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Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

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Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#82

Post by halostatue »

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…

How many of the folks who commented on the notability of the programming languages in question actually had the qualifications or knowledge to do so?

I'm not questioning your actions, although I think deletionism is a prima facie bad thing; I just doubt most people who would comment on such things are knowledgeable about them.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#83

Post by Devilboy »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #74
wisty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 There are a number of other papers on Saarland University's website, but they are either 1) not peer reviewed (tech reports) 2) not cited or 3) not actua…

So after all this outrage, do you agree that maybe you took it just a little bit too far?

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#85

Post by j_baker »

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.

> A PhD student isn't an idiot

I have met a few PhD students who weren't the most notable programming languages in the wiki if you get my drift...

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#86

Post by bpodgursky »

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…

Christopher is a PhD student at Princeton under advisor Dave Walker.

If anyone here has connections to Princeton or Dave Walker, I really encourage you to bring this to his attention, as he is hopefully someone Christopher respects enough to listen to advice from. Given that Dave's CV includes designing several esoteric programming languages, I suspect he would have a personal stake in this issue.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#87

Post by derleth »

halostatue wrote: post #79
rick_2047 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Everyone's a deletionist about something.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#88

Post by grav1tas »

If the problem is pollution of the main lists of programming language articles by entries that Mr. Monsanto considers to be inappropriate for listing...wouldn't an appropriate compromise be removing them from these programming languages lists? This seems like a shortcoming in Wikipedia's policies? This way the data is preserved, but not related to the main search spaces. If you look a language up on Google, it will still be there because it will be indexed.

Otherwise, Mr. Monsanto has every right to push his agenda on Wikipedia insofar as it is within the bounds of legal play on the site. Attacking his character gets nobody anywhere, and probably adds credence to whatever he's doing. If you're really concerned about deletions of your favorite PL articles, sit on them. If a request for removal/deletion (I don't know the wiki-jargon) pops up, just dump all over it. Even better, improve the articles. He can't get something deleted that's not mediocre. Agents like Mr. Monsanto will actually improve the quality of your average article one way or the other. I'm impressed that somebody would bother reading so many articles and post meta-data about them....especially on a topic that so few people engage in.

It's curious that pages that don't meet Mr. Monsanto's criterion of having been cited in a 'top-tier' publication. There are so many articles on Wikipedia that do not have ties to anything real. Is it really fair to hold PL topics to academic-level standards? What if somebody considers PL an art, or something other than semantics and formalisms? This does happen, and people who create new languages from languages that aren't considered much in the PL community might actually fall into these categories.

I think Mr. Monsanto would do well to spell out his criteria for what isn't desirable in precise and formal terms.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#89

Post by katovatzschyn »

j_baker wrote: post #19
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…

> We need better criteria for establishing notability of programming languages: for some reason, a number of people seem to think languages are notable if they are mentioned in a book/third-tier academic paper or have a few people who contribute to/use them. My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them.

     My favorite part is how he admits the rules he's enforcing are inadequate, and yet continues to enforce them.
Sounds like furthering a cause. By the specificness of that cause, I would have to bet:

- Had an article he wrote on a small programming language, possibly his own, deleted for not being notable enough.

- Feels that less notable languages than the one in question were not treated similarly.

- Perceives injustice.

- Takes action.

Hopefully nothing other than some quality encyclopedia writing and anti-deletionist attitude (space is very cheap) comes from this. I don't like how ugly this is already becoming.

Re: Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

#90

Post by mfukar »

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…

  None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up.
Alice ML has more than a handful of papers on its design, semantics, implementation, and related concepts. Are peer reviewed publications not reliable? As a PhD student, I'm sure you disagree.

The best you could do is add those citations to the article, instead of the chosen course of (in)action.

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