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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#241

Post by carussell »

gwern wrote: post #233
tty wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also apparently thinks that once a dedicated article gets deleted, all mention of that particular subject should be removed (as is evidenced by the fact that he went on a removal spree and removed most mentions of Nemerle from other Wikipedia articles as soon as wiki:Nemerle was deleted - he didn't just delete links pointing to wiki:Nemerle but the actual mention of it). That is not a WP policy.

But it is a guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_cre...

Reread the comment. tty is not referring to changes like

  - …[[Nemerle]]…
  + …Nemerle…
He or she is claiming mentions of Nemerle being completely excised from other articles.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#242

Post by TillE »

bane wrote: post #224

Great discussion on wikipedia about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...

Why not just formalize WikiProject rankings? Instead of being deleted, all articles with verifiable, independent sources should be graded on quality and importance by those involved in the relevant WikiProject(s).

I think exposing that kind of metadata would be really, really useful.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#243

Post by carussell »

redthrowaway wrote: post #154
boyter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since you got voted down, I see where you're coming from, and past discussions about Wikipedia on HN has revealed that a non-trivial number of HN members have only a surprisingly superficial understanding or experience with Wikipedia, I'll attempt to further explain.

The Anna Patterson one is absolutely a case of where the proposed solution achieves the desired effect (in my opinion). redthrowaway hasn't mentioned whether he or she agrees about the Patterson situation, but that's fine, because it's neither here nor there.

What happens on Wikipedia is that people drive by and will literally create an aritcle like "Shitfuck" and will literally write something like "a shitfuck is a guy named jason form cedar springs". seconds later the page content is changed by them again to something like: "a shitfuck is a guy named jason from cedar springs he really likes to shit but he never gets to fuck".

The proposed solution is to retain all deleted articles. redthrowaway points out this isn't a realistic approach in light of these types of new articles. Opposition to redthrowaway here seems to be in the case where multiple someones somewhere care do care about the information in the Anna Patterson article. Is the Anna Patterson article at all similar to the shitfuck incident? Is someone somewhere going to come along and constructively improve that one?

In case you're wondering, "yeah, but how often does that kind of thing really happen?" It happens. A lot.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#244

Post by bane »

TillE wrote: post #242
bane wrote: post #224

Great discussion on wikipedia about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...

Why not just formalize WikiProject rankings? Instead of being deleted, all articles with verifiable, independent sources should be graded on quality and importance by those involved in the relevant WikiProject(s). I think exposing that kind of metadata would be really, really useful.

I think the biggest problem I have with the notability guidelines is that none of the editors (pedantic as they tend to be) understand what the word "guideline" means. Most of the AfD discussions center around WP:N. Yet notability is a scarily vague and personal criteria. In this case, the original deletion discussion appeared to be 100% in favor of keeping the articles in question with only Monsanto against. The only apparent question was WP:N and despite quite a bit of evidence demonstrating notability, the editor appeared to unilaterally delete the articles.

In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in at that moment, you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense.

So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone.

If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#245

Post by sedachv »

cabalamat wrote: post #212
lparry wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you ever stop to think what positive impact the deletion of these articles actually makes? I cant come up with any positive contribution you're making, but I can see that if I saw one of these languages mentioned somewhere (hacker news for instance), you've now ensured I have one less place that I can go to to find out about them. you're a drain on wikipedia, a source of negative knowledge.

> Did you ever stop to think what positive impact the deletion of these articles actually makes? As far as I can tell, the only positive contribution that deletionism makes to the welfare of humanity is it makes individual deletionists happy when they destroy other people's work. I wonder if anyone has done research into possible links between deletionism and mental disorders such as OCPD?

There's lots of pages on Wikipedia that are basically self-promotion, or descriptions of inconsequential "news" events, or "micro-celebrities," or moderately rich people, or other stuff that will have no relevance in 10 years, except to people with OCPD who like to hoard information.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#246

Post by redthrowaway »

burgerbrain wrote: post #218
tommorris wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a hard drive space issue. All deleted articles are kept in the database. Are you seriously advocating that if someone comes and posts an article in main-space which is nothing but an advert for a crappy little garage band or some kid creating an article about how his friends are gay or whatever shouldn't be deleted?

Yeah, so what? No harm is done. Revert bad changes to articles people care about, and ignore articles that nobody cares about. If people actually someone start visiting these 'bad' articles, that means nothing more than you've just identified another avenue for expansion.

That turns Wikipedia into geocities, which is not its role or purpose. There have to be criteria for inclusion. If you have a bunch of articles with unverifiable information, you aren't doing your job as an encyclopedia. Quality matters.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#247

Post by Tobu »

joshfraser wrote: post #217

Christopher has posted this update on his profile: Dear internet, You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion. I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability gu…

One deletionist got a clue. Nice! But the process or the practice is still broken, and there's a lot more good articles being lost. Hopefully someday we'll have a better wiki (my wishlist: long-term archival, forking, mergeing and fuzzy links) with a less harmful community.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#248

Post by abstractbill »

sedachv wrote: post #245
cabalamat wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you ever stop to think what positive impact the deletion of these articles actually makes? As far as I can tell, the only positive contribution that deletionism makes to the welfare of humanity is it makes individual deletionists happy when they destroy other people's work. I wonder if anyone has done research into possible links between deletionism and mental disorders such as OCPD?

There's lots of pages on Wikipedia that are basically self-promotion, or descriptions of inconsequential "news" events, or "micro-celebrities," or moderately rich people, or other stuff that will have no relevance in 10 years, except to people with OCPD who like to hoard information.

You're arguing that many pages in Wikipedia aren't useful. I don't think anyone is debating that, but are these pages actually harmful?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#249

Post by mrmekon »

The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are:

1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users

2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia

Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments.

In response to the first argument:

Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand.

We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough.

In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain.

Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation:

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

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

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

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#250

Post by chc »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #193
lparry wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you ever stop to think what positive impact the deletion of these articles actually makes? I cant come up with any positive contribution you're making, but I can see that if I saw one of these languages mentioned somewhere (hacker news for instance), you've now ensured I have one less place that I can go to to find out about them. you're a drain on wikipedia, a source of negative knowledge.

I think this is far too harsh. >" you're a drain on wikipedia, a source of negative knowledge. " Notability requirements are there for a reason. If you think it's notable then there are clear methods on Wikipedia to press your case and establish the notability without stooping to direct personal criticism. I've not looked in detail but from the couple of posts here it seems the languages in question are esoteric and…

As far as I can tell, Wikipedia does not have clear methods (or at least not effective ones) for establishing the notability of things like programming languages, and some editors have failed to use their heads to adapt the guidelines to the situation. The fact that Heather Kuzmich (to save you the trouble of looking up her yet extant Wiki page: She was a contestant on "America's Next Top Model" who suffered from Asperger's) appears to be more notable than Alice ML shows the uneven standards of notability pretty clearly.
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