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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#71

Post by jedsmith »

nerfhammer wrote: post #67

The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons . This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no b…

Whoa, hold the phone: List of animals in The Simpsons is notable but Nemerle isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#72

Post by nettdata »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #53
kevbin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. In other words, the articles I am proposing for deletion are the lowest of the low hanging fruit. I honestly didn't think anyone would care, and to be honest, most don't -- the only reason anyone even took note of what I'm doing is…

What I find most interesting about this is that you are "cleaning up" Wikipedia so that you can better find new programming languages. You've mentioned this a couple of times.

Do you assume that everyone uses it for the same purpose?

What makes you think that is a valid reason for "cleaning" up the articles?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#73

Post by getsat »

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…

Haha, I love the edit war on his profile regarding his "non-notable" website: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...

Which is making him a little handful of money daily: http://w3spy.net/site/smogon.com

Chris, I suggest you pay GoDaddy the extra $10/year and hide your address.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#74

Post by chrismonsanto »

wisty wrote: post #48
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".

Of course I've done a Google Scholar search for Alice ML. There is roughly one admissible source -- "Through the looking glass" in Trends in Functional Programming. Small workshop paper, 12 citations according to CiteSeer. Doesn't show up in the ACM Digital Library. There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actually about Alice ML. To illustrate #3, consider "A concurrent lambda-calculus with Futures". This is a relatively well-cited paper, and it mentions Alice ML (a sentence or two?), but it isn't actually about Alice ML! It describes a new language construct and models the semantics in the lambda-calculus. In this case, wouldn't it be the construct, not the language that is notable?

I gave the following example in my Wikipedia talk page: the first paper on functional reactive programming is very famous. It describes a DSL called Fran. However, Fran could have not been given a name and the paper still would have been influential, because it wasn't the language itself that had the impact, it was the idea of functional reactive programming that had an impact.

(For the record, I got an A in PL! We used Coq. And proved a lot of theorems, mechanically.)

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#75

Post by nerfhammer »

jedsmith wrote: post #26
tibbon wrote: post #17

In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything f…

The one thing that has always blown my mind on Wikipedia is that they have "votes" all the time where people edit in their opinion, but then a decision is made which may or may not take the votes into account. They're actually pretty clear on this: there's a policy that says something to the effect of "yeah, we'll take votes, but the person acting on the vote doesn't have to listen to the votes because Wikipedia isn'…

Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#76

Post by cyrus_ »

Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high.

I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#77

Post by kprobst »

Udo wrote: post #36

The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers. The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because…

The main problem with deletionism in WP is the fact that the notion of notability is very subjective in some cases. There are situations that are very clear (people who have competed in Olympics are a shoe-in, garage bands that have never charted are not). Then there are cases like these where notability might be tied to a research or theoretical niche for example, and is hard to establish with enough solidity to break through the wikilawyering crud. And believe me, if they can out-lawyer you with WP:THIS and WP:THAT, the article you're trying to preserve will be deleted. Worse, the avenues for recourse are thin and usually controlled or influenced by the same people that you went against to begin with.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#78

Post by oconnore »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #62
oconnore wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...

I apologize for the confusion, but that still doesn't change much. See these papers on Nemerle:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/sscli2005/pachols...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#79

Post by halostatue »

rick_2047 wrote: post #57
jacques_chester wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? So now we need two levels of notability. First you must be published and you must have "impact". How is this "impact" thing defined, by the way? Are you agitating for an agreed bibliometric standard for notabi…

You action was a necessary cause of their deletion and therefore you are one of the directly culpable persons destroying the long tail of knowledge. I am no expert here, but does one person tagging something for deletion make such an impact? He must have convinced the administrators by only good arguments (like lawyer arguments, which are not necessarily moral or anything, just good enough to win the case). If we can…

I could be wrong, but the Wikipedia admins aren't responsible for creating pages or accepting pages. That's an "editor", e.g., a standard user. Admins can make pages, but I guarantee it was an interested editor/user who created the Alice ML page, not an admin acting as an admin.

Still, Wikipedia's deletionism is arrant nonsense up with which we should not put.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#80

Post by nerfhammer »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #69
jacques_chester wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this actually an argument for a better UI for wikipedia?

Perhaps, but no one has come forth and developed one. But what would such a UI look like? Would it filter based on user-given notability criteria?

Does it need to be at all sophisticated? What's wrong with categorizing lists according to "well-known" and "lesser-known"?
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