge section of the front page of their own language's website mentioning this commercial software, even though they're... not?... affiliated with the company? Bigging up the reflected glory.
And in the years of this programming language existing, and supposedly being being general purpose... there have been zero papers about it in the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems or The Computer Journal, nor computer interest publications like Ars Technica or Linux Journal, and it hasn't been covered at SIGGRAPH or the Game Developers Conference. Why not?
If the language wants a Wikipedia page, the way forward is to get notable coverage from reliable sources. You and your friends who hang out on Discord and blog or vlog/livestream aren't reliable sources, even if you have a million friends.
There aren't specialised notability guidelines for programming languages, but there are for software, which a programming language definitely is. Even if no academics or professional journalists have written about it, there are other ways to establish its notability:
- have schools and universities used it to teach programming? There are hundreds, possibly thousands of languages that clear that bar
- have books or manuals been written about it? From what I can see, there is exactly one book about it
This language could clear the notability bar, but it just currently doesn't. The language's author positing a conspiracy of Wikipedia moderators keeping it out is unhelpful. I wouldn't include it in Wikipedia with its current sources, and I've literally never heard of it until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
strenholme 60 minutes ago [-]
I agree with you about the notability aspects, but using the word “proprietary” has a very specific meaning and Odin may be many things, but it’s not “proprietary”—it’s open source. When I saw you use the word “proprietary”, I was initially under the impression that Odin’s source code wasn’t even available, and one could only download .exe files and binary packages of Odin.
cygx 6 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, the Wikipedia model is that anyone may contribute, but the information has to be collected from sources that conform to certain formal criteria. There are no such sources for Odin.
minraws 1 hours ago [-]
If building products were enough, I know a whole lots of stuff I built with friends that used in several trillion dollar companies, likely generating a small part of considerable revenue we aren't running around trying to get it on Wikipedia pages...
I don't see the point about why making a closed tool open source suddenly give it enough notoriety to put it on Wikipedia.
I say that as someone who has used Odin, I do decently like the language but it's just moot to try to fight over this randomly.
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
Please RTFA and address the rebukes to this very point that are presented herein... -.- "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable, but how to establish this fact is the problem; a tweet by the CEO is not enough to establish this, secondary reporting by a reliable and archived source would.
kemayo 1 hours ago [-]
> "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable
I'm not even sure that would count, really. A world-class product that gets a lot of coverage is notable, for sure, but that wouldn't be enough to make some implementation detail of that product notable unless the sources really leaned on it.
notarobot123 7 hours ago [-]
There is a fair question here (though presented with questionable integrity) about what notability means in programming languages. Especially for more recent and perhaps not widely used programming languages.
I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).
Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.
On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.
myko 6 hours ago [-]
Odin isn't exactly obscure to be fair
pmarreck 4 hours ago [-]
I've heard of Odin for years now. Maybe because I like knowing about new/nascent languages. For example, have you heard of roc-lang? You've likely heard of Zig.
It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.
Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug
cygx 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts?
It is an encyclopedia of topics that meet its standards of notability (ie there exists "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"[1]).
Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.
And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
stock_toaster 12 hours ago [-]
> And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it". Consider AI spam, or a company (or government!) paying, or forcing!, people to write articles with whatever focus/leaning/slant they desire. It seems like a hard problem!
Maybe people forget how things were before wikipedia existed? Like many things run primarily by volunteers, it is messy and imperfect. It's arguably still pretty great, and I'm glad it is around.
lambdaone 4 hours ago [-]
The deletion discussion also takes time and consensus, and even then isn't irreversible; you can move the text to draftspace, [1] and try again when you do have proof of notability. Even if the article is deleted before you can respond you can always get a deletion review [0] get your article text back via temporary undeletion and move that to draftspace.
Right. I had an article I spent a bunch of time on last year that didn't pass muster for notability (first time I've had this happen) and shoved into draftspace where I got to edit it and retry it (unsuccessfully) a couple of times.
It was an article that really just slipped between the cracks of the rules, probably like the Odin one. All I did was take a breather for a few weeks, come back, edit it judiciously down to its core and resubmit it. It passed.
If Odin is important enough then one day there will be enough relevant citations to make it notable and it will be approved. Take a breather and come back.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Actually, I see the article has already been moved to draftspace, so nothing has been lost, except visibility, for which you will have to establish notability; you have six months to work on this before it gets deleted, and you can always go back for as many tries as you like.
Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it".
No, and I'm not arguing for that. Just pointing out that that insidious nature makes contributing to Wikipedia a questionable activity for (a few|some|many|???) people.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for having NO standards at all for what's included, but I think there's room to rethink the nature of some of those standards.
pphysch 11 hours ago [-]
The fact is GingerBill or someone else could have kept the article up with enough money spent on the right PR firm that knows how to turn the Wikipedia knobs.
hatefulheart 11 hours ago [-]
This is also why the conclusion of the article is extremely bizarre. I’m not keeping my eyes peeled for more articles from this individual.
meheleventyone 8 hours ago [-]
Have you ever considered that the high cost of contribution and low cost of moderation is why Wikipedia is successful?
Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.
Morromist 12 hours ago [-]
"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"
Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.
zerobees 12 hours ago [-]
> "It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"
Very few people do, which actually makes it worse: of course the spammers and the hustlers are still motivated, so the needle moves more firmly into the territory of "most newcomer contributions are made in bad faith". Editors and admins feel increasingly under siege, so they respond more aggressively to everything.
It's basically the same problem as with real-world policing: because the cops overwhelmingly have deal with "problem" cases (you call them about burglars or drug dealers, not to tell them you baked some cookies), they develop a skewed perception of the average citizen and... well.
twister2920 3 hours ago [-]
Cops actually spend the vast majority of their time policing traffic violations and responding to non-emergency calls. Not in GTA-style shootouts.
lambdaone 4 hours ago [-]
"They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't" is exactly the point of the notability policy in the first place.
Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
Because, in 2026, hard drives are really small and can't hold much information, that we need to limit the world's freely and globally available editable encyclopedia, too what a select group of individuals consider noteworthy. No possible editorial bias there!
Hard drives can hold lots of data these days, and text compresses rather well.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
You can write about whatever you like and put it on the web, just not in Wikipedia for which, as has been said exhaustively above, there are clearly laid out admissions criteria, not just the whims of a "select group". You are entirely free to contribute to articles-for-deletion process yourself.
Wikipedia does not exist to be a soapbox, self-publishing host or advertising medium, and having a Wikipedia article is not a human right.
ninjascotsman 3 hours ago [-]
It is filled with crap for example London Bus routes
lambdaone 20 minutes ago [-]
Even the bus route articles seem to have drawn sufficient reliable-sources attention to merit them being kept. The policy is clear and definitive.
NordStreamYacht 12 hours ago [-]
They even roll back corrections to grammar. Power tripping overrides common sense.
shevy-java 12 hours ago [-]
This could be automatic. I noticed this myself because I corrected
both typos in english and german wikipedia; sometimes they are
reverted, sometimes not. There seems no logic in it, so I assumed
that in some cases this must have been automatic wiki bots
reverting something.
NordStreamYacht 11 hours ago [-]
This was like 10 years ago. Long before the real invasion of the bots. I don't even remember the username or password of my account any more.
Nnnes 8 hours ago [-]
The main anti-vandalism bot ClueBot was created in 2007, and its successor ClueBot NG in 2010. They certainly have false positives from time to time, but that doesn't mean they aren't the most useful bots on the website.
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
Anti-vandalism bots have been used for much longer than 10 years lol
questiona 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
halperter 10 hours ago [-]
Did you create an account _just_ so you could comment? lol.
Anyways, footnotes seem to work or are in-text. Links work as well so IDK the problem?
Then you talk about the claim of notability? Wikipedia's terms for notability are different than just a lot of people using the product. It's not the best, and should be reworked, but you're confusing wiki policies for general terms.
Then, we summarize that the article, author, and wikipedia are trash. Definitely one of the non-sequiturs of all time, lol. You don't even have an issue that the article is deleted, showing that you have no knowledge or at the very least don't care about adding substance to the discussion.
To summarize:
Please articulate your thoughts in a understandable, neutral manner that adds to the discourse.
killpedoslikeu 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
halperter 8 hours ago [-]
>account created: 15 mins ago
Comments on: One singular post
>Calls people pedophiles(?), calls for homicide(?)
0/8 bait, best regards.
Paracompact 9 hours ago [-]
Wretch, huh. I don't think we want you here.
killpedoslikeu 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
halperter 8 hours ago [-]
Definitely one of the alt accounts of all time. Regards.
yorwba 9 hours ago [-]
If you don't care about the notability filter and independent confirmation provided by secondary sources, you don't need Wikipedia. Just be your own primary source publishing whatever you want! You can even make it a wiki and let anyone else add to it too!
I guess the reason people aren't content with that approach and still want a Wikipedia article is because Wikipedia has much higher visibility. Great for SEO! Except if you can't get reputable third parties to publish about you, maybe you're not important enough to deserve that visibility.
baranul 8 hours ago [-]
That sounds like EverybodyWiki[1]. By the way, a number of programming languages have pages. Odin, Vlang, Zig, C3, etc... Surprised that fans have not put more lesser known or their favorites on it. Jai, for example.
The existence of EverybodyWiki demostrates the usefulness of Wikipedia's restrictions. Nothing is stopping you from either putting up your own website or writing on any of the free-access wikis; the reason people treat Wikipedia as a valuable resource is exactly because it won't publish anything indiscriminately. Having a Wikipedia article is not a right.
zarzavat 13 hours ago [-]
I was researching a public company the other day and I open their Wikipedia page: deleted.
I get it, probably it had been massaged by their PR department. But deleting the article punishes the readers by removing the very space for critical discussion of a topic with good SEO. Now if you want information on this company you will likely end up on their website, it seems like a reward to me.
LunicLynx 10 hours ago [-]
Not if the perception of Wikipedia is „truthful“ and „reliable“.
I’m saying neither, but in that case the article on Wikipedia puts weight behind the statements on the webpage.
I do see your argument: „But it would be adjusted to reflect the truth about it“. Honestly I don’t know enough about Wikipedia to agree or deny it. But given the amount of articles on it, i would lean in the direction that the motivation of a single few would win over the curators.
Which means applying a vector that cannot be influenced by those few.
zarzavat 9 hours ago [-]
They can just strip out any problematic content and protect it. At least leave the lede and the infobox and whatever else can be salvaged.
Deleting the article means you can't even see the edit history to see why it was deleted. Whatever good work was done by other editors is gone cannot be built on. It's extreme.
amiga386 4 hours ago [-]
> Deleting the article means you can't even see the edit history to see why it was deleted.
You can see why it was deleted without that. Picking an example deleted article; the very first line, in a red box, is the deletion log entry.
Wikipedia still has the full edit history of deleted articles, they can be restored upon request. The "hard work lost" argument is moot.
It's more important to speedily remove spam; keeping non-notable articles available is a huge win for spammers who put them there, every minute of endorsement by Wikipedia by continuing to exist there is a blessing. Wikipedia should keep the lede and infobox of the "EWKRHEKWJ.COM VIAGRA SALES COMPANY" article about how EWKRHEKWJ.COM sells the very finest viagra and cialis at the lowest prices, and their address is https://EWKRHEKWJ.COM ... because think of the hard work they must've put in to the article? Just leave that up and protect it? No thanks!
shevy-java 12 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I also noticed this myself.
I understand that Wikipedia does not want corporate propaganda or other
forms of propaganda, but whether a company exists or not at the time is
an objective yes/no answer. It is probably more work to correct propaganda
though, so articles are deleted. Would be better to simplify an article
down to the bare bone instead, though, so I agree with you here.
amiga386 7 hours ago [-]
That a company exists at all can be verified in business registries (e.g. Companies House in the UK). But clearly having a wikipedia page at all is a big positive signal for a company, it means that they are "known", the GP admitted they were searching to get that kind of understanding. So you can see why a company would want a wikipedia article, even if all it said was "Blahblahco is a enterprise software company headquartered in Bumfuck Nowhere, Alabama" and nothing else.
Hence why, to even be in wikipedia, the company has to be notable, otherwise every LLC and partnership would want to boost their reputation (while ruining wikipedia's): the barrier to entry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...
7bees 12 hours ago [-]
> once whatever discussion happens
Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.
Barrin92 11 hours ago [-]
>an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time
this isn't a meaningful criticism. An encyclopedia is a reference for established and public knowledge. It's by definition archaic, not an archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the article's criterion for the relevance of Odin.
An encyclopedia shouldn't prioritize article creation, it should be restrictive about what it adds and make sure the content is long term relevant, accurate and sourced. If anything Wikipedia has already been way too lax with what it lets stand on the site. They should honestly do a big cleaning and remove more articles that barely cite any meaningful source or seem like they're self-promotion, because there's already too much of it.
mindcrime 9 hours ago [-]
See, to me, you're just leaning into the outdated and archaic aspect of this. Sure, that's the way encyclopedia's have been for a long time. But none of that means that they need to continue to work the same way. Technologies change, times change, standards change.
And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).
mberning 13 hours ago [-]
This happened to me back in college. I authored a couple pages for some bands that I was in to, probably spent weeks pulling together history, lineup, albums, eps, etc. only to have them deleted unceremoniously with no recourse. That was my first and last attempt to contribute to wikipedia.
Dfol 11 hours ago [-]
Same, I understand the editors/admins can't be experts on every topic but just because THEY don't think something is notable doesn't mean most people don't either.
bawolff 10 hours ago [-]
In general, it should be clear from the article if the subject is notable. Admins don't have to be an expert, they just have to read the article.
Notable is not the same as popular.
mberning 3 hours ago [-]
Notability is arguably even more subjective than popularity.
CM30 4 hours ago [-]
I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic.
For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.
And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.
The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.
Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.
However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.
Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
ajross 3 hours ago [-]
> The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.
But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.
And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.
We trust people first, up and down the scale.
CM30 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like it's more than a handful of areas, though I'll grant there are plenty where academia or mainstream media outlets are the most reliable/trusted source. If you're talking about astrophysics, the history of the eastern Roman empire or the US' government foreign policy, the Wikipedia setup will work perfectly.
On the other hand, if you're talking about Star Trek, the MCU, Taylor Swift or the Legend of Zelda series, the most reliable source is probably not going to be either an academic journal or the New York Times. Many of my videos and articles are about games in the latter series, and the reliable sources for that would probably be something like speedrunners, dataminers, etc. For most of those things, the reliable source would either be the artist or company that owns the rights, or some fansite/video creator that's been documenting them for the last three decades.
Plus, a lot of the time the sources Wikipedia accepts are just laundering the same info anyway. It would be very, very easy to get misleading or incorrect information about the next Pokemon game to go viral, just by sending a few publications a link to a random blog and letting them take it at face value. In a depressing number of fields, fact checking and research is minimal even from name brand publications, and some guy's post on Reddit can get treated like gospel.
ajross 21 minutes ago [-]
> if you're talking about Star Trek, the MCU, Taylor Swift or the Legend of Zelda series, the most reliable source is probably not going to be either an academic journal or the New York Times.
You lost me here. I mean, yes, there's serious fan community interaction around those subject which is unauthenticated and anonymous. But that's interaction and not research or journalism. You might cite the existence of a favorite lore or fan theory in a wikipedia article, but you don't take the fan stuff as a source for the original material!
To take your specific example: Swift is literally getting married today, I gather. Why do I gather it? Because trusted human beings in my information space (Twitter feed, news articles, etc...) are telling me! Would I trust an anonymous fan source telling me someone got married? Almost certainly not.
dibujaron 17 hours ago [-]
This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
recursivecaveat 17 hours ago [-]
I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.
woodruffw 16 hours ago [-]
This is an argument for deleting those non-notable articles as well, not retaining other non-notable articles.
nvme0n1p1 17 hours ago [-]
SISC is there because it's not notable, so the busybodies haven't even noticed the page exists. Odin, however, is notable, and that put it on their radar as a target for attacking its notability.
stymaar 9 hours ago [-]
And here's the persecution LARPing the article talks about.
HappyPanacea 4 hours ago [-]
So why is that article not deleted yet?
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.
chris_wot 11 hours ago [-]
Not more obscure than Brainfuck.
traes 10 hours ago [-]
What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.
akritid 9 hours ago [-]
And it’s also a reinvention of Corrado Bohm’s P’’ which is even more seminal
chris_wot 10 hours ago [-]
Could you use it in production?
traes 10 hours ago [-]
From Cambridge dictionary:
obscure (adjective)
not known to many people:
- an obscure island in the Pacific
- an obscure 12th-century mystic
Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.
chris_wot 10 hours ago [-]
If you quote the dictionary to win an argument, quote it in full. There are two definitions of obscure in the Cambridge dictionary. The other is:
obscure (adjective)
not clear and difficult to understand or see:
- Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.
- His answers were obscure and confusing.
- "the syntax itself is obscure"
halperter 10 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure caveat intended for the former definition.
baranul 10 hours ago [-]
You never hearing about Odin, is an example of why its article was rejected by Wikipedia, because they failed at providing reputable references. The languages that you likely know of, often are corporate backed, with large marketing budgets and backdoor deals to help saturate traditional and social media.
Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.
klibertp 4 hours ago [-]
> I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.
The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).
In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.
> maybe I just happened to miss it?
You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.
andai 17 hours ago [-]
The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)
jibal 16 hours ago [-]
The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai.
This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.
wtetzner 16 hours ago [-]
> The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.
The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
dismalaf 15 hours ago [-]
Is C++ a game oriented language because most game engines and games are written in it?
andai 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah oriented might be the wrong word here. "Surprisngly well suited for the job" is more like it. It was very ergonomic. In fact, I ended up translating my Odin game to several other languages and the experience was quite painful. (That's one way to measure the quality of a language! How much it hurts to port code out of it.)
jibal 9 hours ago [-]
Ginger Bill directly addresses this erroneous argument in TFA:
> Many people think Odin is "just for games" at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible.
> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
andai 15 hours ago [-]
I clearly remember Jonathan Blow talking about how Jai's syntax was influenced by his conversations with Bill. But it was 10+ years ago, so I might have gotten it mixed up.
I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.
jibal 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, you have it mixed up ... Jai development started 2 years before Odin. And the claim was
I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.
3836293648 15 hours ago [-]
I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.
loeg 16 hours ago [-]
It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.
dismalaf 17 hours ago [-]
It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server.
If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.
krautsauer 16 hours ago [-]
It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?
firesteelrain 13 hours ago [-]
I have only heard about it because of HN.
16 hours ago [-]
steveklabnik 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.
bobbytheblkbear 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jibal 16 hours ago [-]
Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.
woodruffw 16 hours ago [-]
I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V).
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
FullGarden_S 6 hours ago [-]
You make it sound like you're confusing popularity with notability.
Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations.
A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.
The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
Notability is a qualified state on Wikipedia, as both TFA and Wikipedia itself document.
One of the qualifications is having third-party sources document the subject, where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area). A company’s statement that it uses a programming language might be factual, but that doesn’t necessarily make it notable.
(To be clear: I was only vaguely aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)
stymaar 9 hours ago [-]
This exactly!
There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.
jibal 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
woodruffw 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you, that’s very persuasive.
jibal 11 hours ago [-]
What should be persuasive is a simple logical inference from the statements made to my conclusion.
From the article:
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development".
Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects.
> Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.
This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake.
As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA:
> Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists.
By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
Barrin92 11 hours ago [-]
No it's an indication that notoriety in Discord servers isn't a basis for relevance in an encyclopedia. Which is a good choice. A streamer mentioned a language? Wikipedia isn't Twitter.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
skotobaza 10 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?
Barrin92 10 hours ago [-]
what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias rely on secondary and not primary sources because they must be authoritative. The CEO of Kelloggs doesn't get to write the wikipedia article for kelloggs even if millions of people eat his cornflakes.
If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.
skotobaza 10 hours ago [-]
But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still...
The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).
stymaar 9 hours ago [-]
> But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it?
Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”. As a result, there's plenty of things that are both true and well known to plenty of people that aren't on Wikipedia, but that's fine, and encyclopedia doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful.
But on the flip side, if they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
Note the bad faith of your correspondent:
> As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
...
> what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia.
baranul 10 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Because a person hangs out in certain social media circles or bubbles, doesn't mean that information from those places are general public knowledge or meets the standards that Wikipedia asks for.
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
Of course it's not general public knowledge ... that's why we put information in encyclopedias and other sources of information. People run across a mention of Odin and want to know about it.
jibal 11 hours ago [-]
I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages, not "the attention of social media" -- that's a silly shallow bad faith reduction. And I see that elsewhere you have written "a archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the articles criterion for the relevance of Odin" -- it doesn't seem that way to anyone who is remotely intellectually honest ... clearly it is ideology about the scope of Wikipedia articles that is work here totally independently of any knowledge of or details about Odin.
There is also virtually no attention in these comments to the content of TFA, e.g.,
> the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was deleted -- you won. People are still entitled to think that it was a mistake and to say why.
bawolff 10 hours ago [-]
> I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages
Are you though? Like this seems like hobby project that hasn't really generated much discussion or interest in the broader programming language community, and practically speaking doesn't seem to have seen much use as a systems programming language (a single vfx package isn't really that impressive).
People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest, and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
> Are you though?
Yes ... read the other comments and TFA that you have completely ignored. And I wouldn't have said that I was talking about that if I weren't talking about that.
> People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest
Nonsense.
> and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Nonsense. (These statements individually and together are literally incoherent.)
The bad faith here is tiresome. Virtually no one has even read TFA, which is actually a defense of Wikipedia and devolves into an attack on Ginger Bill for following right wingers on Twitter. (And I'm no fan of those people, to say the least, but they have nothing to do with the notability of Odin.)
andrybak 17 hours ago [-]
> Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
What kind of happens is that there are some people who invest their lives in Wikipedia, their opinions is what ends up mattering.
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
baranul 39 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like you are describing Grokipedia (Grok), where the general public has rejected it as a replacement for Wikipedia. Way too much hallucinating, tainted algorithms reflecting political preferences, gossip, and unverified or disreputable sources.
lerno 38 minutes ago [-]
No, Grokipedia is just a crapfest. I'm talking about actually asking ChatGPT
lerno 39 minutes ago [-]
And as an example of bias: I personally witnessed a wikipedia editors adding their own interpretation of a certain written article. This interpretation was very politically biased and not justified by the text, but these were influential wikipedia editors so that it stayed in. I then asked the author of the article on Twitter if this interpretation was correct. I was unambiguously told NO. This information (including the public twitter conversation), was rejected by the wikipedia editors because it was first hand accounts.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
econ 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
_def 9 hours ago [-]
Are you seriously complaining that you are not getting taken seriously anymore after creating a track record of acting in bad faith?
You literally can't create constructive online communities if you don't do that.
Alpha3031 12 hours ago [-]
> I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way.
> I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?
leecommamichael 10 hours ago [-]
>There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
>You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information.
See who they follow on Twitter.
This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill.
My politics are left-leaning and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya)
If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right.
Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.
willdr 8 hours ago [-]
Encyclopedias are not designed to report on pop culture. The entire nature of an encyclopedia is to be downstream of good secondary sources, ideally academic, and summarise what those good secondary sources have said about specific topics.
Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?
lerno 1 hours ago [-]
It's funny. Today people say that of Wikipedia, as if it was trustworthy. But it used to be common knowledge to just "don't trust anything on Wikipedia". Wikipedia was never like a regular encyclopedia, it just wanted to be one.
Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.
shash 45 minutes ago [-]
TBH, "Don't trust anything on Wikipedia" was always just stuck up posturing. Plenty of badly sourced, badly edited and biased articles in regular encyclopedias too, but because Wikipedia is contributed to by the unwashed masses, don't trust it.
"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.
Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.
lerno 28 minutes ago [-]
Early days of Wikipedia was the wild west. Surely you must agree to that.
rq1 7 hours ago [-]
Because it’s supposedly open?
cygx 6 hours ago [-]
When open online spaces gain popularity, the threat of devolving into a cesspool of bigotry and misinformation rears its head. Sadly, moderation isn't optional.
But how do you moderate? Do you establish your own ministry of truth? Only allow contributors with a university email address (shoutout to the arXiv)?
Wikipedia decided to externalize part of the vetting process by placing formal restrictions on the sources you're allowed to collect information from.
Sadly, there currently aren't any such sources for Odin.
de_nied 3 hours ago [-]
The author of this article seems quite politically driven like the mods on Wikipedia, and created it disingenuously. I feel it's an attempt to overwhelm the readers through massive amounts of text so that they are too tired to see what's being said at the beginning and end are completely unrelated.
joenot443 1 hours ago [-]
I got the same impression. It was pretty disappointing to realize they had an axe to grind completely unrelated to Odin or Wikipedia.
Imustaskforhelp 7 hours ago [-]
+1 I remember joining the discord server and I think that Bill even responded to me and the community was helpful!
bawolff 16 hours ago [-]
> If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud
Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.
I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
forrestthewoods 13 hours ago [-]
> one of
Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.
But other than that?
Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!
dismalaf 16 hours ago [-]
Zig is more popular. Name a second modern "C competitor" language that's more popular?
calvinmorrison 16 hours ago [-]
golang, rust, c++... etc?
dismalaf 16 hours ago [-]
The whole "C competitor" category is about minimalism so no one puts Rust or C++ in that category. Also Golang has a GC so most wouldn't even call it a systems language at all...
bawolff 15 hours ago [-]
Everyone considers rust a c competitor. Its literally replacing c in the linux kernel.
uecker 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder whether the "replacing c in the linux kernel" is not more wishful thinking by Rust enthusiasts. As of know it has less than 1% and less than bash.
happosai 10 hours ago [-]
Linux kernel project stuck at C89 and refused move to c++ or even a C standard upgrade for decades. Move to C11 (a 15 year old standard) was done just a few years ago.
The fact that rust has been even accepted into the kernel is a resounding endorsement.
uecker 9 hours ago [-]
It was a resounding endorsement in 2020, but the proof is in the pudding. So far I am not impressed. It is also not something I think is terribly important. Even if they managed to improve memory safety in the kernel using Rust (but I assume improvements in C tooling will have a much bigger impact), the reality is that for the overall Linux community (but maybe not Google and co.) others things would be far more important (such as a proper responsible disclosure process, the recent failures were pretty bad).
tialaramex 9 hours ago [-]
The C ISO document only ships about once or twice per decade, so being a "15 year old standard" means there are in fact only two newer standards C17 and C23.
C17 is largely bugfixes. An "upgrade" to C17 probably wouldn't even change most of the whole files in Linux, let alone most of the lines of code, it's just not relevant. C23 is a larger change but it's also very young, much younger for example than the Rust for Linux project.
raphlinus 10 hours ago [-]
Greg Kroah-Hartman has given a talk entitled "Untrusted data in Linux — How Rust is going to save us"[1] which I think is fairly optimistic about the idea that Rust will have an increasingly large role in the kernel. The total number of lines of code is small today but that will change.
NetBSD puts Lua in kernel space, is it a C competitor?
Rust is an obvious competitor to C++, both are similarly featured.
When people talk about "modern C competitors" they're almost always talking about more minimalist languages like Zig, Odin, C3, Jai, Hare, etc...
calvinmorrison 15 hours ago [-]
ok maybe you are zoomed to far in.
Imustaskforhelp 7 hours ago [-]
can only speak from my personal experience, I have made a scratchpad app within Odin and it was the first language that I picked for because I wanted C-esque speed and gui libraries being built in and I even used LLM's to write the whole thing to see LLM's capabilities.
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
bawolff 2 minutes ago [-]
I don't think anyone doubts that odin is a real programming language that you can make something in. The part that is doubtful is that it enjoys any level of popularity.
andai 17 hours ago [-]
If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind.
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.
wavemode 17 hours ago [-]
You've almost got it, except:
> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them
No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.
This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.
Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.
This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
aeontech 12 hours ago [-]
> The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work these articles may have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors (citation needed) - which to me confirmed my gut feeling that most new editors bounce off and give up on contribution in short order.
I contributed for a few years, but gave up eventually - it was exhausting to spend time collating sources, collecting information, editing, rewriting, and then having someone come along and propose discarding your work with very little investment from their side.
Stackoverflow has gone through similar calcification - it's nearly impossible to contribute now, or build reputation as a new user, as posts get closed as duplicates or not-relevant.
andai 15 hours ago [-]
>Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.
dcrazy 13 hours ago [-]
This is a poor attempt to imply an equivalence between deletionism and non-impartiality (influence campaigns and reputation managers).
altmanaltman 14 hours ago [-]
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk
flexagoon 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jasonlotito 13 hours ago [-]
> Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
> Maybe i am missing something
You are.
> idk
That says it all.
wavemode 13 hours ago [-]
The broad strokes of what Wikipedia considers notable has not changed significantly in the last 20 years.
What has mostly changed is that there are more editors now, and thus more eyes and also more serious discussion (rigor?) about such things.
chris_wot 11 hours ago [-]
Do you have proof there are more editors now? By an order of magnitude? Or don’t mean there are people who like to participate in Wikipedia drama and who don’t actively contribute to article creation?
altmanaltman 13 hours ago [-]
> More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
w10-1 17 hours ago [-]
In wikipedia-land, I read "primary source" as "motivated source", given their need to prune biased edits.
netbioserror 17 hours ago [-]
The fatal flaw here being that secondary sources and tertiary ad infinitum are all always motivated. It's inescapable.
Dfol 11 hours ago [-]
Yep, good point.
James_K 15 hours ago [-]
Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.
And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.
kibibu 17 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't think Malbolge, for example, warrants a Wikipedia page if Odin doesn't
fluoridation 16 hours ago [-]
Malbolge is basically a meme, and Wikipedia does have articles for memes. Speaking for myself, I have heard about Malbolge, and not about Odin.
JBits 16 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it is because Malbolge is notable within the category of esolangs.
lifthrasiir 12 hours ago [-]
As an actual esolang enthusiast (and a past Wikipedia administrator two decades ago), I can say that Malbolge is only notable because it remained unsolved for the extended period only due to the lack of serious attempts. It doesn't even pass the meme criteria IMO.
dickiedyce 11 hours ago [-]
Although, didn’t it appear in a popular culture reference? I seem to remember an episode of “elementary“ that mentioned it.
lifthrasiir 11 hours ago [-]
Oh, sure, the "In Popular Culture" section is a prerequisite for every Wikipedia article. ;-)
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
HappyPanacea 4 hours ago [-]
A form of Citogenesis although here it is about notability instead (notabilitogensesis is mouthful unfortunately)
brendoelfrendo 16 hours ago [-]
Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.
skotobaza 10 hours ago [-]
The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter?
And then I read this:
> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view
> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
> 2. See who they follow on Twitter
What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia?
Is this a normal world view?
de_nied 3 hours ago [-]
Well we now know the author's true intentions. It was never about any real criticism, and simply an attack on a person they politically dislike.
vor_ 9 hours ago [-]
If you read the whole article, you'll understand the context and how its relates to Wikipedia. The fact GingerBill accuses Wikipedia of having a political bias against Odin when (spoilers) it was actually a "constitutional conservative" who triggered the deletion is amusing.
skotobaza 8 hours ago [-]
I don't see anyone (especially GingerBill) stating that article about Odin was deleted because of "political bias". The only thing I see is a general statement about Wikipedia being an "ideological playground". But I don't see that anyone thinks that people who removed the article were of the opposite views. The author makes the connection because of some Twitter accounts that GingerBill follows (and because of what he allegedly said in some videos), but I don't think it's a good proof, especially by the author's own standards.
atiedebee 7 hours ago [-]
Right before the statement in Wikipedia being an ideological playground:
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language and don't want it on Wikipedia as any form of "advertisement".
It doesn't directly say "political bias", but it certainly is implied (not as in national politics, more like ideological)
arijun 55 minutes ago [-]
> the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Seems to be pretty explicit that they don't like the language, not the creator or his political views. I don't like Java, the few times I was forced to use it I hated it, but I don't even know who the creators are.
Like someone else said, for someone to go through such lengths to claim many of their points, it's a pretty tenuous connection to hang half your article on.
dismalaf 2 hours ago [-]
I've engaged with GingerBill enough on X and the Discord server and I have no idea what his political stances are; he literally never talks politics in public (he's also English and not American). So if he says there's a political bias he's definitely not talking about politics in the general sense, but the specific context of programming languages.
ternaryoperator 13 hours ago [-]
When Wikipedia first came out, there was a big debate about articles on people: should it be inclusive (anybody with minor accomplishments gets in) or should there be some threshold to be met? Ultimately, it was decided that if the perception was that the person involved was to become notable principally by having a WP page, then they did not qualify. WP did not want to be used as a means of getting attention/traction/credibility. I like that criterion and I think it’s reasonable to feel that Odin does not meet it…yet.
pwdisswordfishq 9 hours ago [-]
> Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.
Yeah, that reference section (odin-lang.org, jangafx.com, learnodin.org, c3-lang.org, odinbook.com, gingerbill.org) is probably not up to Wikipedia's standards...
square_usual 15 hours ago [-]
I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
rurban 41 minutes ago [-]
Nim was also constantly threatened to be deleted. Then still named nimrod. This is when amateurs decide on professionals. I stopped contributing long time ago, though I was in the first 10
staplung 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
zig: 71,565
rust: 304,405
golang: 1,246,300
malbogle: 9
fwipsy 15 hours ago [-]
The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.
greyface- 15 hours ago [-]
> The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete
The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate.
fwiw, I think a lot of people just clone odin and build it via `./build_odin.sh release` on MacOS (at least, I do). The compiler builds in ~20s
lambdaone 4 hours ago [-]
The sad (or wonderful) fact is that anyone can write a new programming language now; I could for example use Claude create a wrapper on top of an existing languge (for example, a Python-like syntax wrapper for Scheme) in a few hours and start marketing it as a new language. So how can Wikipedia tell toy languages from real ones with actual useful adoption?
It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.
Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.
There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?
tialaramex 8 hours ago [-]
Bill is that exact kind of person who is desperate to tell you that they don't care the mean girls are saying something nasty about them and, lest you mistake this for them actually not caring, will then spend an hour detailing all these accusations they don't care about and why exactly they're all wrong.
Here on the orange site, where he can't edit what he wrote hours after finding out that he was wrong, there are a few interactions between me and Bill where I know a topic, Bill blusters but is clueless and so he makes a bit of a fool of himself.
On Reddit, where Bill can go back and "edit" embarrassing mistakes the dynamic is very weird, with it appearing (if you go look now) that I keep restating things Bill has explicitly said he knows. Of course if you saw it when it happened it's the same as on HN, I stick to areas of expertise, Bill offers pronouncements on topics he doesn't understand, he looks like an idiot. But the power of the edit button allows Bill to rewrite history so that he knew all that with only the small price that now the conversation looks weird (and there's a tiny asterisk on his comments in some Reddit UIs to hint that they're edited)
Now, I don't like what I call "Auteur languages". Programming Languages where a single individual or maybe a couple of people have absolute control. So Odin was never going to be a language I like, same for Jai, Hare, Cpp2† and indeed more relevantly Zig. In that sense it doesn't matter whether I like Odin, but it does seem like feedback on "Ginger" Bill Hall.
† I'm sure Herb Sutter would tell you that his "new syntax" for C++ would be overseen by the same committee as the current language. The language as it exists today, largely abandoned, does not have such oversight.
tulio_ribeiro 44 minutes ago [-]
This isn’t the first Wikipedia controversy. And I’m happy to learn that Jimmy Wales is actually the bad guy; this isn’t a case of Wikipedia getting out of his control.
That makes it especially unfortunate that Grokipedia, which seemed like the strongest alternative to Wikipedia, is no longer being updated.
I despise the "what's true is true" attitude exhibited by Casey and Bill in these tweets. I find it to be an instant flag of unreliability. The smartest human alive is still a human. We have a stake in every conversation, we bring our baggage and our allegiances.
So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.
It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Nothing here is about "truth" or "objectivity", it's about Wikipedia's subjective view of what counts as "notable" or not. Seems like a really strange confusion here, as you're giving some meta-perspective on the discussion while seeming to miss the entire point of the discussion you're trying to provide a new perspective to?
movpasd 4 hours ago [-]
You're talking about the material of the Twitter discussions where I'm more discussing the article itself, which is about the community and discourse surrounding it.
If you want my opinion on that, Odin seems pretty notable to me, and I would expect there to be a Wikipedia article for it, and I'd be all for engaging with the editors on that. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia moderators to be plugged into the world of programming languages the way I am, though. Like the article says, this seems like subject-specific notability guidelines could help. It's definitely true that the programming world is missing the kind of institutional material that works well for, say, science or news.
ChoosesBarbecue 8 hours ago [-]
Firstly, I think the visual design of this article (at least on a desktop display) was beautiful, and a delight to read.
Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.
20k 9 hours ago [-]
I'm glad someone's calling this out for what it is. These twitter influences are professional horseshit mongers that pretend to be acting in good faith, but flip what they're saying 180 degrees to fit whatever will drive maximum engagement in the moment. Its something that tends to slide by unless you stop and actually try to reconcile all the disparate things that someone has said, at which point you realise literally none of it makes any sense
Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't
PakistaniDenzel 9 hours ago [-]
Funny how GearsDatapacks (https://github.com/gearsdatapacks) votes to delete the Odin page because it's "non-notable" yet is a core member of the non-notable Gleam language which shockingly has a Wikipedia page
arijun 9 hours ago [-]
But the Gleam Wikipedia page is littered with references? Including to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey page, which has gleam very high on "want to learn" but doesn't have Odin at all...
baranul 8 hours ago [-]
If you look on the Gleam's article talk and GearsDatapacks userpage, it gives information on that person's conflict of interest. Wikipedia has various complex rules surrounding this, though this person is very clearly a core gleam team member, and should know better. Looks like competition elimination.
cygx 9 hours ago [-]
Well, Casey Muratori argued github stars should be considered a metric of notability, and the Gleam repository has almost twice the number (21.6k vs Odin's 11k)!
Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...
klibertp 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...
They both don't belong there, TBH. I'm a PL nerd and have been one for nearly 20 years. Wikipedia is the last place I would search for information about even the TIOBE Top 20 languages, let alone anything newer or more niche. The only reason new/niche languages have a Wikipedia page is for advertising - they all hope to attract new users and convey an impression of being mature enough for serious work. It's a failure of Wiki that some pages like that were not flagged and deleted quickly enough. Enthusiasts will keep creating those pages as long as there's a chance they'll fly under the radar long enough to make them hard to delete. If they put that effort into RosettaCode (also a wiki) pages, we'd be all the better for it.
Here's why Gleam belongs on libopedia and Odin does not:
>As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
>Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
Does Odin tell you to check your privileges? No? thought so.
OP tries very hard to pretend the person he's writing a hit piece on, on a blog/website that was entirely created for this singular purpose (no other posts in there), is the one and only that has political obsessions and surely nothing about libopedia is political!
In this day and age, if you make a niche thing and want your libopedia page, you need to work harder on proving you are a card carrying democrat.
PakistaniDenzel 31 minutes ago [-]
yep the group constantly going on about how "inclusive" they are are typically the least inclusive
chris_wot 9 hours ago [-]
Even more incredible that someone who represents an organisation is allowed to edit the English Wikipedia under that username! Anyone else would have their account banned.
But hey, don't expect consistency or fairness from the ones on the English Wikipedia.
willdr 17 hours ago [-]
Interesting article (I tend to agree with you re SNG in the programming field). But unfortunately I couldn't easily absorb the substance as your site needs some work on mobile:
- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
- footnotes appearing out of order
bbkane 4 hours ago [-]
I actually enjoyed the layout, even though I had to use landscape mode on my phone to comfortably read it. It's nice to see new formats
mwkaufma 1 hours ago [-]
Took a looooong time to get to their point (that ragebaiters don't actually care about neolangs _or_ wikimedia policy).
greenoracle9 8 hours ago [-]
The awkward part is that modern software communities often do not produce the kind of durable secondary sources Wikipedia wants.
armchairhacker 10 hours ago [-]
Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia.
Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.
If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).
* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
bawolff 10 hours ago [-]
Its a good reminder that all wikipedia software is GPL, and the article content is CC-BY-SA. Anyone who thinks they can do better has the right to fork.
Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.
ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago [-]
Hey, you can fork 100% of the content, and several sites already have; but can you also fork enough volunteer editors, sysops, bureaucrats? Can you fork enough DevOps and cloud architects? Can you fork the WikiMania events and the assets that have been collected & established by the Wikimedia Foundation?
I mean, some dudes way back in the day successfully forked Spanish-language Wikipedia because of some advertising disputes. Can anyone truly replicate success with a forked enwiki?
bawolff 1 hours ago [-]
Network effects are always hard, although i dont think you have to have all that from day 1.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can participate. Anyone can advocate for change, such as changing the rules around notability.
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
xeric 16 hours ago [-]
I looked and the cultural marxism tweet has zero likes, zero comments, and only 35 views. Although it has caused much consternation for you and the author. So it seems strange that you don't understand why people might be concerned about what Wikipedia has to say about things, and how it works, given its prominence.
cindyllm 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
amval 10 hours ago [-]
What a fantastic article. I could not care less about the actual topic, but in these times of literacy scarcity, it is refreshing to see someone actually being able to read through sub-text and present their views in a well-reasoned manner.
Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
leecommamichael 9 hours ago [-]
I think part of being well-reasoned is being honest, and they're certainly being honest. I don't agree with their means, though. Bill is a complex person, and you don't have to stalk him to learn about him. He interacts with newbies plenty in the Discord server. I find him to be pretty nice in those interactions.
47 minutes ago [-]
amval 9 hours ago [-]
I think the article is pretty fair at presenting GingerBill's legitimate grievances, Wikipedia shortcomings, acknowledging that GingerBill can be constructive and, at the same time, recognizing that the current interactions are coloured by his particular ideological grievances.
It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".
leecommamichael 8 hours ago [-]
That’s fair, I think I’m mostly referring to their assessment of how they could possibly come to evaluate his position as BDFL (which I realize is totally subjective) and I disliked that they didn’t bother trying to talk to him… which I’m not being super rational about, people in his position aren’t always accessible.
qjack 16 hours ago [-]
The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on.
Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.
Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
conartist6 16 hours ago [-]
I dunno I just find it silly because they're making such a Thing out of it that soon there's just gonna be a Wikipedia page on Odingate as it is rapidly becoming a notable public event of its own. Then that page will have to link to a page on Odin anyway
zerocrates 16 hours ago [-]
The hypothetical "Odingate" article in a reliable source would probably have to discuss Odin enough to also be a viable source for Odin itself; problem solved.
add-sub-mul-div 14 hours ago [-]
If the language is too irrelevant to be of interest then why would any bickering about it be notable? There must be thousands of topics people whine about for not making the notability threshold.
conartist6 5 hours ago [-]
Well Jimmy Wales is a kinda notable dude to be bickering directly about it with other internet-famous public figures.
Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).
Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word for it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!
krautsauer 16 hours ago [-]
Link will be red?
16 hours ago [-]
wmorgan 16 hours ago [-]
FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.
boca_honey 16 hours ago [-]
I know programming is what's most important to many in this community, but as an outsider I need to ask: literally WTF is Odin? I mean I know about Java and C++, etc. But Odin? That's what Wikipedia policies are for. It cannot include anything and everything about every single profession, subculture, or interest group.
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
bawolff 15 hours ago [-]
> An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
fwipsy 15 hours ago [-]
> Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur
Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
zdc1 1 hours ago [-]
This is silly. If you're language isn't getting enough coverage to get onto Wikipedia, stop complaining and get it some coverage. Ship features. Evangelise it. Get people using it.
Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).
strenholme 51 minutes ago [-]
I have read the entire blog entry while waiting for all of MaraDNS’s automated tests to pass so I could release MaraDNS 3.5.0038.
My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion.
That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that someone Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with.
I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.
LoveMortuus 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t get why they would ever delete knowledge… that’s like burning books…
sethaurus 2 hours ago [-]
Are you sincerely advocating that Wikipedia should never delete anything, regardless of notability or verifiability? Do you think that would make it better or worse?
Reubend 12 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, but I agree with the wiki editors in this case. Odin is obscure. The author of this blog post seems to think it's well known, but I don't think that's substantiated.
asibahi 9 hours ago [-]
I like this article. It puts to words something that has been in my mind for a while.
WhereIsTheTruth 5 hours ago [-]
Textbook example of using fame as leverage against a rule, while claiming indifference to the rule itself
diimdeep 12 hours ago [-]
Article has a few decent remarks, but ultimately it fails to deliver anthropologic, grounded, humane interpretation without narrow worldview and ideological biases of it's author.
James_K 15 hours ago [-]
I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.
bakugo 16 hours ago [-]
This article seems quite drawn out for what is essentially an ad hominem attack on the personal views of the creator of the language.
hoffs 12 hours ago [-]
I'd say it provides a lot of information about whole situation, including context on how wikipedia operates and history of behavior from the creator of the language.
Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
petesergeant 9 hours ago [-]
Underlying this whole drama, and indeed as much of the article as I was able to stomach, is that there is a large degree of politicking, personal taste, and arbitrariness in the enforcement of Wikipedia’s policies, while pretending that there isn’t. At least on Reddit the mods don’t pretend they’re not biased
JBits 16 hours ago [-]
It is disappointing to see that the v programming language has a Wikipedia article given it's history of being essentially fraudulent.
baranul 10 hours ago [-]
This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older.
Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.
Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.
While perhaps this is on me for not stating my position while repeating Bill's comment, I think you are unfairly assuming bad faith.
You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy.
I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
baranul 1 hours ago [-]
Nowhere, that I could find, was katamari's post about Wikipedia's rejection of Odin or the one by Ginger Bill (which katamari references), were either was saying that vlang was fraudulent (which is ridiculous disinformation).
Rather, the shooting of such strays appears to reflect old competitor propaganda pushed on certain social media sites (that traces back to Ginger Bill and other competitors in different ways) and a sentiment, often regurgitated by certain fanatics of his, where they appear to be upset by vlang's level of success.
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Even here, where this quote is taken directly from Ginger Bill's post, shows how wrong he and certain of his followers are about the issue. It is not about about Wikipedia mods not liking Odin or even about the articles of other languages. Wikipedia has certain rules and reference requirements for articles to survive an AfC or AfD "challenge" and Odin failed.
hmry 14 hours ago [-]
Being fraudulent doesn't make something less notable. It might even make something more notable, provided enough sources report on it.
loeg 16 hours ago [-]
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
bobbytheblkbear 16 hours ago [-]
I'll just say the obvious:
Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.
It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
bawolff 16 hours ago [-]
> edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
loeg 16 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that lying isn't considered poor behavior by Wikipedia or what? I don't believe that.
bawolff 15 hours ago [-]
Depends on how you define "lying".
Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked.
Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring.
In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
17 hours ago [-]
brador 10 hours ago [-]
The fact that any factual text article needs to be deleted from an encyclopaedia fills me with rage.
daneel_w 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting article until you reach the gooey, messy bottom where the author takes a sudden personal turn and decides to pick apart the "spineless" creator of the programming language - who is the article's actual subject - by wielding their own ideologically and morally superior perspectives as truths. Smug, ironic, personal and somewhat unpleasant.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
chris_wot 11 hours ago [-]
Given the people now running the English Wikipedia, this is hardly surprising. Most of these folks have no real interest in article creation, only drama and fiddling with things like categories.
Dfol 11 hours ago [-]
Agreed, plus they're weirdly political/politically biased in how a lot of topics are covered.
If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects
win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data.
Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it
it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.
womble2 6 hours ago [-]
Of what use is an encyclopedia with "trash quality"?
countWSS 5 hours ago [-]
Ok, suppose you have a "trash/low quality" article and
"this article has been deleted", the article with some info
will win over the audience as they search for it. Like "Worse is Better", the quality
will improve over time and the "deleted article" will stay at 0 recognition.
An average internet user will not complain about the Wikipedia
article, they just switch to Grokipedia and whatever AI-generated content it has,
since they now have it.
pyinstallwoes 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SepiaSapient 12 hours ago [-]
Linking to the equivalent of "@groq is this true??" should be mocked.
smitty1e 3 hours ago [-]
Your reply was as substantive as my original, but I'll upvote you anyway, because there is no point in being a jerk.
217 9 hours ago [-]
slop in its purest non ai form
shevy-java 12 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia can be strange sometimes, in particular the german variant.
Ignoring all other factors, IMO there should be an article about
Odin the programming language. Deleting an article about something
that exists, is incredibly stupid; not sure why Wikipedia resorts to
that. If Wikipdia deems Odin not noteworthy - and I don't really care
about Odin myself - then the article could be kept short. That would
still be better than deleting it.
Wikipedia started with the goal of a database of literally everything.
One could argue that Odin is not relevant because it may not be used
by anyone, but then this would need to be an objective argument based
on numbers and data, because many other programming languages are used
by few people yet are mentioned on Wikipedia. So, that seems to be a
stupid decision by those responsible on Wikipedia. CensorshipBros are
annoying in general - the english wikipedia is much more open than the
german wikipedia by the way.
Alpha3031 10 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia is very explicitly not a indiscriminate database of everything,[1] and dismissing anyone in the editing community who attempts curate it as CensorshipBros is the same type of twitter bullshitting called out by the blog post in the OP.
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?
bena 4 hours ago [-]
He’s not saying that’s why the article was deleted.
He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.
chaostheory 13 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the Wikipedia mods have many great, valid reasons for deleting articles. Unfortunately for the ignorant masses, this has bad optics, since it looks like it runs counter to their goal of "cataloging all human knowledge".
atiedebee 7 hours ago [-]
But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
I've found myself running into this sort of trap a lot. When I do something I think about the data that will be created and how to preserve it, and sometimes this prevents me from ever doing the thing, while the reality is that any data generated is worthless anyway.
For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!
16 hours ago [-]
Rochus 6 hours ago [-]
I find it strange that they deleted the article. The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. I think there is a deeper bureaucratic pattern behind it. In every once-useful organization, there comes a point where the rules stop being instruments and become relics: nobody asks whether they still serve the original purpose, because the bureaucracy now exists mainly to defend its own procedures. That is basically Parkinson territory, and also the classic drift into cargo cult administration.
The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.
That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.
17 hours ago [-]
SanjayMehta 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
add-sub-mul-div 13 hours ago [-]
Why would deleting a page on an obscure topic earn anyone clout? Did they see into the future to know the public tantrum would follow?
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
Ever heard of rage-baiting? Look it up. On Wikipedia.
SidewaysView 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
marseysneed 11 hours ago [-]
What do you think the world incel means?
SidewaysView 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
9 hours ago [-]
suddenlybananas 10 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't understand why this article upsets you so much you want the author beaten. Could you elaborate?
bugjoey 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rfleury 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andrepd 5 hours ago [-]
> The Wikipedia Mods view themselves as "journalists" and trying to do the "morally ideological" thing by only allowing certain posts on there
I don't know any of the people in this post, since I firmly believe that not having twitter, instagram, or tiktok is the #1 thing anyone can do to improve their mental well-being. From this sentence alone however, I can exactly establish what kind of person this is. The persecution complex, the "journalist" as an insult, it's all there.
> I know that as of now, GingerBill follows: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Libs of TikTok.
People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:
Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...
source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing
That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end.
Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
"Use reliable secondary sources" is a simple rule that limits the scope for possible conflict and chaos. For an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's very important.
Dubious "secondary sources" write hit pieces on individuals, which then get quoted by alleged "newspapers of record," which then get looped into Wikipedia.
https://citationintegrity.org
That's not Wikipedia's fault. It is a bit weird that people are insisting that Odin is such a big deal that it must have a Wikipedia page, but apparently no tech website of note has ever mentioned it.
I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.
But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?
Apparently that one is "notable" but Odin is not.
"The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves.
If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.
This is the Odin article as it existed when it was deleted by that AfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr...
The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.
I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
The fact that you are pointing that language out specifically is reason enough.
Rules should be treated as such, strict guidelines that exist because the easier options failed and they will punish or hurt the innocent but that's the price we pay for living in a rules based system.
I think they could surely be more forgiving to programming domain but then everyone will ask for similar benefits.
If your best sources for a project are that you and people you work with use it that isn't very conveniencing and the fact that supposedly you have a lot of fans on twitter shouldn't make it any different.
Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers:
https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096
https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432
If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion.
I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
I think a more comparable language would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
if people want there to be an article on Odin they can contribute to the current draft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
Argument of Casey was that it is not.
Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.
That is, things that a tiny clique of topic campers decides to be verifiable and truthful, are verifiable and truthful on Wikipedia. Once a decision has been made, it's close to impossible to overturn it, no matter how poorly it was justified, because that would be "disruptive".
Layers and layers of policies and guidelines are there only to obscure the fact that Wikipedia reflects what only a very small circle of chronically online weirdos want it to reflect, even if their position is utterly indefensible.
In this case, Wikipedia's policy is reasonable. I tried looking for any articles in reputable sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any. Not one article in any tech magazine.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.
Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.
> If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable"
Notability is not transitive. If you make a notable thing using a non-notable thing, it doesn't make the non-notable thing notable unless somehow the notable thing sparks a wave of public interest and thus reporting on the non-notable thing.
Also EmberGen doesn't seem terribly notable either.
How many SIGGRAPH papers go in-depth into EmberGen? As far as I can tell: zero. A Google Scholar search shows a single paper where EmberGen is not just a passing mention, and it's in a journal with low reach: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22e... -- also somewhat damning in its conclusion that EmberGen is faster than Blender, but if you need "precise artistic control", keep using Blender.
Has EmberGen won the Academy Scientific and Technical award, like, say, Houdini, Renderman, After Effects or Dragonframe? No it hasn't.
Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on Houdini's HScript.
What do you mean by “proprietary language”? To me “proprietary” means closed source, where one can only download binaries, not source code. “proprietary” can also have source code available, but with a license which is not open-source.
Odin, however, is an open-source language with an open-source license:
https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/LICENSE
Having looked more, this is not right. It seems more like one person who wanted to make video games developed a programming language instead, and now makes their living developing this programming language. And has built up some community of users, and one of those users is a small company making VFX software which has some usage but it's not making headlines anywhere. But this is so significant to the language author that they have a huge section of the front page of their own language's website mentioning this commercial software, even though they're... not?... affiliated with the company? Bigging up the reflected glory.
And in the years of this programming language existing, and supposedly being being general purpose... there have been zero papers about it in the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems or The Computer Journal, nor computer interest publications like Ars Technica or Linux Journal, and it hasn't been covered at SIGGRAPH or the Game Developers Conference. Why not?
If the language wants a Wikipedia page, the way forward is to get notable coverage from reliable sources. You and your friends who hang out on Discord and blog or vlog/livestream aren't reliable sources, even if you have a million friends.
There aren't specialised notability guidelines for programming languages, but there are for software, which a programming language definitely is. Even if no academics or professional journalists have written about it, there are other ways to establish its notability:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(software...
- have schools and universities used it to teach programming? There are hundreds, possibly thousands of languages that clear that bar
- have books or manuals been written about it? From what I can see, there is exactly one book about it
This language could clear the notability bar, but it just currently doesn't. The language's author positing a conspiracy of Wikipedia moderators keeping it out is unhelpful. I wouldn't include it in Wikipedia with its current sources, and I've literally never heard of it until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
I don't see the point about why making a closed tool open source suddenly give it enough notoriety to put it on Wikipedia.
I say that as someone who has used Odin, I do decently like the language but it's just moot to try to fight over this randomly.
Please RTFA and address the rebukes to this very point that are presented herein... -.- "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable, but how to establish this fact is the problem; a tweet by the CEO is not enough to establish this, secondary reporting by a reliable and archived source would.
I'm not even sure that would count, really. A world-class product that gets a lot of coverage is notable, for sure, but that wouldn't be enough to make some implementation detail of that product notable unless the sources really leaned on it.
I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).
Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.
On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.
It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.
Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug
It is an encyclopedia of topics that meet its standards of notability (ie there exists "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"[1]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
https://xkcd.com/1053/
So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.
And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it". Consider AI spam, or a company (or government!) paying, or forcing!, people to write articles with whatever focus/leaning/slant they desire. It seems like a hard problem!
Maybe people forget how things were before wikipedia existed? Like many things run primarily by volunteers, it is messy and imperfect. It's arguably still pretty great, and I'm glad it is around.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review
It was an article that really just slipped between the cracks of the rules, probably like the Odin one. All I did was take a breather for a few weeks, come back, edit it judiciously down to its core and resubmit it. It passed.
If Odin is important enough then one day there will be enough relevant citations to make it notable and it will be approved. Take a breather and come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
No, and I'm not arguing for that. Just pointing out that that insidious nature makes contributing to Wikipedia a questionable activity for (a few|some|many|???) people.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for having NO standards at all for what's included, but I think there's room to rethink the nature of some of those standards.
Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.
Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.
Very few people do, which actually makes it worse: of course the spammers and the hustlers are still motivated, so the needle moves more firmly into the territory of "most newcomer contributions are made in bad faith". Editors and admins feel increasingly under siege, so they respond more aggressively to everything.
It's basically the same problem as with real-world policing: because the cops overwhelmingly have deal with "problem" cases (you call them about burglars or drug dealers, not to tell them you baked some cookies), they develop a skewed perception of the average citizen and... well.
Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.
Hard drives can hold lots of data these days, and text compresses rather well.
Wikipedia does not exist to be a soapbox, self-publishing host or advertising medium, and having a Wikipedia article is not a human right.
Anyways, footnotes seem to work or are in-text. Links work as well so IDK the problem?
Then you talk about the claim of notability? Wikipedia's terms for notability are different than just a lot of people using the product. It's not the best, and should be reworked, but you're confusing wiki policies for general terms.
Then, we summarize that the article, author, and wikipedia are trash. Definitely one of the non-sequiturs of all time, lol. You don't even have an issue that the article is deleted, showing that you have no knowledge or at the very least don't care about adding substance to the discussion.
To summarize:
Please articulate your thoughts in a understandable, neutral manner that adds to the discourse.
Comments on: One singular post
>Calls people pedophiles(?), calls for homicide(?)
0/8 bait, best regards.
I guess the reason people aren't content with that approach and still want a Wikipedia article is because Wikipedia has much higher visibility. Great for SEO! Except if you can't get reputable third parties to publish about you, maybe you're not important enough to deserve that visibility.
[1]: https://en.everybodywiki.com/Everybodywiki:Welcome
I get it, probably it had been massaged by their PR department. But deleting the article punishes the readers by removing the very space for critical discussion of a topic with good SEO. Now if you want information on this company you will likely end up on their website, it seems like a reward to me.
I’m saying neither, but in that case the article on Wikipedia puts weight behind the statements on the webpage.
I do see your argument: „But it would be adjusted to reflect the truth about it“. Honestly I don’t know enough about Wikipedia to agree or deny it. But given the amount of articles on it, i would lean in the direction that the motivation of a single few would win over the curators. Which means applying a vector that cannot be influenced by those few.
Deleting the article means you can't even see the edit history to see why it was deleted. Whatever good work was done by other editors is gone cannot be built on. It's extreme.
You can see why it was deleted without that. Picking an example deleted article; the very first line, in a red box, is the deletion log entry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpanceo
> 00:57, 28 June 2026 .... deleted page Xpanceo (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xpanceo (...))
Click on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... and you will see all the reasons why it was deleted.
Wikipedia still has the full edit history of deleted articles, they can be restored upon request. The "hard work lost" argument is moot.
It's more important to speedily remove spam; keeping non-notable articles available is a huge win for spammers who put them there, every minute of endorsement by Wikipedia by continuing to exist there is a blessing. Wikipedia should keep the lede and infobox of the "EWKRHEKWJ.COM VIAGRA SALES COMPANY" article about how EWKRHEKWJ.COM sells the very finest viagra and cialis at the lowest prices, and their address is https://EWKRHEKWJ.COM ... because think of the hard work they must've put in to the article? Just leave that up and protect it? No thanks!
I understand that Wikipedia does not want corporate propaganda or other forms of propaganda, but whether a company exists or not at the time is an objective yes/no answer. It is probably more work to correct propaganda though, so articles are deleted. Would be better to simplify an article down to the bare bone instead, though, so I agree with you here.
Hence why, to even be in wikipedia, the company has to be notable, otherwise every LLC and partnership would want to boost their reputation (while ruining wikipedia's): the barrier to entry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...
Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.
this isn't a meaningful criticism. An encyclopedia is a reference for established and public knowledge. It's by definition archaic, not an archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the article's criterion for the relevance of Odin.
An encyclopedia shouldn't prioritize article creation, it should be restrictive about what it adds and make sure the content is long term relevant, accurate and sourced. If anything Wikipedia has already been way too lax with what it lets stand on the site. They should honestly do a big cleaning and remove more articles that barely cite any meaningful source or seem like they're self-promotion, because there's already too much of it.
And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).
Notable is not the same as popular.
For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.
And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.
The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.
Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.
However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.
Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.
But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.
And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.
We trust people first, up and down the scale.
On the other hand, if you're talking about Star Trek, the MCU, Taylor Swift or the Legend of Zelda series, the most reliable source is probably not going to be either an academic journal or the New York Times. Many of my videos and articles are about games in the latter series, and the reliable sources for that would probably be something like speedrunners, dataminers, etc. For most of those things, the reliable source would either be the artist or company that owns the rights, or some fansite/video creator that's been documenting them for the last three decades.
Plus, a lot of the time the sources Wikipedia accepts are just laundering the same info anyway. It would be very, very easy to get misleading or incorrect information about the next Pokemon game to go viral, just by sending a few publications a link to a random blog and letting them take it at face value. In a depressing number of fields, fact checking and research is minimal even from name brand publications, and some guy's post on Reddit can get treated like gospel.
You lost me here. I mean, yes, there's serious fan community interaction around those subject which is unauthenticated and anonymous. But that's interaction and not research or journalism. You might cite the existence of a favorite lore or fan theory in a wikipedia article, but you don't take the fan stuff as a source for the original material!
To take your specific example: Swift is literally getting married today, I gather. Why do I gather it? Because trusted human beings in my information space (Twitter feed, news articles, etc...) are telling me! Would I trust an anonymous fan source telling me someone got married? Almost certainly not.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
obscure (adjective)
not known to many people:
- an obscure island in the Pacific
- an obscure 12th-century mystic
Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.
obscure (adjective)
not clear and difficult to understand or see:
- Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.
- His answers were obscure and confusing.
- "the syntax itself is obscure"
Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.
Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.
The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).
In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.
> maybe I just happened to miss it?
You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai.
This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.
The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
> Many people think Odin is "just for games" at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible.
> Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai
which simply isn't true. Just google it, e.g.,
https://handmade.network/forums/t/1338-the_odin_programming_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jai/comments/1j2idvz/is_odin_kind_o...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317815
If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.
The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.
One of the qualifications is having third-party sources document the subject, where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area). A company’s statement that it uses a programming language might be factual, but that doesn’t necessarily make it notable.
(To be clear: I was only vaguely aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)
There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.
From the article:
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development".
See for instance https://dev.to/dimension-ai/13-languages-are-challenging-c-m...
Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects.
> Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.
This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake.
As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA:
> Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists.
By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.
Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”. As a result, there's plenty of things that are both true and well known to plenty of people that aren't on Wikipedia, but that's fine, and encyclopedia doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful.
But on the flip side, if they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.
> As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
...
> what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia.
There is also virtually no attention in these comments to the content of TFA, e.g.,
> the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was deleted -- you won. People are still entitled to think that it was a mistake and to say why.
Are you though? Like this seems like hobby project that hasn't really generated much discussion or interest in the broader programming language community, and practically speaking doesn't seem to have seen much use as a systems programming language (a single vfx package isn't really that impressive).
People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest, and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Yes ... read the other comments and TFA that you have completely ignored. And I wouldn't have said that I was talking about that if I weren't talking about that.
> People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest
Nonsense.
> and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Nonsense. (These statements individually and together are literally incoherent.)
The bad faith here is tiresome. Virtually no one has even read TFA, which is actually a defense of Wikipedia and devolves into an attack on Ginger Bill for following right wingers on Twitter. (And I'm no fan of those people, to say the least, but they have nothing to do with the notability of Odin.)
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
For more details, see
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
You literally can't create constructive online communities if you don't do that.
> I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?
>You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information. See who they follow on Twitter.
This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill.
My politics are left-leaning and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya)
If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right.
Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.
Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?
Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.
"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.
Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.
But how do you moderate? Do you establish your own ministry of truth? Only allow contributors with a university email address (shoutout to the arXiv)?
Wikipedia decided to externalize part of the vetting process by placing formal restrictions on the sources you're allowed to collect information from.
Sadly, there currently aren't any such sources for Odin.
Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.
I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.
But other than that?
Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!
The fact that rust has been even accepted into the kernel is a resounding endorsement.
C17 is largely bugfixes. An "upgrade" to C17 probably wouldn't even change most of the whole files in Linux, let alone most of the lines of code, it's just not relevant. C23 is a larger change but it's also very young, much younger for example than the Rust for Linux project.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzmj7K0FNRY
Rust is an obvious competitor to C++, both are similarly featured.
When people talk about "modern C competitors" they're almost always talking about more minimalist languages like Zig, Odin, C3, Jai, Hare, etc...
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.
> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them
No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.
This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.
Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.
This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work these articles may have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors (citation needed) - which to me confirmed my gut feeling that most new editors bounce off and give up on contribution in short order.
I contributed for a few years, but gave up eventually - it was exhausting to spend time collating sources, collecting information, editing, rewriting, and then having someone come along and propose discarding your work with very little investment from their side.
Stackoverflow has gone through similar calcification - it's nearly impossible to contribute now, or build reputation as a new user, as posts get closed as duplicates or not-relevant.
Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.
There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk
More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
> Maybe i am missing something
You are.
> idk
That says it all.
What has mostly changed is that there are more editors now, and thus more eyes and also more serious discussion (rigor?) about such things.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
And then I read this:
> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view
> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
> 2. See who they follow on Twitter
What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language and don't want it on Wikipedia as any form of "advertisement".
It doesn't directly say "political bias", but it certainly is implied (not as in national politics, more like ideological)
Seems to be pretty explicit that they don't like the language, not the creator or his political views. I don't like Java, the few times I was forced to use it I hated it, but I don't even know who the creators are.
Like someone else said, for someone to go through such lengths to claim many of their points, it's a pretty tenuous connection to hang half your article on.
Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
zig: 71,565
rust: 304,405
golang: 1,246,300
malbogle: 9
The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
Verifiable, in addition to accurate. Not "not accurate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_i...
It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.
There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?
Here on the orange site, where he can't edit what he wrote hours after finding out that he was wrong, there are a few interactions between me and Bill where I know a topic, Bill blusters but is clueless and so he makes a bit of a fool of himself.
On Reddit, where Bill can go back and "edit" embarrassing mistakes the dynamic is very weird, with it appearing (if you go look now) that I keep restating things Bill has explicitly said he knows. Of course if you saw it when it happened it's the same as on HN, I stick to areas of expertise, Bill offers pronouncements on topics he doesn't understand, he looks like an idiot. But the power of the edit button allows Bill to rewrite history so that he knew all that with only the small price that now the conversation looks weird (and there's a tiny asterisk on his comments in some Reddit UIs to hint that they're edited)
Now, I don't like what I call "Auteur languages". Programming Languages where a single individual or maybe a couple of people have absolute control. So Odin was never going to be a language I like, same for Jai, Hare, Cpp2† and indeed more relevantly Zig. In that sense it doesn't matter whether I like Odin, but it does seem like feedback on "Ginger" Bill Hall.
† I'm sure Herb Sutter would tell you that his "new syntax" for C++ would be overseen by the same committee as the current language. The language as it exists today, largely abandoned, does not have such oversight.
That makes it especially unfortunate that Grokipedia, which seemed like the strongest alternative to Wikipedia, is no longer being updated.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language
So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.
It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.
If you want my opinion on that, Odin seems pretty notable to me, and I would expect there to be a Wikipedia article for it, and I'd be all for engaging with the editors on that. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia moderators to be plugged into the world of programming languages the way I am, though. Like the article says, this seems like subject-specific notability guidelines could help. It's definitely true that the programming world is missing the kind of institutional material that works well for, say, science or news.
Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.
Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't
Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...
They both don't belong there, TBH. I'm a PL nerd and have been one for nearly 20 years. Wikipedia is the last place I would search for information about even the TIOBE Top 20 languages, let alone anything newer or more niche. The only reason new/niche languages have a Wikipedia page is for advertising - they all hope to attract new users and convey an impression of being mature enough for serious work. It's a failure of Wiki that some pages like that were not flagged and deleted quickly enough. Enthusiasts will keep creating those pages as long as there's a chance they'll fly under the radar long enough to make them hard to delete. If they put that effort into RosettaCode (also a wiki) pages, we'd be all the better for it.
Here's why Gleam belongs on libopedia and Odin does not:
>As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
>Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
Does Odin tell you to check your privileges? No? thought so.
OP tries very hard to pretend the person he's writing a hit piece on, on a blog/website that was entirely created for this singular purpose (no other posts in there), is the one and only that has political obsessions and surely nothing about libopedia is political!
In this day and age, if you make a niche thing and want your libopedia page, you need to work harder on proving you are a card carrying democrat.
But hey, don't expect consistency or fairness from the ones on the English Wikipedia.
- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
- footnotes appearing out of order
Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.
If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).
* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.
I mean, some dudes way back in the day successfully forked Spanish-language Wikipedia because of some advertising disputes. Can anyone truly replicate success with a forked enwiki?
At least there, the Odin article still lives on.
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".
Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.
Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).
Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word for it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).
My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion.
That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that someone Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with.
I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.
Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.
Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy.
I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
Rather, the shooting of such strays appears to reflect old competitor propaganda pushed on certain social media sites (that traces back to Ginger Bill and other competitors in different ways) and a sentiment, often regurgitated by certain fanatics of his, where they appear to be upset by vlang's level of success.
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Even here, where this quote is taken directly from Ginger Bill's post, shows how wrong he and certain of his followers are about the issue. It is not about about Wikipedia mods not liking Odin or even about the articles of other languages. Wikipedia has certain rules and reference requirements for articles to survive an AfC or AfD "challenge" and Odin failed.
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.
It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked.
Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring.
In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language
Ignoring all other factors, IMO there should be an article about Odin the programming language. Deleting an article about something that exists, is incredibly stupid; not sure why Wikipedia resorts to that. If Wikipdia deems Odin not noteworthy - and I don't really care about Odin myself - then the article could be kept short. That would still be better than deleting it.
Wikipedia started with the goal of a database of literally everything. One could argue that Odin is not relevant because it may not be used by anyone, but then this would need to be an objective argument based on numbers and data, because many other programming languages are used by few people yet are mentioned on Wikipedia. So, that seems to be a stupid decision by those responsible on Wikipedia. CensorshipBros are annoying in general - the english wikipedia is much more open than the german wikipedia by the way.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...
What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?
He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.
For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!
The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.
That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
I don't know any of the people in this post, since I firmly believe that not having twitter, instagram, or tiktok is the #1 thing anyone can do to improve their mental well-being. From this sentence alone however, I can exactly establish what kind of person this is. The persecution complex, the "journalist" as an insult, it's all there.
> I know that as of now, GingerBill follows: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Libs of TikTok.
Nailed it.