People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:

Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...

This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.

There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)

If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.

"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...

If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.

> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.

So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.

And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.

It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.

Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?

>

> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.

important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.

For more details, see

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...

Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.

I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.

For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.

And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.

The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.

But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.

Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.

However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.

Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.

>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 and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya)

If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right.

Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.

e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.

The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.

And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.

And then I read this:

> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view

> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:

> 2. See who they follow on Twitter

What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?

For the record, I like Odin.

(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)

zig: 71,565

rust: 304,405

golang: 1,246,300

malbogle: 9

Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.

Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.

There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?

Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.

Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.

Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't

- text completely overflowing the background

- body text is arguably too small

- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually

- footnotes appearing out of order

Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.

On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.

If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).

* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles

It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

my $0.02: if they think odin is notable enough for wikipedia and all they need is for someone to actually note it, now is the time to hire a pr firm. seriously. that's what they're there for.

But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.

I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.

So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.

And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.

Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.

Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.

Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.

So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.

It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.

An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?

That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.

[4] like this

GingerBill, a person who cares deeply and has very specific ideas about how some obscure stuff the public doesn't care about should work, meets another group of people who are exactly like him, except for they happen to be fixated on other stuff, fails to recognize this, and assumes the world is out to get him.

He reaches out to Jimmy Wales, who acts like the adult in the room, and tells him to follow the rules just like anyone else, immediately gets added to the list of evil co-conspirators.

After running out of ideas, he tries to follow the rules, and lo and behold, his Wikipedia page gets added.

As an open source maintainer, Bill likely constantly deals with the kind of person who tries to get a PR merged, who, after getting told what needs fixing before the merge, cries injustice and goes on an internet crusade instead of doing what they've been told.

Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).

That would have solved this issue for them.

My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion.

That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that something Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with.

I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.

I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.

Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.

It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.

The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.

If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language

Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.

Ignoring all other factors, IMO there should be an article about Odin the programming language. Deleting an article about something that exists, is incredibly stupid; not sure why Wikipedia resorts to that. If Wikipdia deems Odin not noteworthy - and I don't really care about Odin myself - then the article could be kept short. That would still be better than deleting it.

Wikipedia started with the goal of a database of literally everything. One could argue that Odin is not relevant because it may not be used by anyone, but then this would need to be an objective argument based on numbers and data, because many other programming languages are used by few people yet are mentioned on Wikipedia. So, that seems to be a stupid decision by those responsible on Wikipedia. CensorshipBros are annoying in general - the english wikipedia is much more open than the german wikipedia by the way.

What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?

The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.

That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.

I don't know any of the people in this post, since I firmly believe that not having twitter, instagram, or tiktok is the #1 thing anyone can do to improve their mental well-being. From this sentence alone however, I can exactly establish what kind of person this is. The persecution complex, the "journalist" as an insult, it's all there.

> I know that as of now, GingerBill follows: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Libs of TikTok.

Nailed it.