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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#41

Post by kevbin »

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…

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 kind of "cleaning-up" seems detrimental to wikipedia and, frankly, a waste of your time.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#42

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #39
[deleted] wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Sorry, you're right. A PhD student isn't an idiot, regardless of how angry they might make me. edit: Chris, I apologise. I let my anger get the best of me. I'll keep my ad homs to a minimum wherever possible.

[deleted]

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#43

Post by oconnore »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #25
ubernostrum wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: I left a note for the guy asking why he doesn't do that (hunt up citations and improve articles). His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia. In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.

I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no citations exist :(

That statement is false.

Take Factor for example. It has been hosted at several conferences, has an active community of users, and has an academic paper published in ACM.

http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf

Perhaps what you meant to say is that no citations exist that meet your own apparently arbitrary standards of approval?

Edit:

It appears that it was another individual who recommended wiki/Factor for deletion. I apologize for my inaccurate accusation, but in my opinion that still does not excuse recommending the removal of Nemerle.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#44

Post by Locke1689 »

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…

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?

Hmm, not entirely. The problem is that certain publications are destined to be cited over and over again. Actually, entry into the elite publications at all can be a signal of significance. Anything published in Nature or SIGCOMM is pretty much notable. On a whim I checked the publication in front of me ("Inside the Bird’s Nest: Measurements of Large-Scale Live VoD from the 2008 Olympics") and it only has one citation but is clearly an important paper.

I won't speak about the people whining or the Wikipedia deletion policy (which I fundamentally disagree with) but clearly citation count is not how notability is derived. Even a quick search of Google Scholar shows ~7 citations for the Nemerle language. How many citations is enough for you?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#45

Post by jacques_chester »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #40
jedsmith wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) not cited enough to count I look forward to your explanation, to other academics, of why their work doesn't "count" because it isn't "cited enough". I also look forward to you explaining to us why you're qualified to determine whether a paper that you didn't write "counts". > I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/w…

It's not that their work doesn't "count" in the more general sense of the word, it's that their work has not had enough impact at the moment to establish the notability of the topic. I'm sure the researchers in question did fine work, and in the future their work will be widely recognized. I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. I didn't delete the articles b…

I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge.

Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#46

Post by greendestiny »

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…

Well lets not do this in the abstract. I'd never heard of Nemerle until now, but a search on Google Scholar and on Google shows many papers, tutorials and general discussion on the language.

I would think an overview of syntax is an excellent level of detail for an encyclopedia to cover a less common programming language. I certainly see no reason to dismiss that in itself.

Proposing that a timely defense to an AfD nomination is a good test of notability in itself is completely absurd. By itself you'd have to consider it a less reliable indicator of notability than someone writing the article in the first place.

If you're doing a PhD in a topic and you decide to take on a section of wikipedia you have at least be willing to take responsibility for your actions.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#47

Post by mike_esspe »

redthrowaway wrote: post #16
w1ntermute wrote: post #14

It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.

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.

Probably instead of deleting, this articles should be moved to sublayers. In this case "programming sublayer". If you don't subscribe to it, you won't see the article and links to it.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#48

Post by wisty »

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…

Look at the deletion threads. He knows what he's talking about, but I think he has some agenda. Maybe he failed a functional language course, and wants to kill off his professor's favourite languages?

There's no way that he couldn't just do a google scholar search for "Alice ML functional programming".

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#50

Post by jedsmith »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #40
jedsmith wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) not cited enough to count I look forward to your explanation, to other academics, of why their work doesn't "count" because it isn't "cited enough". I also look forward to you explaining to us why you're qualified to determine whether a paper that you didn't write "counts". > I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/w…

It's not that their work doesn't "count" in the more general sense of the word, it's that their work has not had enough impact at the moment to establish the notability of the topic. I'm sure the researchers in question did fine work, and in the future their work will be widely recognized. I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. I didn't delete the articles b…

> One of the basic tenets of Wikipedia is "assume good faith"

Stylistic note: try not to assume that people you're dealing with outside of Wikipedia aren't intimately familiar with Wikipedia. It comes off a bit condescending.

I'm aware of WP:AGF, and I'm also aware of WP:IGNORE. You're selectively choosing which tenets to subscribe to: deletionism benefits nobody, because the opinions of the participants in the AfD (yes, opinions) are influencing the availability of information to everyone. Your actions are not benefiting Wikipedia, whether you want to lay claim to them or blame the Internet as you did in this thread. Rather than try to improve what was presented to you, you are pursuing an idealistic utopia of programming languages on Wikipedia, where only programming languages with a wide audience that you can observe get blessed with a mention on the site.

I don't have any stock invested in any of the languages you've nominated, but I do see the benefit of a resource describing them for people to find via Google. Some of the languages you've nominated are very new, and are finding a community - you've basically just issued a big "you don't count" to every single person that uses those languages. It has happened to companies I work for, too. I work for a very large contender in a specific market, which has had several "of impact" (to steal your term) media mentions including Dr. Dobb's Journal. They've been deleted from Wikipedia on more than one occasion due to not proving notability to the editor of the week that feels like nominating the article. It's a joke.

I find it really hard to digest that you subscribe so hard to the notion of notability (a very subjective concept, might I add), admit that your criteria for evaluating notability need improvement, then nominate languages and successfully get them deleted anyway.

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