Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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• Hacker News
• > The Wikipedia Mods view themselves as "journalists" and trying to do the "morally ideological" thing by only allowing certain posts on there

  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.

  by andrepd
• I'll just say the obvious:

  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.

  by bobbytheblkbear
• > edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.

  Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.

  by bawolff
• I find it strange that they deleted the article. The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. I think there is a deeper bureaucratic pattern behind it. In every once-useful organization, there comes a point where the rules stop being instruments and become relics: nobody asks whether they still serve the original purpose, because the bureaucracy now exists mainly to defend its own procedures. That is basically Parkinson territory, and also the classic drift into cargo cult administration.

  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.

  by Rochus
• > The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest.

  According to what authority?

  by Gander5739
• slop in its purest non ai form
  by 217
• > My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".

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

  by loeg
• I have read the entire blog entry while waiting for all of MaraDNS’s automated tests to pass so I could release MaraDNS 3.5.0038.

  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.

  by strenholme
• I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
  by superdisk
• See also https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
  by eru
• This is silly. If you're language isn't getting enough coverage to get onto Wikipedia, stop complaining and get it some coverage. Ship features. Evangelise it. Get people using it.

  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).

  by zdc1
• I'm sure the Wikipedia mods have many great, valid reasons for deleting articles. Unfortunately for the ignorant masses, this has bad optics, since it looks like it runs counter to their goal of "cataloging all human knowledge".
  by chaostheory
• But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.
  by atiedebee
• Wikipedia can be strange sometimes, in particular the german variant.

  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.

  by shevy-java
• Wikipedia is very explicitly not a indiscriminate database of everything,[1] and dismissing anyone in the editing community who attempts curate it as CensorshipBros is the same type of twitter bullshitting called out by the blog post in the OP.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...

  by Alpha3031
• on mobile firefox, I'm seeing tons of numbered footnotes that don't link back to anything. is this a styling issue or what?

  [4] like this

  by pillmillipedes
• > My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".

  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?

  by nromiun
• He’s not saying that’s why the article was deleted.

  He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.

  by bena
• Honestly this article ends on a bit of an antagonistic note, but this whole situation is hilarious to me.

  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.

  by torginus
• Underlying this whole drama, and indeed as much of the article as I was able to stomach, is that there is a large degree of politicking, personal taste, and arbitrariness in the enforcement of Wikipedia’s policies, while pretending that there isn’t. At least on Reddit the mods don’t pretend they’re not biased
  by petesergeant
• I like this article. It puts to words something that has been in my mind for a while.
  by asibahi
• The fact that any factual text article needs to be deleted from an encyclopaedia fills me with rage.
  by brador
• It is disappointing to see that the v programming language has a Wikipedia article given it's history of being essentially fraudulent.
  by JBits
• This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older.

  Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.

  Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

  by baranul
• Being fraudulent doesn't make something less notable. It might even make something more notable, provided enough sources report on it.
  by hmry
• Crazy that nobody has mentioned the standup podcast on this
  by SpyCoder77
• Took a looooong time to get to their point (that ragebaiters don't actually care about neolangs _or_ wikimedia policy).
  by mwkaufma
• I'm sorry, but I agree with the wiki editors in this case. Odin is obscure. The author of this blog post seems to think it's well known, but I don't think that's substantiated.
  by Reubend
• Well, there's always

  https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language

  by smitty1e
• Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data. Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.
  by countWSS