Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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• Hacker News
• I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
  by square_usual
• When Wikipedia first came out, there was a big debate about articles on people: should it be inclusive (anybody with minor accomplishments gets in) or should there be some threshold to be met? Ultimately, it was decided that if the perception was that the person involved was to become notable principally by having a WP page, then they did not qualify. WP did not want to be used as a means of getting attention/traction/credibility. I like that criterion and I think it’s reasonable to feel that Odin does not meet it…yet.
  by ternaryoperator
• I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic.

  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 Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.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.

  by CM30
• > 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.

  I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.

  But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.

  And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.

  We trust people first, up and down the scale.

  by ajross
• The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter?

  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?

  by skotobaza
• Well we now know the author's true intentions. It was never about any real criticism, and simply an attack on a person they politically dislike.
  by de_nied
• If you read the whole article, you'll understand the context and how its relates to Wikipedia. The fact GingerBill accuses Wikipedia of having a political bias against Odin when (spoilers) it was actually a "constitutional conservative" who triggered the deletion is amusing.
  by vor_
• >There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:

  >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.

  by leecommamichael
• Agreed. This blog entry was really good, but then it started getting really left-leaning and making leftist cancel-culture type arguments by the end. Why is it relevant that Odin’s developer follows Matt Walsh on Twitter? Would Matt Walsh really call himself a “White supremacist”, or that a label placed on him by people who don’t like Walsh?

  These culture war “hot takes” at the end of the article distract from what was otherwise a reasonable look at how online culture brings out people who believe conspiracy theories, don’t care about objective fact, and post content with far more heat than light.

  by strenholme
• The author of this article seems quite politically driven like the mods on Wikipedia, and created it disingenuously. I feel it's an attempt to overwhelm the readers through massive amounts of text so that they are too tired to see what's being said at the beginning and end are completely unrelated.
  by de_nied
• I don't know men. I do hang out in the handmade Discord from time to time, and Bill has not been very kind, to say the least.

  Maybe I just met him on a bad day.

  by vitaminCPP
• +1 I remember joining the discord server and I think that Bill even responded to me and the community was helpful!
  by Imustaskforhelp
• Encyclopedias are not designed to report on pop culture. The entire nature of an encyclopedia is to be downstream of good secondary sources, ideally academic, and summarise what those good secondary sources have said about specific topics.

  Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?

  by willdr
• If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind.

  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.

  by andai
• I genuinely don't think Malbolge, for example, warrants a Wikipedia page if Odin doesn't
  by kibibu
• Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.
  by brendoelfrendo
• In wikipedia-land, I read "primary source" as "motivated source", given their need to prune biased edits.
  by w10-1
• You've almost got it, except:

  > Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them

  No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.

  This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.

  Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.

  This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.

  by wavemode
• Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.

  And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.

  by James_K
• > If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud

  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.

  by bawolff
• can only speak from my personal experience, I have made a scratchpad app within Odin and it was the first language that I picked for because I wanted C-esque speed and gui libraries being built in and I even used LLM's to write the whole thing to see LLM's capabilities.

  After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!

  I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.

  I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least

  by Imustaskforhelp
• Zig is more popular. Name a second modern "C competitor" language that's more popular?
  by dismalaf
• > one of

  Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.

  But other than that?

  Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!

  by forrestthewoods
• > Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments

  >

  > 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...

  by andrybak
• What kind of happens is that there are some people who invest their lives in Wikipedia, their opinions is what ends up mattering.

  This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.

  The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.

  Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.

  So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)

  Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.

  by lerno
• This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.

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

  by dibujaron
• It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.
  by loeg
• I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.
  by 3836293648
• > I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.

  Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.

  The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).

  In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.

  > maybe I just happened to miss it?

  You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.

  by klibertp
• I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.
  by panzi