Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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.

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:

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...

>Apparently [Brainfuck] is "notable" but Odin is not

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...

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.

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.