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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#101

Post by akamaka »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #74
wisty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the deletion threads. He knows what he's talking about, but I think he has some agenda. Maybe he failed a functional language course, and wants to kill off his professor's favourite languages? There's no way that he couldn't just do a google scholar search for "Alice ML functional programming".

Of course I've done a Google Scholar search for Alice ML. There is roughly one admissible source -- "Through the looking glass" in Trends in Functional Programming. Small workshop paper, 12 citations according to CiteSeer. Doesn't show up in the ACM Digital Library. There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actua…

I got involved with the deletion debate over the Go! programming language, and was among a handful of people who actually tried to reason out how Wikipedia's notability policies could be improved.

The fact is that Wikipedia is full of articles about people's own pet research projects which have no users and no impact.

Your arguments are solid and worth thinking about, but as you can see, nobody wants to address the wider problem of Wikipedia's poor notability guidelines directly, and have let this devolve into a flamewar.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#102

Post by zedshaw »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #23
jacques_chester wrote: post #6

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 cent…

No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count. Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reli…

My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and you just erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer science to the general public. You just made it harder to get people interested in programming. Amazing.

Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't "notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate puts out, no matter how idiotic it is.

Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor.

So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now, you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#103

Post by jeswin »

Nemerle has 209,000 results on Google, and the first few pages are stacked with relevant, well-written articles. How is this not notable?

I played with this language a few years back and thought it had great promise(when C# was much less capable). I have read the exact Wikipedia page you deleted, and it got me to write some code in Nemerle.

* Btw, this might get some publicity for Nemerle (and the other languages).

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#104

Post by Confusion »

Locke1689 wrote: post #52
chrismonsanto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that their work doesn't "count" in the more general sense of the word, it's that their work has not had enough impact at the moment to establish the notability of the topic. I'm sure the researchers in question did fine work, and in the future their work will be widely recognized. I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. I didn't delete the articles b…

I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. Meh, as a researcher and grad student myself I wouldn't say that. You earn the qualification to judge notability of scholarly works after defending your dissertation and publishing significant work for the community. That's kind of how the system works.

I'd say that when someone 'earns the qualification' is much less important than whether they 'have what it takes'. It's a bit arbitrary to suggest someone only has what it takes after a bit of paperwork has been completed. Failing a dissertation defense is rare and after having published the first work of minor notability, you're as good as set. By that standard, he is probably right that he is qualified.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#105

Post by ubernostrum »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #25
ubernostrum wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no citations exist :(

One suggestion I'd make (following up on my directing you to WP:POINT on your talk page) would be to research the history of Improv's famous spree, wherein he speedy-deleted a bunch of articles on different brands of cookies. You may learn some useful things about when to be strict on policy and when not to.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#106

Post by greendestiny »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #74
wisty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the deletion threads. He knows what he's talking about, but I think he has some agenda. Maybe he failed a functional language course, and wants to kill off his professor's favourite languages? There's no way that he couldn't just do a google scholar search for "Alice ML functional programming".

Of course I've done a Google Scholar search for Alice ML. There is roughly one admissible source -- "Through the looking glass" in Trends in Functional Programming. Small workshop paper, 12 citations according to CiteSeer. Doesn't show up in the ACM Digital Library. There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actua…

35 citations according to Google Scholar.

So to count for notability:

- An article can't be from a workshop?

- It must solely be about a topic?

- It must be peer reviewed?

At this point you must acknowledge that your own complicated rules for notability have diverged a long way from those stated anywhere else.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#107

Post by [deleted] »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #59
jacques_chester wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge. Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?

So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless. Most of the languages I propose for deletion have almost no information available about them, and therefore, one can't write a useful Wikipedia article about them. More information isn't necessarily better. Anything I am not 95% sure about I add a notability tag to or simply leave alone.…

[deleted]

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#108

Post by nerfhammer »

jedsmith wrote: post #71
nerfhammer wrote: post #67

The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons . This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no b…

Whoa, hold the phone: List of animals in The Simpsons is notable but Nemerle isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.

Scroll down to the List of One-Time Animals section if you really want your mind boggled

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#109

Post by j_baker »

rick_2047 wrote: post #57
jacques_chester wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? So now we need two levels of notability. First you must be published and you must have "impact". How is this "impact" thing defined, by the way? Are you agitating for an agreed bibliometric standard for notabi…

You action was a necessary cause of their deletion and therefore you are one of the directly culpable persons destroying the long tail of knowledge. I am no expert here, but does one person tagging something for deletion make such an impact? He must have convinced the administrators by only good arguments (like lawyer arguments, which are not necessarily moral or anything, just good enough to win the case). If we can…

You ever notice how executions always have 10 people doing something that can be done by one person? It's so that individual people don't feel responsible for the execution.

By that same token, it's easier to not feel responsible for deleting a page if it's a team effort. I would imagine that the admin who deleted them would probably say "I was just responding to complaints."

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#110

Post by carsongross »

@chrismonsanto has this thread (and the reddit thread) caused you to reevaluate what we, the programming community, consider 'notable'?

The easy reaction would be to focus on the flamers, harden your heart and drive ahead. The wise man, here, stops and thinks for a bit.

Restore Nemerle.

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