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Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#391

Post by dismalaf »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #297
SanjayMehta wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I tried looking for reliable secondary sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any. That's not Wikipedia's fault. It is a bit weird that people are insisting that Odin is such a big deal that it must have a Wikipedia page, but apparently no tech website of note has ever mentioned it.

> tech website of note

Does anyone care about "tech websites"? Like what, one of those weird websites that thinks they're a newspaper whose revenue collapsed 10 years ago so they only publish clickbait no one reads?

Does anyone actually get tech news, especially about programming languages, from a space that's not X, HN, YouTube, GitHub, Codeberg or a user group?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#392

Post by leecommamichael »

vitaminCPP wrote: post #367
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.

I think “kindness” is somewhat different than what I’m referring to. I’d agree he’s not always kind.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#393

Post by econ »

_def wrote: post #184
econ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you seriously complaining that you are not getting taken seriously anymore after creating a track record of acting in bad faith? You literally can't create constructive online communities if you don't do that.

You describe the concept of being taken seriously. We use this a lot in real life. It's arguably a very useful concept.

Wikipedia has elaborate guidelines for everything but users have their own ideas.

For example, the guidelines don't grant you the privilege to delete contributions because you've decided not to take the editor seriously.

Imagine reverting and putting it in an edit summary: I don't take this guy seriously

If there are insufficient independent so called reliable sources to establish the so called notability of Odin but it does have 11k GitHub stars. Then you put an infobox on the article that describes the problem.

You then attempt to find sources. If you find nothing that Wikipedia accepts you might have a conversation about sources for programming languages.

Then you end up reading things like the AFD for hackernoon (22 May 2026) Not even worthy of a stub?

Then you wonder how any programming article established so called notability.

I've just looked at php and I don't see any reference from mainstream media, definitely nothing specifically about php.

It doesn't seem notable?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#394

Post by econ »

Alpha3031 wrote: post #112
econ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. > I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough. You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?

You can't report someone for constructive improvements, quality citations and polite talk page discourse.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#395

Post by NordStreamYacht »

andrepd wrote: post #248
NordStreamYacht wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was like 10 years ago. Long before the real invasion of the bots. I don't even remember the username or password of my account any more.

Anti-vandalism bots have been used for much longer than 10 years lol

Don't know, don't care. Wikipedia is not a major source of information for me any more, the summaries from various search engines are enough.

For everything else there's grok.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#396

Post by NordStreamYacht »

shevy-java wrote: post #109
NordStreamYacht wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They even roll back corrections to grammar. Power tripping overrides common sense.

This could be automatic. I noticed this myself because I corrected both typos in english and german wikipedia; sometimes they are reverted, sometimes not. There seems no logic in it, so I assumed that in some cases this must have been automatic wiki bots reverting something.

I would expect a bot to be consistent. Wikipedia editors? Not so much.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#397

Post by FullGarden_S »

woodruffw wrote: post #275
FullGarden_S wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 awar…

To be clear, I was not talking about Odin specifically. This is about notability in general.

>where those third-party sources are themselves notable and reputable (in the subject area)

this is where the bias kicks in. It would be great if Wikipedia's notability goes "All youtube sources are not reliable" but instead its always phrased like "Some Youtube sources are not reliable" and what qualifies as this "some" is usually decided by the personal bias of the admins.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#398

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

dismalaf wrote: post #391
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried looking for reliable secondary sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any. That's not Wikipedia's fault. It is a bit weird that people are insisting that Odin is such a big deal that it must have a Wikipedia page, but apparently no tech website of note has ever mentioned it.

> tech website of note Does anyone care about "tech websites"? Like what, one of those weird websites that thinks they're a newspaper whose revenue collapsed 10 years ago so they only publish clickbait no one reads? Does anyone actually get tech news, especially about programming languages, from a space that's not X, HN, YouTube, GitHub, Codeberg or a user group?

Do you want Wikipedia editors to start citing YouTube videos?

I'll tell you what will happen if sourcing standards are loosened in that way. You'll get tons of editors arguing, "So and so said this at 21:45 in this podcast." And then someone else will say, "But he said this other thing that contradicts that at 22:30." And then a third editor will come along and say the person was just joking. The signal-to-noise in the sources will go way down, and you'll have editors acting like detectives and investigative journalists with a mass primary sources. It will be a mess, and it won't work.

Those "weird websites" have a reputation one can track. One can look at whether they have a history of correcting errors, citing sources correctly, etc.

That's why Wikipedia relies on secondary sources with a history of reliability. It's a simple rule that works for a website with tons of anonymous editors.

And guess what? There are tons of secondary sources that cover every major programming language. It looks like Odin is highly niche, which is why it has no secondary sourcing. Maybe it doesn't need a Wikipedia article.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#399

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

youarenaive343 wrote: post #387
thunderfork wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cited sources are as-close-to-truthful-as-one-can-manage. This is how one avoids having the truthiness of the editors matter.

It's just shifting the problem from one dimension to another, not actually solving it.

Shifting the problem from anonymous Wikipedia editors to newspapers and magazines is a big improvement.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#400

Post by pilgrim0 »

greenoracle9 wrote: post #201

The awkward part is that modern software communities often do not produce the kind of durable secondary sources Wikipedia wants.

It’s also intriguing how an academic article read by no one would pass as valid source but an YouTube channel with multiple videos about the thing reaching millions of people across several countries and languages would not. I understand it’s not about reach, but trust and such. And it’s weird that Wikipedia, a Website, does not trust, in essence, its very medium.
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