I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V).
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.
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 of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.
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 aware of Odin, and I have no idea who/what JangaFX. But that isn’t dispositive.)
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.
> 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.
You can read the policy yourself[1]. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me at all.
It does not seem unreasonable to me as well and I do not recall stating that being the case.
I only mentioned the YouTube scenario, but that's pretty much the case for almost everything. I'll repeat it again: it all boils down to the personal bias of the admins, and you seem to agree with that as well.
I don’t agree, because no evidence of bias has been advanced. They might be biased, but the plain reading of the situation of that (1) Odin is not notable under GNG, (2) JangaFX might be notable, but notability isn’t transitive.
What should be persuasive is a simple logical inference from the statements made to my conclusion.
From the article:
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development".
Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects.
> Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.
This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake.
As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA:
> Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists.
By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
No it's an indication that notoriety in Discord servers isn't a basis for relevance in an encyclopedia. Which is a good choice. A streamer mentioned a language? Wikipedia isn't Twitter.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages, not "the attention of social media" -- that's a silly shallow bad faith reduction. And I see that elsewhere you have written "a archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the articles criterion for the relevance of Odin" -- it doesn't seem that way to anyone who is remotely intellectually honest ... clearly it is ideology about the scope of Wikipedia articles that is work here totally independently of any knowledge of or details about Odin.
There is also virtually no attention in these comments to the content of TFA, e.g.,
> the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was deleted -- you won. People are still entitled to think that it was a mistake and to say why.
> I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages
Are you though? Like this seems like hobby project that hasn't really generated much discussion or interest in the broader programming language community, and practically speaking doesn't seem to have seen much use as a systems programming language (a single vfx package isn't really that impressive).
People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest, and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Yes ... read the other comments and TFA that you have completely ignored. And I wouldn't have said that I was talking about that if I weren't talking about that.
> People seem to get offended by the notion that this language is obscure and hasn't generated much interest
Nonsense.
> and yet they don't seem to offer any counter examples.
Nonsense. (These statements individually and together are literally incoherent.)
The bad faith here is tiresome. Virtually no one has even read TFA, which is actually a defense of Wikipedia and devolves into an attack on Ginger Bill for following right wingers on Twitter. (And I'm no fan of those people, to say the least, but they have nothing to do with the notability of Odin.)
Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?
what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias rely on secondary and not primary sources because they must be authoritative. The CEO of Kelloggs doesn't get to write the wikipedia article for kelloggs even if millions of people eat his cornflakes.
If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.
But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still...
The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).
> But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it?
Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”. As a result, there's plenty of things that are both true and well known to plenty of people that aren't on Wikipedia, but that's fine, and encyclopedia doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful.
But on the flip side, if they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.
please stop crying about bad faith every time someone disagrees with you. If you think everyone talks with you in bad faith maybe you didn't articulate your points very well.
What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work. The Encyclopedia Britannica which comes in at a frugal 120k entries doesn't add new ones because you yell at the manager long enough, they choose what to add.
Encyclopedias are not consumer or user driven but curator driven. It's not want or popularity that determines inclusion, it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance. It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes. I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
> What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work.
Changing the subject is yet more bad faith ... what I called bad faith wasn't anything about how encyclopedias work, it was about an evasive rhetorical move.
> it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance
That's quite an admission and contradicts other claims on this page that WP's notability guidelines are objective. And neither quality standards nor relevance are the same as notability -- it's almost as if this person has no idea what he's talking about and is simply doing apologetics for a position that he's planted his flag on.
> It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes.
Silly bad faith strawman. The complaints from people like Ginger Bill (which I don't necessarily endorse or agree with) are about gatekeeping, and the previous comment gave that away.
> I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.
Exactly. Because a person hangs out in certain social media circles or bubbles, doesn't mean that information from those places are general public knowledge or meets the standards that Wikipedia asks for.
Of course it's not general public knowledge ... that's why we put information in encyclopedias and other sources of information. People run across a mention of Odin and want to know about it.
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)