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Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#211

Post by willdr »

leecommamichael wrote: post #144

>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…

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?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#212

Post by meheleventyone »

mindcrime wrote: post #86

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 Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a…

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#213

Post by willdr »

lvoudour wrote: post #127

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 t…

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#214

Post by ChoosesBarbecue »

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#215

Post by baranul »

PakistaniDenzel wrote: post #171

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

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#216

Post by tux3 »

willdr wrote: post #213
lvoudour wrote: post #127

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 t…

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.

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#217

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

leecommamichael wrote: post #144

>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…

+1 I remember joining the discord server and I think that Bill even responded to me and the community was helpful!

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#218

Post by amiga386 »

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.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#219

Post by rq1 »

willdr wrote: post #211
leecommamichael wrote: post #144

>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…

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 m…

Because it’s supposedly open?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#220

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bawolff wrote: post #26

> 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.

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

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