Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

All anyone needs to do about this is find reliable sources to improve the articles that are being nominated for deletion. Really. If some wikipedian who knows about published, reliable sources about each of the languages simply adds some source citations to the articles, all will be well.

I don't remember who said it, but I read something recently which I thought was amusing and not serious (paraphrasing):

> All that donation money, and they still can't afford enough hard drive space to avoid deletionism.

The guy allegedly doing the flagging has responded on his user page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto

Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'.

Here's the main offender:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto

One of his arguments is that these languages are often only mentioned in conference proceedings.

How you get to be a PhD student in computer science without realising that conference proceedings are the leading distribution mechanism for knowledge in the CS research world is a mystery.

I may only be a humble honours student, but the central importance of conferences over journals has been drummed into me over and over by my professors.

Yes, yes, a million times yes. Everybody knows that the existing Wikipedia Notability guidelines have serious issues when it comes to dealing with software and technology issues. I know I fought tooth and nail to get the Steve Yegge article back on Wikipedia a while back, and Steve is pretty damn notable in his community.... to the point that a WP article on him is a no-brainer. Now imagine anybody just a hair less well known, or a project with no celebrity leader or that isn't sponsored by $MEGACORP.

Software just isn't cited generally in the New York Times and the kinds of sources that they want... that doesn't mean it isn't notable, it just means that it's "noted" a different way. Notability in our world is based on blog posts, mailing list posts, github commit logs, etc.

Now how to get Wikipedia's policies amended to reflect that? Good question... I know it's been tried before and failed, but maybe it's time somebody built a coalition to make a serious, coordinated effort to get something done (no, I'm not volunteering, unfortunately.)

Edit: My memory is failing, it was the Yegge article I had that big battle over, not Zed. But the point remains the same.

Fun fact: I left a note for the guy asking why he doesn't do that (hunt up citations and improve articles).

His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia.

In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.