Live data from Hacker News

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

katamari64.se

271–280 of 441 posts

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible,…

So Odin is a proprietary language used by a startup company that makes graphical effect tools, one of which is popular with vfx artists? I can see why Wikipedia's washing its hands of it. > If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable" Notability is not transitive. If you make a notable thing using a non-notable thing, it doesn…

>Odin is a proprietary language

What do you mean by “proprietary language”? To me “proprietary” means closed source, where one can only download binaries, not source code. “proprietary” can also have source code available, but with a license which is not open-source.

Odin, however, is an open-source language with an open-source license:

https://github.com/odin-lang/Odin/blob/master/LICENSE

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Linking to the equivalent of "@groq is this true??" should be mocked.

Your reply was as substantive as my original, but I'll upvote you anyway, because there is no point in being a jerk.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#273
post #187

Funny how GearsDatapacks ( https://github.com/gearsdatapacks ) votes to delete the Odin page because it's "non-notable" yet is a core member of the non-notable Gleam language which shockingly has a Wikipedia page

Well, Casey Muratori argued github stars should be considered a metric of notability, and the Gleam repository has almost twice the number (21.6k vs Odin's 11k)! Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...

> I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...

They both don't belong there, TBH. I'm a PL nerd and have been one for nearly 20 years. Wikipedia is the last place I would search for information about even the TIOBE Top 20 languages, let alone anything newer or more niche. The only reason new/niche languages have a Wikipedia page is for advertising - they all hope to attract new users and convey an impression of being mature enough for serious work. It's a failure of Wiki that some pages like that were not flagged and deleted quickly enough. Enthusiasts will keep creating those pages as long as there's a chance they'll fly under the radar long enough to make them hard to delete. If they put that effort into RosettaCode (also a wiki) pages, we'd be all the better for it.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#274
post #250

I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic. For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite th…

> The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.

I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.

But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.

And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.

We trust people first, up and down the scale.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V). (But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)

You make it sound like you're confusing popularity with notability. Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent. The Notability…

Notability is a qualified state on Wikipedia, as both TFA and Wikipedia itself document.

One of the qualifications is having third-party sources document the subject, where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area). A company’s statement that it uses a programming language might be factual, but that doesn’t necessarily make it notable.

(To be clear: I was only vaguely aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time. Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cu…

The deletion discussion also takes time and consensus, and even then isn't irreversible; you can move the text to draftspace, [1] and try again when you do have proof of notability. Even if the article is deleted before you can respond you can always get a deletion review [0] get your article text back via temporary undeletion and move that to draftspace. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts [1] https:/…

Actually, I see the article has already been moved to draftspace, so nothing has been lost, except visibility, for which you will have to establish notability; you have six months to work on this before it gets deleted, and you can always go back for as many tries as you like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it. Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's no…

I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot ), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.

I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!!

I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.

But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#278

I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language. There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. H…

I've heard of Odin for years now. Maybe because I like knowing about new/nascent languages. For example, have you heard of roc-lang? You've likely heard of Zig. It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble. Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them. Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug

Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts?

It is an encyclopedia of topics that meet its standards of notability (ie there exists "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"[1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#279
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I understand the editors/admins can't be experts on every topic but just because THEY don't think something is notable doesn't mean most people don't either.

In general, it should be clear from the article if the subject is notable. Admins don't have to be an expert, they just have to read the article. Notable is not the same as popular.

Notability is arguably even more subjective than popularity.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it. Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's no…

I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot ), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.

After reading through several pages of their comments, I'm roughly 100% certain that the user you're referring to is not a bot and is not karma farming. They just post a lot.
Post reply on HN