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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#141

Post by redthrowaway »

burgerbrain wrote: post #138
prodigal_erik wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia relies on volunteers to do updates, corrections, and repair of vandalism. Storage is cheap but their time on this thankless work (just look at this thread—and we're relatively civil!) is a limited resource, and the thinner you spread them, the more unusable (outdated, mistaken, and actively misleading) the results will be. If you want a boundless supply of crap content, the union of everything anyone ever b…

If tyrannical admins didn't chase away all possible contributors by deleting their work, perhaps this would no longer be an issue.

It's not the admins. There are relatively few of them, and they really don't nominate pages for deletion very often. When a page is nominated, it's the community that argues and the admin only deletes if there's clear consensus. The problem is that deletionists flock to AfDs like it's Mecca, and inclusionists are too busy writing content.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#142

Post by jarin »

_delirium wrote: post #135
akamaka wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Yeah, this is probably the most disappointing HN flamewar yet, full of outrage and attacks but very little information or people wanting to educate themselves. There's lots of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but it requires people to: 1) become familiar with how things work; 2) become familiar with why things came to be that way; and 3) come up with workable proposals to improve things that take into accoun…

You're assuming that people don't know how Wikipedia works. I think most people who are angry with arbitrary deletion on Wikipedia have probably at some point read through enough of the WP: articles to understand why it's offensive.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#143

Post by _delirium »

jarin wrote: post #142
_delirium wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is probably the most disappointing HN flamewar yet, full of outrage and attacks but very little information or people wanting to educate themselves. There's lots of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but it requires people to: 1) become familiar with how things work; 2) become familiar with why things came to be that way; and 3) come up with workable proposals to improve things that take into accoun…

You're assuming that people don't know how Wikipedia works. I think most people who are angry with arbitrary deletion on Wikipedia have probably at some point read through enough of the WP: articles to understand why it's offensive.

Judging by the discussion so far, I would be willing to wager that most people in fact are unfamiliar and have not read anything.

One experiment that could be useful is for people to just follow the "Articles for deletion" page for a few days when it's not currently focused on something they're personally big fans of. Say, next Monday through Wednesday. Then everyone would be much better informed to explain what's wrong about the process and what to do about it. They'd also have a better understanding about the kind of crap that gets regularly deleted, i.e. why the rules exist in the first place, which is what any reform proposal would have to also account for.

But I think most people are just jumping in because someone said something bad about a thing they're a fan of, hence the mob style.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#144

Post by MaysonL »

jacques_chester wrote: post #39
[deleted] wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Sorry, you're right. A PhD student isn't an idiot, regardless of how angry they might make me. edit: Chris, I apologise. I let my anger get the best of me. I'll keep my ad homs to a minimum wherever possible.

From wikipedia's definition of idiot: "someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way"

I would submit that the aforementioned PhD student qualifies, whatever his I.Q. or programming chops.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#146

Post by MaysonL »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #136
elliottcarlson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby was released in 1995, and there was no documentation available in English until 1997. Ruby's popularity outside of Japan didn't even gain any kind of momentum until 2000 and on. Obviously no one can say for sure, but I am sure an un-notable language could possibly gain even more popularity with a Wikipedia entry as it helps people learn more about a small obscure language that might grow in to something bigger -…

What that means is that Ruby simply wasn't very notable until 2000. Trying to make obscure things more notable is not a legitimate use of Wikipedia. It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. And there can't possibly be any objective measure today of what independent sources in the future may be writing about.

Notable != noticed.

i.e.

Worthy of attention != getting attention.

Ruby was notable, just not noticed.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#147

Post by aneth »

jacoblyles wrote: post #114
zedshaw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

>"...you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge" Correction: a professor is a profession devoted to advancing human knowledge and then locking that knowledge behind expensive paywalls so that only elites with institutional subscriptions can afford to read it. Academia couldn't care less about the knowledge available to the average…

> Academia couldn't care less about the knowledge available to the average internet user.

Except for just about every elite university, most of which make their courses available online for free.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#148

Post by wauter »

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…

Let's put them back on there and add a chapter titled 'controversy over Wikipedia deletion' - plenty of sources there :-)

(I am only half kidding in fact, I remember something like this happening a while ago but don't remember what the precise article was about)

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#149

Post by chalst »

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…

None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up.

Impact is not a measure of whether a source is reliable, peer review is. One can argue that journals with higher impact factors are likely to have more rigorous peer review, but the AfD's have not talked about journal impact factor.

Note that TOPLAS, a source for the Nemerle article, had an impact factor of 1.92 in 2010, the highest PL journal, and among the higher CS journals overall.

Also note that the high-impact CS conferences are peer reviewed. This fact, and the general importance of conference publications in CS, appeared to have escaped the participants in the AfDs I looked at.

The article was deleted for lack of reliable sources: what does the number of citations that this or that article has have to do with that?

Nazi/asshole/whatnot - These people are pathetic. Don't be put off by them.

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