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No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count. Hopeful

No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count. Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a superficial overview of syntax. I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...? But seriously. Anyone could have commented on the AfD. Anyone could have provided reliable sources. The only thing anyone did was bitch and moan. I didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. Thumbs down, internet.

jedsmith 16y ago
> 2) not cited enough to count I look forward to your explanation, to other academics, of why their work doesn't "count" because it isn't "cited enough". I also look forward to you explaining to us why you're qualified to determine whether a paper that you didn't write "counts". > I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...? Infamy is not the kind of fame that you want.
- tptacek 16y ago
  This comment is totally uncalled for. You're participating in a discussion about someone's effort to remove "non-notable" articles from Wikipedia. That someone actually took the time to comment on HN, for the first time, for this one story. Attempting to chase that person off HN by saying "get over yourself" decreases the quality of HN for everyone. Please don't do that.
  - jedsmith 16y ago
    I edited it out before you commented, because I agreed upon a reread of my own comment.
- chrismonsanto 16y ago
  It's not that their work doesn't "count" in the more general sense of the word, it's that their work has not had enough impact at the moment to establish the notability of the topic. I'm sure the researchers in question did fine work, and in the future their work will be widely recognized. I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. I didn't delete the articles based on my own opinion :( The purpose of the AfD process is to get the opinions of others so that a consensus can be established! I'm sorry -- I really am -- that the Alice ML and Nemerle communities were offended by my AfD. My nomination of a language for deletion does not speak for my opinion of the language itself. I figured if I was doing the wrong thing, that the AfD would result in a keep, and at the very least, sources that I had not found would be found by others to improve the article. One of the basic tenets of Wikipedia is "assume good faith", and very few have done so so far. I am completely open to civil discussion about any aspect of my work, and I would love to develop more concrete/relevant criteria for assessing notability of a programming language.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge. Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?
    - chrismonsanto 16y ago
      So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless. Most of the languages I propose for deletion have almost no information available about them, and therefore, one can't write a useful Wikipedia article about them. More information isn't necessarily better. Anything I am not 95% sure about I add a notability tag to or simply leave alone. There are a number of articles that I did in fact find interesting citations for while trying to decide notability. Napier88 is a good example of such a language -- the papers on it received hundreds of citations, yet I had never heard of the language. I've been working on an entire rewrite of Napier88 in my spare time, which has understandably become even more "spare" recently :)
vicngtor 16y ago
I think a lot of people over-reacted. When people see the title of this article, he/she would immediately think you are trolling and doing this for no concrete reasoning. (I am not that your actions are justified, but I am just pointing out that a lot of people are acting before they have considered both sides of the story)
jacques_chester 16y ago
> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? So now we need two levels of notability. First you must be published and you must have "impact". How is this "impact" thing defined, by the way? Are you agitating for an agreed bibliometric standard for notability? > I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a superficial overview of syntax. OK, so you thought they sucked. Did you: 1. Decide to improve them? Nah, not the wikipedia way. 2. Slap on one of the numerous tags saying "this article needs improvement"? Nah, not the wikipedia way. 3. Mark it for deletion because you thought the article was sucky and took no action to improve it? Ding ding ding! > I didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. You action was a necessary cause of their deletion and therefore you are one of the directly culpable persons destroying the long tail of knowledge. edit: slightly politified per tptacek's request.
- deleted 16y ago
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  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    Sorry, you're right. A PhD student isn't an idiot, regardless of how angry they might make me. edit: Chris, I apologise. I let my anger get the best of me. I'll keep my ad homs to a minimum wherever possible.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - j_baker 16y ago
      > A PhD student isn't an idiot I have met a few PhD students who weren't the most notable programming languages in the wiki if you get my drift...
    - MaysonL 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
kevbin 16y ago
It reduces the overall usefulness and quality of Wikipedia to delete leaves that are referenced from other Wikipedia pages. Nemerle is an example: there are several references to it from other PL pages, that before your "improvement" could be resolved w/in Wikipedia, but now require going outside of Wikipedia to determine that "Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform." This kind of "cleaning-up" seems detrimental to wikipedia and, frankly, a waste of your time.
- chrismonsanto 16y ago
  It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. In other words, the articles I am proposing for deletion are the lowest of the low hanging fruit. I honestly didn't think anyone would care, and to be honest, most don't -- the only reason anyone even took note of what I'm doing is because I proposed Nemerle for deletion. I disagree that the clean up is detrimental to Wikipedia. I like to browse Wikipedia for new programming languages, and it is very difficult for me to do so when the "good stuff" is buried in WP's lists and categories. More information is not necessarily better :(
  - est 16y ago
    > it is very difficult for me to do so when the "good stuff" is buried in WP's lists and categories. More information is not necessarily better :( Category too crowded? Sure let's just delete a few. May I suggest you just add a new category for "notable programing languages"?
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    Isn't this actually an argument for a better UI for wikipedia?
    - chrismonsanto 16y ago
      Perhaps, but no one has come forth and developed one. But what would such a UI look like? Would it filter based on user-given notability criteria?
Locke1689 16y ago
Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? Hmm, not entirely. The problem is that certain publications are destined to be cited over and over again. Actually, entry into the elite publications at all can be a signal of significance. Anything published in Nature or SIGCOMM is pretty much notable. On a whim I checked the publication in front of me ("Inside the Bird’s Nest: Measurements of Large-Scale Live VoD from the 2008 Olympics") and it only has one citation but is clearly an important paper. I won't speak about the people whining or the Wikipedia deletion policy (which I fundamentally disagree with) but clearly citation count is not how notability is derived. Even a quick search of Google Scholar shows ~7 citations for the Nemerle language. How many citations is enough for you?
greendestiny 16y ago
Well lets not do this in the abstract. I'd never heard of Nemerle until now, but a search on Google Scholar and on Google shows many papers, tutorials and general discussion on the language. I would think an overview of syntax is an excellent level of detail for an encyclopedia to cover a less common programming language. I certainly see no reason to dismiss that in itself. Proposing that a timely defense to an AfD nomination is a good test of notability in itself is completely absurd. By itself you'd have to consider it a less reliable indicator of notability than someone writing the article in the first place. If you're doing a PhD in a topic and you decide to take on a section of wikipedia you have at least be willing to take responsibility for your actions.
bad_user 16y ago
Nemerle is a beautiful example of a programming language that lets the programmer hook into the compiler's pipeline and add arbitrary new syntax. For example, here's what the developer needs to do to add the LINQ syntax (introduced in C# 3.0): http://nemerle.googlecode.com/svn/nemerle/trunk/Linq/ http://nemerle.googlecode.com/svn/nemerle/trunk/Linq/ It definitely belongs to Wikipedia simply because it's an interesting language, that doesn't have an easy replacement. It's of special interest to language designers looking for ideas or for students learning about programming languages. Also, comparing the Nemerle page to your would-be biography on Wikipedia is pretty lame, as people would actually learn something when reading about Nemerle.
elliottcarlson 16y ago
Ruby was released in 1995, and there was no documentation available in English until 1997. Ruby's popularity outside of Japan didn't even gain any kind of momentum until 2000 and on. Obviously no one can say for sure, but I am sure an un-notable language could possibly gain even more popularity with a Wikipedia entry as it helps people learn more about a small obscure language that might grow in to something bigger - even if it takes years to do so. While it might be argued that a page with little to no information should be deleted, I don't think that pages with adequate information to get someone the general idea about some new (possibly just new to the reader) programming language should go anywhere. It's a valuable resource and losing that kind of information from Wikipedia is a shame. Please keep that line of thought in your AfD's - and think about the "notability" that Frenetic may get in the future.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  What that means is that Ruby simply wasn't very notable until 2000. Trying to make obscure things more notable is not a legitimate use of Wikipedia. It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. And there can't possibly be any objective measure today of what independent sources in the future may be writing about.
  - MaysonL 16y ago
    Notable != noticed. i.e. Worthy of attention != getting attention. Ruby was notable, just not noticed.
    - prodigal_erik 16y ago
      Ruby lacked verifiable evidence of notability from independent secondary sources. Wikipedia strenuously avoids making subjective judgment calls about whether anything is notable despite somehow failing to have been noticed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    > It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. I'm sure. And that's why deleting the pages of languages with peer-reviewed literature is a vital and useful way to prevent marketers from abusing Wikipedia.
mfukar 16y ago
None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Alice ML has more than a handful of papers on its design, semantics, implementation, and related concepts. Are peer reviewed publications not reliable? As a PhD student, I'm sure you disagree. The best you could do is add those citations to the article, instead of the chosen course of (in)action.
zedshaw 16y ago
My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and you just erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer science to the general public. You just made it harder to get people interested in programming. Amazing. Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't "notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate puts out, no matter how idiotic it is. Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor. So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now, you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.
- j_baker 16y ago
  > Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Well, technically he and an admin deleted them unilaterally. Regardless, you're correct. The focus should be on building knowledge, not tearing it down.
  - namdnay 16y ago
    Unilaterally? Anyone can !vote on an AFD.
    - maximilianburke 16y ago
      Anyone can vote on whether or not an article should be deleted but how many people actually do? I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics. If something is in the process of being deleted that I don't know about then I can't vote on whether or not I want it to be kept around. Wikipedia is great for jumping from link-to-link to find out new things and if the content is being deleted it's that much harder to learn. I didn't even know about the programming language Nemerle before and now the article is gone. Knowledge shouldn't be voted on.
mattmight 16y ago
> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference Sure anyone can submit, but not anyone can get a paper accepted. Conferences in CS are much more selective than journals. As a Ph.D. student in CS, you should know this. > the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? No, notability != impact. My dictionary defines notability as "worthy of attention or notice." And, how do you measure impact anyway? By citations? By peer-reviewed papers? By venue prestige? Seasoned academics cringe when these are used as measures of "impact." You're a Ph.D. student in programming languages. Obscure languages with a handful of users are the norm. When you're doing a literature search on one of these languages, it's helpful when it pops up on Wikipedia. You're doing a disservice to the programming languages research community (of which I am a member) by nominating these articles for deletion. You may be obeying the letter of Wikipedia's policies. Yet, at the same time, you're being disrespectful to your peers. If you want to help the community, instead of nominating these pages for deletion, go to conferences like POPL, ICFP or PLDI and ask folks, "So, what's notable about language X?" They will tell you. Capture that knowledge and then add it to Wikipedia.
wauter 16y ago
Let's put them back on there and add a chapter titled 'controversy over Wikipedia deletion' - plenty of sources there :-) (I am only half kidding in fact, I remember something like this happening a while ago but don't remember what the precise article was about)
- eru 16y ago
  There was a restaurant in South Africa, or so. And it only gained so much attention, because Jimbo was involved.
chalst 16y ago
None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Impact is not a measure of whether a source is reliable, peer review is. One can argue that journals with higher impact factors are likely to have more rigorous peer review, but the AfD's have not talked about journal impact factor. Note that TOPLAS, a source for the Nemerle article, had an impact factor of 1.92 in 2010, the highest PL journal, and among the higher CS journals overall. Also note that the high-impact CS conferences are peer reviewed. This fact, and the general importance of conference publications in CS, appeared to have escaped the participants in the AfDs I looked at. The article was deleted for lack of reliable sources: what does the number of citations that this or that article has have to do with that? Nazi/asshole/whatnot - These people are pathetic. Don't be put off by them.
- cema 16y ago
  I don't think they are pathetic. I think they are at a loss for words. Besides, the word "nazi" has regrettably come to be used loosely to describe someone who is too strict with respect to an agenda ("grammar nazi" etc), which I would say is quite applicable here. Still a bad choice of a word, in my opinion; at least a veneer of decency should be maintained.
- ltratt 16y ago
  There's a big debate to be had about the utility of journals in 2011, but when a Wikipedia editor writes about TOPLAS that "I'm not sure about this journal [TOPLAS], more research would be necessary, it may have a low impact factor as it does not have a wikipedia page, which indicates that the journal itself is not notable." then you know you're in trouble. I'm only sorry that my articles which referenced Nemerle wern't enough to save its Wikipedia page - I hope it's reinstated. I don't know whether all of the articles deleted were worthy or not, but Nemerle, in my opinion, has justified its place in the world.
monsanto4pres 16y ago
From the tone of his posts I can already tell he's a smug little b. A cynic would think that he's doing all this deletionism so that when his own pet project FRENETIC is done, it'll be easier to distinguish from other languages.
- thunk 16y ago
  Accidental upvote
Arve 16y ago
> None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up You didn't look very hard, did you? For instance, the Alice ML homepage lists an entire page of papers. http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/papers.html http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/papers.html - including nine thesises at various levels, something that wouldn't happen to something non-notable. For Nemerle, Google Scholar has 81 results, http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nemerle&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nemerle&hl=en&bt...
tty 16y ago
>None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Really? The following discussion page says you're a liar. It's sad that despite the majority being for keeping the article, you actually won in the end even though you didn't reply to any questions asking you what exactly you personally consider to be notable. Same goes for the replies that linked to computer magazine articles about the programming language in question, you've completely ignored those. If you think what you're doing is good, then you're delusional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  That's actually an interesting question. Should a topic be presumed notable in the English version of Wikipedia if basically everything specifically written about it was in a Russian magazine?
  - tty 16y ago
    That was just an example, the Russian magazine isn't the only source talking about the language in question. I mentioned it because he complained about that source and then just started ignoring it when people translated the thing.
  - gwern 16y ago
    Of course. Being written in another language doesn't affect notability; it just means in practice, foreign sources aren't as desirable as native ones. (They are harder to find, harder to understand, harder for other editors to verify, etc., and naturally you will see less of them at any time.)
nCdy 16y ago
Chris You became notable as most inadequate moron. YES ! You are.
tsycho 16y ago
HN people, while I whole-heartedly disagree with chrismonsanto's actions here, let's not do any personal attacks. From wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law) "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
- est 16y ago
  Link broken. I thought it was deleted fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law
  - bane 16y ago
    Nope, it's gone.
- purp 16y ago
  It's been (properly) folded into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarks_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarks_Law
cabalamat 16y ago
> to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page If someone calls you a Nazi, they're probably a bad person. But if lots of people call you a Nazi, that should suggest to you that your behaviour may be at fault.

jedsmith 16y ago

> 2) not cited enough to count I look forward to your explanation, to other academics, of why their work doesn't "count" because it isn't "cited enough". I also look forward to you explaining to us why you're qualified to determine whether a paper that you didn't write "counts". > I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...? Infamy is not the kind of fame that you want.

tptacek 16y ago
This comment is totally uncalled for. You're participating in a discussion about someone's effort to remove "non-notable" articles from Wikipedia. That someone actually took the time to comment on HN, for the first time, for this one story. Attempting to chase that person off HN by saying "get over yourself" decreases the quality of HN for everyone. Please don't do that.
- jedsmith 16y ago
  I edited it out before you commented, because I agreed upon a reread of my own comment.
chrismonsanto 16y ago
It's not that their work doesn't "count" in the more general sense of the word, it's that their work has not had enough impact at the moment to establish the notability of the topic. I'm sure the researchers in question did fine work, and in the future their work will be widely recognized. I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source. I didn't delete the articles based on my own opinion :( The purpose of the AfD process is to get the opinions of others so that a consensus can be established! I'm sorry -- I really am -- that the Alice ML and Nemerle communities were offended by my AfD. My nomination of a language for deletion does not speak for my opinion of the language itself. I figured if I was doing the wrong thing, that the AfD would result in a keep, and at the very least, sources that I had not found would be found by others to improve the article. One of the basic tenets of Wikipedia is "assume good faith", and very few have done so so far. I am completely open to civil discussion about any aspect of my work, and I would love to develop more concrete/relevant criteria for assessing notability of a programming language.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge. Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?
  - chrismonsanto 16y ago
    So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless. Most of the languages I propose for deletion have almost no information available about them, and therefore, one can't write a useful Wikipedia article about them. More information isn't necessarily better. Anything I am not 95% sure about I add a notability tag to or simply leave alone. There are a number of articles that I did in fact find interesting citations for while trying to decide notability. Napier88 is a good example of such a language -- the papers on it received hundreds of citations, yet I had never heard of the language. I've been working on an entire rewrite of Napier88 in my spare time, which has understandably become even more "spare" recently :)

vicngtor 16y ago

I think a lot of people over-reacted. When people see the title of this article, he/she would immediately think you are trolling and doing this for no concrete reasoning. (I am not that your actions are justified, but I am just pointing out that a lot of people are acting before they have considered both sides of the story)

jacques_chester 16y ago

> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? So now we need two levels of notability. First you must be published and you must have "impact". How is this "impact" thing defined, by the way? Are you agitating for an agreed bibliometric standard for notability? > I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a superficial overview of syntax. OK, so you thought they sucked. Did you: 1. Decide to improve them? Nah, not the wikipedia way. 2. Slap on one of the numerous tags saying "this article needs improvement"? Nah, not the wikipedia way. 3. Mark it for deletion because you thought the article was sucky and took no action to improve it? Ding ding ding! > I didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. You action was a necessary cause of their deletion and therefore you are one of the directly culpable persons destroying the long tail of knowledge. edit: slightly politified per tptacek's request.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Sorry, you're right. A PhD student isn't an idiot, regardless of how angry they might make me. edit: Chris, I apologise. I let my anger get the best of me. I'll keep my ad homs to a minimum wherever possible.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - j_baker 16y ago
    > A PhD student isn't an idiot I have met a few PhD students who weren't the most notable programming languages in the wiki if you get my drift...
  - MaysonL 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

kevbin 16y ago

It reduces the overall usefulness and quality of Wikipedia to delete leaves that are referenced from other Wikipedia pages. Nemerle is an example: there are several references to it from other PL pages, that before your "improvement" could be resolved w/in Wikipedia, but now require going outside of Wikipedia to determine that "Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform." This kind of "cleaning-up" seems detrimental to wikipedia and, frankly, a waste of your time.

chrismonsanto 16y ago
It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. In other words, the articles I am proposing for deletion are the lowest of the low hanging fruit. I honestly didn't think anyone would care, and to be honest, most don't -- the only reason anyone even took note of what I'm doing is because I proposed Nemerle for deletion. I disagree that the clean up is detrimental to Wikipedia. I like to browse Wikipedia for new programming languages, and it is very difficult for me to do so when the "good stuff" is buried in WP's lists and categories. More information is not necessarily better :(
- est 16y ago
  > it is very difficult for me to do so when the "good stuff" is buried in WP's lists and categories. More information is not necessarily better :( Category too crowded? Sure let's just delete a few. May I suggest you just add a new category for "notable programing languages"?
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Isn't this actually an argument for a better UI for wikipedia?
  - chrismonsanto 16y ago
    Perhaps, but no one has come forth and developed one. But what would such a UI look like? Would it filter based on user-given notability criteria?

Locke1689 16y ago

Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? Hmm, not entirely. The problem is that certain publications are destined to be cited over and over again. Actually, entry into the elite publications at all can be a signal of significance. Anything published in Nature or SIGCOMM is pretty much notable. On a whim I checked the publication in front of me ("Inside the Bird’s Nest: Measurements of Large-Scale Live VoD from the 2008 Olympics") and it only has one citation but is clearly an important paper. I won't speak about the people whining or the Wikipedia deletion policy (which I fundamentally disagree with) but clearly citation count is not how notability is derived. Even a quick search of Google Scholar shows ~7 citations for the Nemerle language. How many citations is enough for you?

greendestiny 16y ago

Well lets not do this in the abstract. I'd never heard of Nemerle until now, but a search on Google Scholar and on Google shows many papers, tutorials and general discussion on the language. I would think an overview of syntax is an excellent level of detail for an encyclopedia to cover a less common programming language. I certainly see no reason to dismiss that in itself. Proposing that a timely defense to an AfD nomination is a good test of notability in itself is completely absurd. By itself you'd have to consider it a less reliable indicator of notability than someone writing the article in the first place. If you're doing a PhD in a topic and you decide to take on a section of wikipedia you have at least be willing to take responsibility for your actions.

bad_user 16y ago

Nemerle is a beautiful example of a programming language that lets the programmer hook into the compiler's pipeline and add arbitrary new syntax. For example, here's what the developer needs to do to add the LINQ syntax (introduced in C# 3.0): http://nemerle.googlecode.com/svn/nemerle/trunk/Linq/ http://nemerle.googlecode.com/svn/nemerle/trunk/Linq/ It definitely belongs to Wikipedia simply because it's an interesting language, that doesn't have an easy replacement. It's of special interest to language designers looking for ideas or for students learning about programming languages. Also, comparing the Nemerle page to your would-be biography on Wikipedia is pretty lame, as people would actually learn something when reading about Nemerle.

elliottcarlson 16y ago

Ruby was released in 1995, and there was no documentation available in English until 1997. Ruby's popularity outside of Japan didn't even gain any kind of momentum until 2000 and on. Obviously no one can say for sure, but I am sure an un-notable language could possibly gain even more popularity with a Wikipedia entry as it helps people learn more about a small obscure language that might grow in to something bigger - even if it takes years to do so. While it might be argued that a page with little to no information should be deleted, I don't think that pages with adequate information to get someone the general idea about some new (possibly just new to the reader) programming language should go anywhere. It's a valuable resource and losing that kind of information from Wikipedia is a shame. Please keep that line of thought in your AfD's - and think about the "notability" that Frenetic may get in the future.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
What that means is that Ruby simply wasn't very notable until 2000. Trying to make obscure things more notable is not a legitimate use of Wikipedia. It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. And there can't possibly be any objective measure today of what independent sources in the future may be writing about.
- MaysonL 16y ago
  Notable != noticed. i.e. Worthy of attention != getting attention. Ruby was notable, just not noticed.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    Ruby lacked verifiable evidence of notability from independent secondary sources. Wikipedia strenuously avoids making subjective judgment calls about whether anything is notable despite somehow failing to have been noticed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  > It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. I'm sure. And that's why deleting the pages of languages with peer-reviewed literature is a vital and useful way to prevent marketers from abusing Wikipedia.

mfukar 16y ago

None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Alice ML has more than a handful of papers on its design, semantics, implementation, and related concepts. Are peer reviewed publications not reliable? As a PhD student, I'm sure you disagree. The best you could do is add those citations to the article, instead of the chosen course of (in)action.

zedshaw 16y ago

My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and you just erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer science to the general public. You just made it harder to get people interested in programming. Amazing. Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't "notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate puts out, no matter how idiotic it is. Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor. So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now, you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.

j_baker 16y ago
> Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Well, technically he and an admin deleted them unilaterally. Regardless, you're correct. The focus should be on building knowledge, not tearing it down.
- namdnay 16y ago
  Unilaterally? Anyone can !vote on an AFD.
  - maximilianburke 16y ago
    Anyone can vote on whether or not an article should be deleted but how many people actually do? I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of Wikipedia users don't know, and don't care, about Wikipedia politics. If something is in the process of being deleted that I don't know about then I can't vote on whether or not I want it to be kept around. Wikipedia is great for jumping from link-to-link to find out new things and if the content is being deleted it's that much harder to learn. I didn't even know about the programming language Nemerle before and now the article is gone. Knowledge shouldn't be voted on.

mattmight 16y ago

> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference Sure anyone can submit, but not anyone can get a paper accepted. Conferences in CS are much more selective than journals. As a Ph.D. student in CS, you should know this. > the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability? No, notability != impact. My dictionary defines notability as "worthy of attention or notice." And, how do you measure impact anyway? By citations? By peer-reviewed papers? By venue prestige? Seasoned academics cringe when these are used as measures of "impact." You're a Ph.D. student in programming languages. Obscure languages with a handful of users are the norm. When you're doing a literature search on one of these languages, it's helpful when it pops up on Wikipedia. You're doing a disservice to the programming languages research community (of which I am a member) by nominating these articles for deletion. You may be obeying the letter of Wikipedia's policies. Yet, at the same time, you're being disrespectful to your peers. If you want to help the community, instead of nominating these pages for deletion, go to conferences like POPL, ICFP or PLDI and ask folks, "So, what's notable about language X?" They will tell you. Capture that knowledge and then add it to Wikipedia.

wauter 16y ago

Let's put them back on there and add a chapter titled 'controversy over Wikipedia deletion' - plenty of sources there :-) (I am only half kidding in fact, I remember something like this happening a while ago but don't remember what the precise article was about)

eru 16y ago
There was a restaurant in South Africa, or so. And it only gained so much attention, because Jimbo was involved.

chalst 16y ago

None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Impact is not a measure of whether a source is reliable, peer review is. One can argue that journals with higher impact factors are likely to have more rigorous peer review, but the AfD's have not talked about journal impact factor. Note that TOPLAS, a source for the Nemerle article, had an impact factor of 1.92 in 2010, the highest PL journal, and among the higher CS journals overall. Also note that the high-impact CS conferences are peer reviewed. This fact, and the general importance of conference publications in CS, appeared to have escaped the participants in the AfDs I looked at. The article was deleted for lack of reliable sources: what does the number of citations that this or that article has have to do with that? Nazi/asshole/whatnot - These people are pathetic. Don't be put off by them.

cema 16y ago
I don't think they are pathetic. I think they are at a loss for words. Besides, the word "nazi" has regrettably come to be used loosely to describe someone who is too strict with respect to an agenda ("grammar nazi" etc), which I would say is quite applicable here. Still a bad choice of a word, in my opinion; at least a veneer of decency should be maintained.
ltratt 16y ago
There's a big debate to be had about the utility of journals in 2011, but when a Wikipedia editor writes about TOPLAS that "I'm not sure about this journal [TOPLAS], more research would be necessary, it may have a low impact factor as it does not have a wikipedia page, which indicates that the journal itself is not notable." then you know you're in trouble. I'm only sorry that my articles which referenced Nemerle wern't enough to save its Wikipedia page - I hope it's reinstated. I don't know whether all of the articles deleted were worthy or not, but Nemerle, in my opinion, has justified its place in the world.

monsanto4pres 16y ago

From the tone of his posts I can already tell he's a smug little b. A cynic would think that he's doing all this deletionism so that when his own pet project FRENETIC is done, it'll be easier to distinguish from other languages.

thunk 16y ago
Accidental upvote

Arve 16y ago

> None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up You didn't look very hard, did you? For instance, the Alice ML homepage lists an entire page of papers. http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/papers.html http://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/alice/papers.html - including nine thesises at various levels, something that wouldn't happen to something non-notable. For Nemerle, Google Scholar has 81 results, http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nemerle&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nemerle&hl=en&bt...

tty 16y ago

>None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. Really? The following discussion page says you're a liar. It's sad that despite the majority being for keeping the article, you actually won in the end even though you didn't reply to any questions asking you what exactly you personally consider to be notable. Same goes for the replies that linked to computer magazine articles about the programming language in question, you've completely ignored those. If you think what you're doing is good, then you're delusional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

prodigal_erik 16y ago
That's actually an interesting question. Should a topic be presumed notable in the English version of Wikipedia if basically everything specifically written about it was in a Russian magazine?
- tty 16y ago
  That was just an example, the Russian magazine isn't the only source talking about the language in question. I mentioned it because he complained about that source and then just started ignoring it when people translated the thing.
- gwern 16y ago
  Of course. Being written in another language doesn't affect notability; it just means in practice, foreign sources aren't as desirable as native ones. (They are harder to find, harder to understand, harder for other editors to verify, etc., and naturally you will see less of them at any time.)

nCdy 16y ago

Chris You became notable as most inadequate moron. YES ! You are.

tsycho 16y ago

HN people, while I whole-heartedly disagree with chrismonsanto's actions here, let's not do any personal attacks. From wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law) "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

est 16y ago
Link broken. I thought it was deleted fixed link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys_Law
- bane 16y ago
  Nope, it's gone.
purp 16y ago
It's been (properly) folded into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarks_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarks_Law

cabalamat 16y ago

> to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page If someone calls you a Nazi, they're probably a bad person. But if lots of people call you a Nazi, that should suggest to you that your behaviour may be at fault.