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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#151

Post by chalst »

greendestiny wrote: post #106
chrismonsanto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actua…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.

I agree with peer review as a criterion for being a reliable source, and that you need reliable sources for notability.

But the other criteria are silly.

Is Strachey's non-mainstream but very influential GPM notable? It has only one journal article about it, with a paltry 65 Google Scholar cites, and the other articles that mention it are all mostly concerned with something else.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#152

Post by tty »

I find it funny that the guy hasn't made a single contribution to Wikipedia. All his edits either directly remove content or nominate it for deletion. Apparently besides the dislike for programming languages, he also hates it when certain scientists have "Dr." next to their names on their Wikipedia articles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributi...

Examples:

>Raj Reddy ‎ (dr. is so unnecessary)

>Randy Pausch ‎ (dr is unnecessary)

>Benjamin C. Pierce ‎ (Don't need dr.)

and so on

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#153

Post by chalst »

kevbin wrote: post #41
chrismonsanto wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It reduces the overall usefulness and quality of Wikipedia to delete leaves that are referenced from other Wikipedia pages. Nemerle is an example: there are several references to it from other PL pages, that before your "improvement" could be resolved w/in Wikipedia, but now require going outside of Wikipedia to determine that "Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform." This…

"several references" is over 50 references

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#154

Post by redthrowaway »

boyter wrote: post #34
redthrowaway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them. We just need to deal with deletionism.

I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive. Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.co…

Don't get me wrong, it's a big problem, I'm just not sure the proposed solution is workable.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#155

Post by monsanto4pres »

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…

From the tone of his posts I can already tell he's a smug little b. A cynic would think that he's doing all this deletionism so that when his own pet project FRENETIC is done, it'll be easier to distinguish from other languages.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#156

Post by knowtheory »

_delirium wrote: post #143
jarin wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

Except that this happens over and over again.

Wikipedia's policies piss everyone off in turn, but it is in turn. The fact that each new community isn't aware of wikipedia's ludicrous policies isn't their fault, since they've had no cause to wrestle with the problems or nuances.

The fact that wikipedians are tired of the debate doesn't mean that they're right, it means that they've done a bad job communicating the problem, dealing with the consequences, and are frankly out of touch with the majority of wikipedia's readers (who outside of a subset of wikipedians thinks deletionism is a good idea?).

The fact that people defending wikipedia on these issues always treat the aggrieved fans/community with such contempt really is part of the problem.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#157

Post by _delirium »

knowtheory wrote: post #156
_delirium wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

Except that this happens over and over again. Wikipedia's policies piss everyone off in turn, but it is in turn. The fact that each new community isn't aware of wikipedia's ludicrous policies isn't their fault, since they've had no cause to wrestle with the problems or nuances. The fact that wikipedians are tired of the debate doesn't mean that they're right, it means that they've done a bad job communicating the pro…

There are certainly some problems, but I don't think they're all on one side. I think that the fact that people who don't spend any effort understanding the problem or trying to improve things treat Wikipedians with such contempt is also part of the problem.

Figuring out how to write an encyclopedia isn't a particularly easy problem, and a lot of people have spent some effort trying to balance things like, on the one hand, wanting coverage of everything, and on the other hand, not wanting physics kooks spamming up Wikipedia with their fringe theories. Lots of people disagree on how to do it, but I think people should at least make some effort to understand things rather than seeing it through the narrow tunnel vision of "the thing I'm a fan of deserves special treatment and Wikipedians don't see that so they're idiots". As in open-source, it's to some extent a contrib-ocracy; if you don't help improve the encyclopedia at all, but only show up when some external fan community is aggrieved, that sort of "contribution" isn't appreciated any more than it would be at LKML (they get such influxes now and then too, e.g. from fans of a module that wasn't accepted for merging).

> who outside of a subset of wikipedians thinks deletionism is a good idea

I actually see the opposite criticism at least as often! Wikipedia's often attacked in academic literature, and some news stories, for being filled with "Star Wars and Pokemon cruft", and not paying enough attention to reliable sources or people with expertise in various fields. There are also periodic controversies about it including articles on borderline-notable people who object to their inclusion. Most forks, like Larry Sanger's "Citizendium", have been based on the Wikipedia-is-too-loose-with-its-standards criticism, rather than the opposite one. Not that I agree with it, but it does seem to be the most common criticism outside of fan communities.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#158

Post by Arve »

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
You didn't look very hard, did you?

For instance, the Alice ML homepage lists an entire page of papers. http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/papers.html - including nine thesises at various levels, something that wouldn't happen to something non-notable.

For Nemerle, Google Scholar has 81 results, http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nemerle&hl=en&bt...

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#159

Post by ugh »

zedshaw wrote: post #102
chrismonsanto wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

Could you please not call other people “nazis” because they have a slightly different opinion?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#160

Post by prodigal_erik »

MaysonL wrote: post #146
prodigal_erik wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ruby lacked verifiable evidence of notability from independent secondary sources. Wikipedia strenuously avoids making subjective judgment calls about whether anything is notable despite somehow failing to have been noticed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

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