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Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#361

Post by cess11 »

bobbytheblkbear wrote: post #340
amiga386 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

In the Wikipedia sense these two are much more notable than the Odin language, because universities and academic publications have given them publicised attention.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#362

Post by Morromist »

lambdaone wrote: post #263
Morromist wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all" Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.

"They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't" is exactly the point of the notability policy in the first place. Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.

I see what you mean, but I've written a fair number of wikipedia articles at the behest of professors who are experts in their fields and were annoyed that X person wasn't mentioned. The articles were eventually deleted.

The professors should probably be the ones who decide what is notable in my view. That a small group of wikipedia editors did not appreciate the significance of the persons isn't surpising, they can't be experts about everything.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#363

Post by cess11 »

Apparently it's important to these odinists to be featured in a particular encyclopedia, so why haven't they spent some time over the last decade or so wooing some press and getting some doctoral students to use their language?

That would have solved this issue for them.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#364

Post by yellowapple »

Given the argument that “Odin must be notable because JangaFX uses it in production!”, it seems worthwhile to note that JangaFX itself doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page. Maybe the case for Odin's inclusion would be stronger if someone fixed that?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#365

Post by yellowapple »

chris_wot wrote: post #142
traes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.

Could you use it in production?

I could use (and have used) Körber/HighJump Advantage Architect in production, and yet that's nonetheless so far from notable that Körber's own Wikipedia page doesn't even bother to mention its acquisition of HighJump and the software products thereof, let alone the proprietary graphical programming language which HighJump's customers use to configure and customize their flagship warehouse management system.

Needless to say: production use ≠ notability, for very good reason.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#366

Post by cygx »

Rochus wrote: post #359
Gander5739 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. According to what authority?

I'm not an Odin user, but interested in programming languages. Concerning Odin, we have these figures: GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016. I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.

Wikipedia doesn't care about Github stars, forks or discord members, but "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".

As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#367

Post by vitaminCPP »

leecommamichael wrote: post #144

>There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure: >You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information. See who they follow on Twitter. This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill. My politics are left-leaning…

I don't know men. I do hang out in the handmade Discord from time to time, and Bill has not been very kind, to say the least.

Maybe I just met him on a bad day.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#368

Post by torginus »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #14
dibujaron wrote: post #5

This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics. Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?

I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC ) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Li…

Unfortunately what makes a programming language famous is usually not the thing that makes it useful.

For example, Go got famous because of how much they pushed channels and launching thousands of green threads per app as the next big thing.

Over time, people kind of soured on these ideas, but Go was a great, simple language with good DX that built static executables.

As a contrast, languages like Kotlin or Swift also brought huge DX improvements to their respective audiences, but didn't really have any standout (novel or divisive) features that made people talk about them.

Odin's like that - it's basically C (or more accurately Pascal) with better generics and some gamedev related features, so it's not as painful to write as plain C.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#369

Post by Rochus »

cygx wrote: post #366
Rochus wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an Odin user, but interested in programming languages. Concerning Odin, we have these figures: GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016. I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.

Wikipedia doesn't care about Github stars, forks or discord members, but "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.

As I said, at some point the bueraucracy took over. In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved. Here in Switzerland, we have a fitting expression for the present behavior in face of obsolescence: "schön sterben" (to die beautifully).

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#370

Post by cygx »

Rochus wrote: post #369
cygx wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia doesn't care about Github stars, forks or discord members, but "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.

As I said, at some point the bueraucracy took over. In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved. Here in Switzerland, we have a fitting expression for the present behavior in face of obsolescence: "schön sterben" (to die beautifully).

In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved.

Such approaches rarely scale: When the Eternal September rolls in, you tighten the reins or get swept away...

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