I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?
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...
Yes, I tried saying this to both GingerBill and Casey on Twitter but they were unreceptive. I understand their frustrations and I think Wikipedia does have sourcing gaps for projects like Odin. But you can't really understand the spam problem until you've seen it firsthand, and general case notability requirements are one of the first lines of defence against bad actors.
And notability isn't just for spam, the core difficulty with Wikipedia is that people disagree about what should be written in articles. The site only functions because of a masterful Jiu-jitsu move where we redirect heated arguments about what Wikipedia should say into heated arguments about which Reliable Source to cite.
That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end.
Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
>Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
Yes, for the encyclopedia project. But they are many use cases where saving who said what, when, within which contextual summarizable frame can also prove very useful.
Luckily we still have things like archive.org still covering a large part of such a need. Because otherwise, anyone can say anything and its contrary just before denying reality never happened, and then the web becomes saturated of every assertion and its contrary being all covered in some farmed nonsense without any way to weight them in the hand of general public.
The gate is reliable secondary sources. These sources, for the most part, don't check their facts using Wikipedia. These sources also tend to have feedback mechanisms, so if they have make a mistake, their response is to correct it in a timely fashion.
This is what makes them reliable in Wikipedians' judgement. A publication that regularly made errors, or published claims regardless of veracity, or left errors in place even after being notified of them, would quickly lose its "reliable" badge. Wikipedians even track the downfall of a reliable source becoming an unreliable one, and say you can only cite articles from the time period the source was reliable.
And Wikipedia itself is ready and waiting to remove citogenesis and prevent it coming back, the moment it's no longer in a reliable source. So while citogenesis can happen, it's detected and resolved over time, it's not some "gotcha".
Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person?
Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...
Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it.
Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
Wikipedia’s strategy is to offload the risk of wrong information to sources which can absorb the hit rather than have it reflected back. It’s “safer” for Wikipedia even to knowingly publish inaccuracies or misinformation from a reputable source than the truth from an unknown source. A lie from a reputable source is unavoidable, a lie from an unknown source is unforgivable.
It's also that letting editors argue based on their own original research would be a recipe for chaos.
"Use reliable secondary sources" is a simple rule that limits the scope for possible conflict and chaos. For an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's very important.
I tried looking for reliable secondary sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any.
That's not Wikipedia's fault. It is a bit weird that people are insisting that Odin is such a big deal that it must have a Wikipedia page, but apparently no tech website of note has ever mentioned it.
It's funny. Just last week I was trying to figure out what this ODIN thing is, and naturally searched Wikipedia, and found nothing. I then did a web search, and found nothing particularly illuminating, and gave up trying to figure out what it is and just added a filtering rule to filter out any further mention of Odin in my RSS feed reader.
Does anyone care about "tech websites"? Like what, one of those weird websites that thinks they're a newspaper whose revenue collapsed 10 years ago so they only publish clickbait no one reads?
Does anyone actually get tech news, especially about programming languages, from a space that's not X, HN, YouTube, GitHub, Codeberg or a user group?
Do you want Wikipedia editors to start citing YouTube videos?
I'll tell you what will happen if sourcing standards are loosened in that way. You'll get tons of editors arguing, "So and so said this at 21:45 in this podcast." And then someone else will say, "But he said this other thing that contradicts that at 22:30." And then a third editor will come along and say the person was just joking. The signal-to-noise in the sources will go way down, and you'll have editors acting like detectives and investigative journalists with a mass primary sources. It will be a mess, and it won't work.
Those "weird websites" have a reputation one can track. One can look at whether they have a history of correcting errors, citing sources correctly, etc.
That's why Wikipedia relies on secondary sources with a history of reliability. It's a simple rule that works for a website with tons of anonymous editors.
And guess what? There are tons of secondary sources that cover every major programming language. It looks like Odin is highly niche, which is why it has no secondary sourcing. Maybe it doesn't need a Wikipedia article.
They're a government run, public broadcaster and they're this poor... But they're an acceptable Wikipedia source.
Meanwhile, someone like the Primeagen has 1.15 million followers and has used Odin. That's not notable?
JangaFX products have been used by creators that cumulatively have millions of subscribers, on top of a website that says they use Odin, on top of the CEO and others X accounts, but that's not enough to convince people JangaFX is a real company with real products?
Remember, CNN and all the "trusted" news outlets also have YouTube accounts.
I gave you the first search result. There are probably tens of thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines about Rust, along with probably hundreds of published books. Unlike Odin, Rust is notable and heavily covered by secondary sources.
If it's so easy to find why did you choose gossip? Take the second hit or third if it's all so technical. But it's not. It's all garbage gossip because Ars Technica is a garbage site, it's like TMZ for nerds.
Is your position that all coverage of Rust is gossip? That's just not a tenable position.
By the way, the article I linked to discusses the history of Rust in the Linux kernel, which is hardly gossip and illustrates why Rust is notable.
You've finally found a better source than YouTube for Odin. Whether it meets Wikipedia's standards will probably depend on whether it's self-published.
I looked at the php article and it's notability is pretty much taken on faith. No one is silly enough to question it.
I pick that one because there are countless programming articles about less popular topics.
A really good source on wp is an article from a major news outlet that talks exclusively about the topic. It gets more hilarious where a tech news website requires the same.
For example, I never read hackernoon but it's big, old and it has a redaction. What it doesn't have is so called reliable sources. Therefore it was deleted and isn't considered a good source.
If some big newspaper would write about hackernoon it would immediately be worthy of an article and it would be usable for articles about things like Odin.
Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.
After reading through several pages of their comments, I'm roughly 100% certain that the user you're referring to is not a bot and is not karma farming. They just post a lot.
I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!!
I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.
But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?
You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.
Yes, apparently some people (like stymaar) do look at user's profile and look at those numbers to decide how they feel about things. Sometimes high karma can be a sign of trust or a established profile, sometimes (like in this case coupled with relatively recent registration date) it comes of as a signal of suspicion.
They do have products you can buy, download and use... And plenty of people on YouTube have made videos reviewing or showing how to use their products.
Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.
Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth. If you put a factual statement into an article, you're required to have a written source that Wikipedia can cite. "Someone who says they're the CEO said so on the talk page" doesn't cut it. If the CEO really wants to get this info into Wikipedia, they can go give an interview to a reputable newspaper, news website, magazine, etc., and then Wikipedia can cite that.
Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.
In this case, Wikipedia's policy is reasonable. I tried looking for any articles in reputable sources that discuss the Odin programming language. I couldn't find any. Not one article in any tech magazine.
Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?"
The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.
I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
Just to be clear Brainfuck was built popularized and has been part of the nerd programming zeitgeist for longer than JangaFX has been around as a company and before the internet culture was less noteworthy.
The fact that you are pointing that language out specifically is reason enough.
Rules should be treated as such, strict guidelines that exist because the easier options failed and they will punish or hurt the innocent but that's the price we pay for living in a rules based system.
I think they could surely be more forgiving to programming domain but then everyone will ask for similar benefits.
If your best sources for a project are that you and people you work with use it that isn't very conveniencing and the fact that supposedly you have a lot of fans on twitter shouldn't make it any different.
If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion.
I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it.
Brainfuck is quite famous though? It even started the wave of 'joke languages', I vividly remember few years when every few month somebody makes a new language
Learning brainfuck was a wildly known challenge back in my uni days (and not only for IT studunts, but in mathematician circles as well). I have yet to know any students that would get competitive over writing in Odin.
694 public odin repositories on gh vs 2064 public brainfuck repositories. And most of the brainfuck fame was before using github so wildly popular.
Brainfuck is the definition of not widely used, but notable
If you conduct a poll of all software engineers, I bet at least a third have heard of brainfuck. It is very widely used as an example of a minimal but Turing complete language and the name itself gathers interest.
Now do Odin. I bet not even one in ten knows what Odin is.
No they are not, which is why Wikipedia doesn't rely on them. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be verifiable via a reliable secondary source (books, newspapers, etc from publishers with a reputation), so anything written by any editor can, if unverifiable, be removed by any other editor, anonymous or not.
A fun excercise but lots of corner cases not covered. For example the words ακριβός (expensive) and ακριβώς (exactly) would have exactly the same spelling
I quickly realized that this was the greatest downside of the simplification.
And actually kills one of the things I actually really like about the Greek language.
This would make Greek more like English for example where you need more context surrounding words to understand their meaning.
How well you interact with other members of a society increases your chances of procreation, survival, knowledge acquisition, ie. it makes sense as a measure of intelligence
It's a pretty ambiguous definition. The most powerful man in the world right now is not someone I consider a role model for social cognition and yet there he is with the football for the second time demonstrating grandmaster skill at social cognition to get there.
So in all seriousness with a bit of snark: Do you want a malevolent AGI? Because "good at navigating society" as the only benchmark here is how you get a malevolent AGI...
Evidence: cuckoos and cheaters all the way down the evolutionary ladder as a winning strategy and arms race against the hard workers.
I sometimes imagine wheeled creatures evolving in a location with a big flat hard surface like the Utah salt flats or the Nazca desert, but I guess there's not much reward for being able to roll around since those places are empty as well as flat. Tumbleweed found some success that way though, maybe?
The golden wheel spider lives in the sand dunes of the Namib Desert. When confronted by a spider-hunting wasp, it can perform a "cartwheeling" maneuver to escape. By tucking in its legs and turning onto its side, it can roll down a sand dune.
Is there any biological examples of freely rotating power systems? We have nice rotating joints with muscles to provide power, but I can't think of any joint that would allow the sort of free rotation while also producing torque, a wheeled animal would require.
Something internal to some shellfish, I believe, a kind of mixing rod that rotates. Hold on, I'll check if it's powered. (Also rotifers but they're tiny.)
Hmm, no, it sounds like it's externally powered:
> The style consists of a transparent glycoprotein rod which is continuously formed in a cilia-lined sac and extends into the stomach. The cilia rotate the rod, so that it becomes wrapped in strands of mucus.
Or maybe the cilia ( = wiggly hairs) could be seen as a kind of motor. Depends how you count it and exactly what the set-up is, I can't tell from this.
I think I would count internal power created by the rotating component itself. I hadn't though of that possibility, since human made machinery usually has the power producing component located in the main body and transferring that power to a freely rotating component is quite hard. Biological systems wouldn't necessarily look like that, and could feasibly be powered by the wheels themselves deforming as if the wheels were a separate, but connected, biological system.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)
Whenever you ask someone in the creative industries, they point to the aggressive tightening of the benefits system. People could write music and books while on the dole in the 80s, and become commercial successes. Now it's an area that's only accessible to people who can afford to have their parents "loss leader" their first few years in the industry, and as a result has lost all "realness".
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.
must commend this briton for his unparalleled sense of humor, razor-sharp wit, subtle, effortlessly charming and perfectly timed quips. While American humor tends to be more direct and sometimes louder, this dry, understated delivery is a unique gift.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.
Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.
But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.
An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.
Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...
This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.
My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.
> Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option...
"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.
I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.
So the choice is between social-media-induced mental illness and alienation/isolation? No wonder kids are so screwed up today: there is no winning move!
It absolutely is a reason. Everyone else is doing it, meaning if you don't you feel isolated.
So, either you participate and feel isolated through your social connections by social media, or you don't participate and feel even more isolated because you don't have social connections.
30 years ago, you didn't live vicariously through the published perception of the world you friends held 24/7. Social interactions stopped when you put down the phone or went home for the day. If your friends went on a trip, while you couldn't, you'd only hear about their stories when they got back.
30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.
Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").
On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.
For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.
In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.
What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.
To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.
If they find a workaround, they will still be unable to sit there around the clock, which is decent reduction of consumption. Also there won't be many, just like smoking schoolkids, so no social pressure. You can ban it completely or you can have your lovely bookface 1 hour per day, why not, it's dangerous when they spend there 10 hours per day.
Overall, I think the internet has basically been weaponised (intentionally or not) by big tech. People of every generation are being manipulated at a scale that has never before been possible, and what’s more is that the algorithms for targeting and engagement make it trivial to do this, either through propaganda, disinformation, or advertising in a way that skirts regulations on traditional media.
Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…
The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.
This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.
Holy moley, that does explain those 4 skinny dudes on horses I saw the other night. This'll enable crazy large single-VI spaghetti monsters. There'll need to be a Guinness record for geometrically largest VI.
Next step is 3D VIs built using VR headsets. I'll buy an oculus and renew my labview cert when that day comes. Setting up communication with a lab instrument over a shoddy USB connection will feel like hacking the Gibson.
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...