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Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

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Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#51

Post by RandalSchwartz »

tptacek wrote: post #47
RandalSchwartz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? I've been very very careful to abide by WP:BIO. The only changes I've ever made are to add ISBNs or my photo. I even stay out of the talk page for the most part as well. I call "troll".

I have a problem with you calling people a "troll" when they are merely wrong in the particulars of WP policy. The fact of the matter is that your changes to that page have not been restricted to ISBNs and your repeated photo changes... and that's just the stuff that's in the history of the page with your name on it; it does't account for the advocacy you've made on the Talk page for the removal of the coverage of yo…

Seriously? you're going there? My first response is "URLs of edits please". Particularly, my talk page edits are not subject to WP:BIO, and the only edit I made there was not "for the removal of the coverage of [my] felony conviction", but quite the opposite: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Randal_L._Sch... - and if you find that any of my further edits weren't strictly about "correcting any factual errors", please call me on it.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#52

Post by thyrsus »

dwyer wrote: post #40
RandalSchwartz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm just a footnote in the history of Perl, you're woefully ignorant.

Maybe more. I'm certainly no Perl historian. But if I were, and I were writing a book about it, I doubt I would include a lot of biographies.

If you're not interested in how the lives of human beings create history, then please write about natural history (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, zoology), not human history. Perl, as software, may instantiate a mathematical ideal, but a history of Perl must talk about its connection to a community of programmers, and Mr. Schwartz is most certainly a leading light of that community.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#53

Post by wisty »

dwyer wrote: post #40
RandalSchwartz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm just a footnote in the history of Perl, you're woefully ignorant.

Maybe more. I'm certainly no Perl historian. But if I were, and I were writing a book about it, I doubt I would include a lot of biographies.

Yes, but you would mention "The Camel Book", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, right? Or that the capitalization "Perl" was coined by Randal (or so Wikipedia's Perl page claims)? And the "Schwartzian Transform" is kind of famous.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#54

Post by andrewguenther »

RandalSchwartz wrote: post #25
andrewguenther wrote: post #13

If you look at the discussion you will see that Randal himself has made multiple contributions to the page, which is against Wikipedia's policy, and could be the perceived grounds for deletion. Aside from that, this is still only a proposal for deletion, like many others have said. I don't think this is any real cause for alarm.

Seriously? I've been very very careful to abide by WP:BIO. The only changes I've ever made are to add ISBNs or my photo. I even stay out of the talk page for the most part as well. I call "troll".

Randal, I apologize that I misspoke, I should have read the policies more thoroughly. I was merely stating my perception of why someone might be trying to delete the article, I had no intent to "troll."

Never thought I would have the guy who taught me Perl get mad at me on the Internet... Sorry again Randal

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#55

Post by pbreit »

tzs wrote: post #37

I've just added my "keep" to the discussion. The following is OT, but I'm curious: Does anyone else find the fact that the Wikipedia talk pages are wiki pages to be about the stupidest thing ever? Wikis are designed for occasional edits, not active discussions. It's very annoying to try to save a comment and find that it is rejected because someone else got an edit in while you were editing. It seems clear to me that…

Service idea: pan-web Disqus-like discussion widget that works like HN.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#56

Post by pbreit »

[deleted] wrote: post #38
joh6nn wrote: post #36

the whole "notability" requirement on WP really bothers me; it's not like this is britannica, where there's a limited number of pages to cram all this info into. i'd much rather have a definitive resource, than one that only covered "notable" material.

[deleted]

It would be ironic of Schwartz is listed in Britannica. I didn't downvote you but I can understand the sentiment. Your comment is nonsensical and does not add value.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#57

Post by dwyer »

RandalSchwartz wrote: post #43
dwyer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe more. I'm certainly no Perl historian. But if I were, and I were writing a book about it, I doubt I would include a lot of biographies.

If "author of first book about Perl" doesn't make your book, you're a pretty poor writer.

Nothing I said was meant to be taken personally, so please stop with the ad hominems. I apologize if I offended you. I didn't mean to imply that your life and work are not important. I just don't feel like every single biography is worthy of ``the sum of human knowledge'', even if that person's work is. I guess that's not a fashionable opinion to have in the post-Twitter era, especially on a website where people submit their .vimrc files as potential ``hacker news'', but it is my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#58

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

tptacek wrote: post #6

Yes. No reasonable person could even contest this. Randal Schwartz has been written about in reliable sources extensively, owing to an incident in which he was convicted for a felony involving breaking into Intel servers. •••• PEOPLE OF HN: ANYBODY CAN PROPOSE ANY ARTICLE ON WP FOR DELETION. THERE IS NO BAR FOR IT. •••• If you make comically stupid proposals, like "[Barack Obama] isn't notable and should be deleted",…

Let's be honest, here; what's actually notable about Randal is that he lives in Portland, OR, the best city in the world, and moreover, since I happen to live in Portland and am unemployed, I think I'll use my spare time to edit Randal's WP page to make this more obvious, and revert people who undo my work.

Re: Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?

#59

Post by slowpoke »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #4

Every time I think Wikipedia couldn't slide any further into craziness, I see something like this. Nobody ever seems to step back and ask "what exactly are we accomplishing by campaigning to get content deleted?". Somewhere between "preventing spam, vandalism, and vanity pages" and "delete everything" there's a line; the exact placement of that line seems non-obvious, but individual cases like this seem incredibly ob…

  Every time I think Wikipedia couldn't slide any further
  into craziness, I see something like this.
Oh boy you haven't seen the German WP yet. At least half of what's in the English WP would be deleted due to irrelevancy in the German one, to name just one thing that's wrong with it.

I do agree that there is a line to be drawn, but I am an advocate of erring on the side of vanity. I'd rather have some vanity pages - that cause next to no traffic and don't really take up much storage - than deleting knowledge, however insignificant it might be.

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