12 ms·

Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

173 points by bendmorris 16y ago

ramanujan 16y ago
The first public victory of inclusionism over deletionism. Perhaps it is not too late for Wikipedia. If only similar mobs could mete out rough internet justice to the top ten most notorious deletionists, casual contributors may once again walk the hallways of Wikipedia. [only partially tongue-in-cheek here...]
- EGreg 16y ago
  This victory will only last until the page is updated :)
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Deletionism is the reason Wikipedia has only a moderate shortage of editors curating content, rather than an utterly insoluble maintenance nightmare. If this farce means the inclusionists are winning, it's the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They will get what they seem to want—a mirror of the entire web hosted at wikipedia.org, with just as much outdated, useless, and actively misleading crap.
  - Smerity 16y ago
    If the issue is with maintenance and proper curation of content then that is what should be discussed. I'd far prefer in the case that an article is not well maintained that it be flagged for deletion in X months due to absence of proper care. If there is a strong community presence the article can be resurrected and recovered and Wikipedia ultimately improved and only otherwise the article deleted. I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I hope you are either generalizing or I'm misunderstanding your point as otherwise this does anything but justify deletionism.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. These characteristics are not the measure used for inclusion. Which is absolutely right IMO - one could create a well written article, well cited and be the best source on what hair products some actor uses but it wouldn't make that information more notable. I think that maintaining as high a quality as possible is important for Wikipedia. Like someone said, making Wikipedia a mirror of the web is not beneficial. Someone here could probably do all right by making a mirror of all pages being deleted though¹. --- ¹ all ready done it seems http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page.
    - tokenadult 16y ago
      I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I'd like you to let us know what specific examples you have seen, if you would please.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Deletionism is also one of the major reasons that I only contribute to the Hackety Hack and Shoes articles on Wikipedia, and nothing else. (oh, and I fear the day when I have to try to prove Hackety Hack 'notable.' I'm pretty sure that it isn't by the letter of the law.) They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.
    - deletjijo 16y ago
      Does deletionism cover the way editors love to revert completely legitimate changes if they didn't come from other editors?
    - Retric 16y ago
      With the current model there needs to be some line because editors are a finite resource and people do occasionally deface articles etc. I would suggest having Wikipedia’s deleted articles end up on another website (using the same backend) which is then ignored by the editorial community to avoid annoying people. PS: There are already plenty of other wiki's with different focus. There is little need for ex: naruto.wikia.com content on en.wikipedia.com.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        The notability guidelines don't address this at all. If the article about AliceML got defaced, the people who obviously care about it would fix it. And if nobody cares about the article, why does it matter if it's been defaced? And why not delete it once it's been defaced, rather than pre-emptively?
        Retric 16y ago
        AliceML is an edge case where arguments can be made on both sides (I would have kept it). However the rule is more setup to avoid people adding their family tree and favorite recopies to Wikipedia etc resulting in 10 billion articles and no way to manage them. Overall I think it's a fairly loose standard ex:(Random article) gave me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookpeople_(distributor) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Nash_(basketball) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Holme_Larsen I can see keeping the first and possibly the second, but why not delete the third? PS: A different option might be to build a custom AI to validate things, but for now balancing Notable around the size of the community seems reasonable.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    Rather than a "moderate shortage of editors curating content," the Wikimedia Foundation says that the decline in the number of active administrators is "continuing in an unsustainable fashion." http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editors#Chapter_Three:_The_future_.282007-present.29 http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor... It would be interesting to look at administrators' self-reported reasons for burning out, and it is definitely interesting to look at competing models for building online encyclopedias, but you may be right that an explicitly more inclusionist policy (which allows even more content that cannot be reliably sourced and that may be simply made up by fanboys) would hasten the decline of active Wikipedia administrators and editors in general. On the whole, I have an inclusionist orientation, and still do, but after seeing many more Wikipedia articles from the inside (as a wikipedian) than I once had, I can't say that I disagree with the majority of article deletion decisions that are actually made by current Wikipedia community processes.
    - bane 16y ago
      I can say definitively that I know of at least a dozen people who would otherwise be active contributors to wikipedia if they hadn't had dozens of hours of their work deleted repeatedly. Not edited or improved, deleted.
      - tokenadult 16y ago
        What kind of sources did they cite in their contributions? (I agree with you, assuming those articles were sourced, that it is appalling to delete sourced content. But that has happened to me. Point-of-view pushing is a huge problem on Wikipedia. Coming with sources, in my observation, saves articles from being deleted entirely, but having good sources doesn't save a paragraph from being deleted entirely in an article devoted to pushing a point of view.)
        bane 16y ago
        I guess that's part of the debate isn't it? Most things don't actually have a tremendous number of academic sources. If I'm fantastically interested in contributing an article about say, a well known jazz band that doesn't have a page on wikipedia, I may be terribly limited in what secondary resources I can call upon. Jazz bands don't get a terrible amount of coverage in main stream media, they don't become top-40 acts, they don't get academic papers written about them in the ACM, etc. But they may be hugely influential, have tens of thousands of listeners, and may have other qualifications for why they should have a page. But if they don't meet <arbitrary person>'s requirement for notability they may flag it AfD and then it ends up working it's way through Wikipedia's impressively broken editing process where it'll probably end up deleted despite any discussion to the contrary. Importantly, my hypothetical jazz band may only be well known in Jazz circles, having never pierced more mainstream circles. But just like a singular academic paper that no lay person has heard about, but been cited hundreds of times, this band may have influenced hundreds of other, highly visible bands. I'm picking Jazz here, but it could be any other fairly insular sub-culture, say Blue Grass, or Model Train collectors. It's not up to me, as somebody not interested in their sub-culture to decide if it's notable. That only tests whether or not something has percolated up to "common knowledge". If that's the test for inclusion, then we don't really need Wikipedia anyway do we? Everybody already knows what's in it!
shekmalhen 16y ago
Even after this "reversal", I'm not sure he understands why people were angry about his AfDs.
- pestaa 16y ago
  If he'll remember this situation next time he starts clicking buttons, I don't care about his understanding.
- T-R 16y ago
  Judging from his comments, I'd wager this wouldn't have blown up if it weren't for his attitude toward the whole situation. His use of smileys coupled with his tone leaves the impression of condescension, obliviousness, or apathy toward the people he'd upset.
chris_j 16y ago
"Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages?" Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true: Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the letter of the law but yet seemed so wrong. There is no way that the likes of Factor or Clean should be deleted from Wikipedia so the question becomes how can the guidelines be changed so that they don't allow it to happen.
- bendmorris 16y ago
  The most important rule of all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules i.e., if something seems to fit in with the "letter of the law" but has no real benefit and lots of reasons not to do it, don't do it!
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    Sadly the mostly widely mis-used rule :) IAR is for daily usage, no real application in this case (because unfortunately the wider community will probably agree with deletions)
- _delirium 16y ago
  There's been some progress on fixing them over the past few years, mostly in terms of making them more specific to different areas. For example, there's now things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music). Factor is an interesting case. I tried to improve that article at one point by adding references, but I was unable to find any. As far as I can tell, it's almost never actually mentioned in the programming language community: not mentioned in a single book, even books about Forth-like languages, has no articles about it (in workshops, conferences, or anything), and its website has been mentioned in passing in four papers according to Google Scholar (the papers provide no real info on it besides mentioning in passing that it exists). It appears to have some level of notability among PLs aficionados, but if you were trying to discern that by reading the PLs literature, you wouldn't know it. Clean is quite easy to find references for, though, so not sure how someone could've argued about that one in good faith. It is something of a problem for things that are "known" in an area but don't have many references, because I do think Wikipedia's insistence on third-party sources is a good idea: an article based entirely on a few sources written by the subject and associates of the subject isn't great, like an article about a band that only cites the band's website, MySpace, and a few mentions on people's blogs. But how do you distinguish that case from the well-known-but-has-few-good-references case, and then how do you write an article about the latter? Here's a music example that might be analogous to some of these programming languages, a record label that's well-known in the postindustrial sphere, but has no good sources as far as I can find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europa_Cafe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europa_Cafe. How should one improve the article, and what should the information in it be referenced to? The long-term solutions here are to improve the literature: someone needs to write a more recent book or survey article on emerging programming languages, and someone else needs to write a book on 1980s/90s independent postindustrial record labels. Then Wikipedia can just cite those books. Until then, since Wikipedia works best when it's a summary of the existing literature, it runs into trouble when the existing literature itself is deficient.
mfukar 16y ago
If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place saying "Christopher, we are upset".
- chrismonsanto 16y ago
  No, my understanding was that a small, but vocal, special interest group was upset for nominating their favorite programming language. The vast majority of angry people seemed unable to come up with a rational reason for saving the article. The vast majority of calm people seemed to agree with the deletions, and agreed with me for labeling the others as a small-but-vocal-minority. If you felt you were doing something right and no one who thought you were wrong had a convincing case (as convincing as "nazi dickwad deletionist we're gonna e-mail your professor" is), wouldn't you try to push through the intimidation? It wasn't until the wider reddit and HN communities caught on that I understood that it wasn't an annoyed minority, yet I would have caught on earlier if someone had actually tried to reason with me (and maybe brought up the citation argument). I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    > I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts. At least you're getting voted up, which should help. It's an anti-spam measure... also, try clicking on the 'link' of something you want to reply to. If there's too much back and forth in a thread, it'll hide the 'reply' button in an attempt to slow down conversation, but obviously this is a bit of a special case.
  - copper 16y ago
    For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.
    - 16y ago
yzhengyu 16y ago
Notability is broken, since it is usually subjective and wielded mercilessly as an axe by the Wikipedia mafia to cull material which they deem as not notable. Inclusive? Haha, don't make me laugh.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  There is, however, nothing stopping articles deemed as not notable by consensus at Wikipedia from being included in other references.
burgerbrain 16y ago
The damage is already done. "I'm sorry (but I was still right!)" is the kind of apology I would expect to hear from a child. If you're sorry, then make it right and undo the harm that you did. Otherwise, just shut-up, you're not sincere.
- nicelios 16y ago
  He didn't say he was sorry. He just said he will stop.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.
    - j_baker 16y ago
      So? Isn't the most important thing that he's stopping?
      - burgerbrain 16y ago
        I repeat myself, but: "The damage is already done."
        j_baker 16y ago
        You're not interested in an apology... You don't care that he stopped. What exactly do you want from him then?
        burgerbrain 16y ago
        I am interested in an apology. He has not given one, despite this so called "reversal". A sincere apology would involve 1) apologizing/admitting wrong-doing and 2) undoing the damage. I could certainly settle for only the second.
j_baker 16y ago
Has this page been changed since it was posted? Perhaps I'm missing it, but I don't see anything that indicates that he's giving up.
- thechangelog 16y ago
  I couldn't see the change on the mobile edition of Wikipedia. It's there on the full version.
- natep 16y ago
  It's showing as the current version for me, but here's the permalink: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_Monsanto&oldid=413834663 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...
to 16y ago
he already succeeded deleting all natural crops in america!
teyc 16y ago
Right... notability guidelines are broken, but he doesn't mind following it to the letter.
latch 16y ago
Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".
- afterburner 16y ago
  Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc. When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like! And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
    - afterburner 16y ago
      I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
      - _delirium 16y ago
Osmose 16y ago
Trying to delete stories? He nominated them for an open discussion to be decided by an admin. But that doesn't sound nearly as malicious. There are valid criticisms about the AfD process, but most people are blaming Chris as if he just walked by and deleted the articles on his own. I fear that this issue has become less about fixing broken Wikipedia policies that encourage people like Chris to delete articles, and more about "teaching him a lesson". The amount of ad hominem attacks in the original story is much higher than anything I'd expect from HN. And, considering HN is self-policed in a lot of ways, I think the issue needs to be pointed out.
- shekmalhen 16y ago
  The AfD process is problematic, but Christopher was also problematic. He was strictly following the rules, even when it didn't make sense, and continued to do so even after other users were telling him, politely, that he was wrong. This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia (at least, according to everyone who comments on ridiculous AfD stories). As for teaching him a lesson: he was caught live. The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce.
  - by 16y ago
    "The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce." Let's consider the logic of that statement by taking a different example. A young child is in a shop and is told by its parent it cannot have some candy. Young child "I want candy! I want candy!". The child becomes enraged, more and more enraged, by the behavior of the parent. Should the child now teach the parent a harsh lesson? Since the parent's behavior has induced a great deal of rage a very harsh lesson seems entirely appropriate.
    - shekmalhen 16y ago
      The two situations are way too different: the relationship between a child and his parents implies that the parents have an authority on him. Deletionists have no authority on the content of Wikipedia. They know the policies and how to make Wikipedia work. Those policies grant them an advantage and if they misuse them, the users have little recourses. This, combined with arrogance, enrage the users. I do not approve the harshness that we saw tonight, but it is easily understandable.
Charuru 16y ago
This problem is hardy unique to this instance alone, or even to wikipedia alone. This is a question faced by All publications, that of target audience and market. Obviously on a tech forum like HN we're more likely to be interested in langs like factor. But imagine a journalist looking through langs to report on computer sci or a teenager looking for something new to study... It would be a waste of time. Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites, except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page? We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything, as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
yaix 16y ago
He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. In an open system, once you start ignoring the rules, everybody will want their exceptions and you end up in chaos. Anyone remember the Wikipedia from ten years ago? Today, it aims to have a good standard regarding its content, that is only possible with rules. So just update the rules and everything is fine. More importantly, it will still be fine ten years from now, when nobody remembers this incident anymore.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. Everyone is responsible for their own action. You should not follow rules that are bad, you should ignore them or try to change them yourself. "Just doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse and if I had the power I would punish that defense more severely than any other because it's the most dangerous.
chmike 16y ago
Pruning knowledge is a dangerous process.
- justincormack 16y ago
  Regarding this as pruning knowledge is rather exaggerated. First wikipedia deletions are not deletions, they are just hidden from most users but can be viewed or restored. Second this is not primary knowledge it is a very short and incomplete summary of the primary sources.
  - teyc 16y ago
    I didn't realize that deletion is not permanent. In what manner is the content hidden? Will it show up in search engine results? Will an anonymous user like myself see the content?
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Check it out for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_language&action=edit&redlink=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_... > A page with this title has previously been deleted. If you are creating a new page with different content, please continue. If you are recreating a page similar to the previously deleted page, or are unsure, please first contact the deleting administrator using the information provided below.
      - bendmorris 16y ago
        Minor correction here: the "Alice programming language" page was deleted, only to be moved to "Alice (programming language)". The one you want is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming...
        steveklabnik 16y ago
        Nice catch -- it still illustrates what a deleted page looks like though.
davidhollander 16y ago
>Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. That's how these things work Chris. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore 1993
slouch 16y ago
chris blanked his talk page on wikipedia. here's the content he removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christopher_Monsanto&action=historysubmit&diff=413834782&oldid=413833989 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christop...
Flenser 16y ago
Stack Exchange process for deleting content > Wikipedia process for deleting content. Having nominations be anonymous until a consensus is reached stops this kind of issue arising. Sometimes complete transparency isn't the best policy.
silverlake 16y ago
As a fan and user(!) of Factor, I agree that it fails the notability test on Wikipedia. I can't find any mention of the language, beyond that by the author, which might convince a 3rd person that it is more notable than my own pet PL projects. But this might be true of many implementations of well-defined languages like Smalltalk, Scheme, or C. Take a look at the big list of Scheme implementations[1]. How many of them are "notable"? Is Ikarus or Chicken notable? Many PL papers describe some minor tweak in a homegrown toy language. Are all those languages notable? I think Factor deserves to have a Wikipedia page (it still does), but I don't know by what general criteria I'm including it. It has a complete, robust implementation and is still actively developed, which is more than could be said of 90% of PLs out there. But how do we codify that into a notability test? [1] http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implementations http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...
daxelrod 16y ago
The permalink for this is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_Monsanto&oldid=413834663 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...
jackfoxy 16y ago
Thank you, Chris. You did the right thing.
Programma 16y ago
What I think is funny: this guy seems to point to a problem with the internet and Wikipedia. But the actual problem is that he is not a programmer (obviously) so he has a skewed view of what is notable when it comes to programming language. In other words, he has no clue what he is talking about. He then blames 'the internet' for calling him out. That is the problem with the internet: this newbie comes into the scene and has no idea why his actions are annoying and detrimental. He says he's looking for 'policies' but he's just a newbie. Hopefully in 5-10 years these dramas will end when we all collectively grow up a bit and stop with the ignorant drama queen games. Good to see that some aren't letting him rest until he acknowledges that he was deleting articles he had no business deleting. Ignorant editor is no excuse.
rkalla 16y ago
I wonder how many people got up in arms when they saw the "Monsanto" and thought a patent-hoarding Satan was running around Wikipedia erasing programming language articles. This wasn't really a valuable comment, but I couldn't help it.
VladRussian 16y ago
that is the outermost danger of tomorrow - the youngs today are made believe in the rule of rule. They will be cutting each other's fingers (of course after due process presided over by the millenium judge) for pressing a button on their own hardware they aren't licensed to press by the EULA or for not using real name on Facebook/Quora.

173 points by bendmorris 16y ago

The first public victory of inclusionism over deletionism. Perhaps it is not too late for Wikipedia. If only similar mobs could mete out rough internet justice to the top ten most notorious deletionists, casual contributors may once again walk the hallways of Wikipedia. [only partially tongue-in-cheek here...]

EGreg 16y ago
This victory will only last until the page is updated :)
prodigal_erik 16y ago
Deletionism is the reason Wikipedia has only a moderate shortage of editors curating content, rather than an utterly insoluble maintenance nightmare. If this farce means the inclusionists are winning, it's the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They will get what they seem to want—a mirror of the entire web hosted at wikipedia.org, with just as much outdated, useless, and actively misleading crap.
- Smerity 16y ago
  If the issue is with maintenance and proper curation of content then that is what should be discussed. I'd far prefer in the case that an article is not well maintained that it be flagged for deletion in X months due to absence of proper care. If there is a strong community presence the article can be resurrected and recovered and Wikipedia ultimately improved and only otherwise the article deleted. I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I hope you are either generalizing or I'm misunderstanding your point as otherwise this does anything but justify deletionism.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. These characteristics are not the measure used for inclusion. Which is absolutely right IMO - one could create a well written article, well cited and be the best source on what hair products some actor uses but it wouldn't make that information more notable. I think that maintaining as high a quality as possible is important for Wikipedia. Like someone said, making Wikipedia a mirror of the web is not beneficial. Someone here could probably do all right by making a mirror of all pages being deleted though¹. --- ¹ all ready done it seems http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I'd like you to let us know what specific examples you have seen, if you would please.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Deletionism is also one of the major reasons that I only contribute to the Hackety Hack and Shoes articles on Wikipedia, and nothing else. (oh, and I fear the day when I have to try to prove Hackety Hack 'notable.' I'm pretty sure that it isn't by the letter of the law.) They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.
  - deletjijo 16y ago
    Does deletionism cover the way editors love to revert completely legitimate changes if they didn't come from other editors?
  - Retric 16y ago
    With the current model there needs to be some line because editors are a finite resource and people do occasionally deface articles etc. I would suggest having Wikipedia’s deleted articles end up on another website (using the same backend) which is then ignored by the editorial community to avoid annoying people. PS: There are already plenty of other wiki's with different focus. There is little need for ex: naruto.wikia.com content on en.wikipedia.com.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      The notability guidelines don't address this at all. If the article about AliceML got defaced, the people who obviously care about it would fix it. And if nobody cares about the article, why does it matter if it's been defaced? And why not delete it once it's been defaced, rather than pre-emptively?
      - Retric 16y ago
        AliceML is an edge case where arguments can be made on both sides (I would have kept it). However the rule is more setup to avoid people adding their family tree and favorite recopies to Wikipedia etc resulting in 10 billion articles and no way to manage them. Overall I think it's a fairly loose standard ex:(Random article) gave me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookpeople_(distributor) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Nash_(basketball) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Holme_Larsen I can see keeping the first and possibly the second, but why not delete the third? PS: A different option might be to build a custom AI to validate things, but for now balancing Notable around the size of the community seems reasonable.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  Rather than a "moderate shortage of editors curating content," the Wikimedia Foundation says that the decline in the number of active administrators is "continuing in an unsustainable fashion." http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editors#Chapter_Three:_The_future_.282007-present.29 http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor... It would be interesting to look at administrators' self-reported reasons for burning out, and it is definitely interesting to look at competing models for building online encyclopedias, but you may be right that an explicitly more inclusionist policy (which allows even more content that cannot be reliably sourced and that may be simply made up by fanboys) would hasten the decline of active Wikipedia administrators and editors in general. On the whole, I have an inclusionist orientation, and still do, but after seeing many more Wikipedia articles from the inside (as a wikipedian) than I once had, I can't say that I disagree with the majority of article deletion decisions that are actually made by current Wikipedia community processes.
  - bane 16y ago
    I can say definitively that I know of at least a dozen people who would otherwise be active contributors to wikipedia if they hadn't had dozens of hours of their work deleted repeatedly. Not edited or improved, deleted.
    - tokenadult 16y ago
      What kind of sources did they cite in their contributions? (I agree with you, assuming those articles were sourced, that it is appalling to delete sourced content. But that has happened to me. Point-of-view pushing is a huge problem on Wikipedia. Coming with sources, in my observation, saves articles from being deleted entirely, but having good sources doesn't save a paragraph from being deleted entirely in an article devoted to pushing a point of view.)
      - bane 16y ago
        I guess that's part of the debate isn't it? Most things don't actually have a tremendous number of academic sources. If I'm fantastically interested in contributing an article about say, a well known jazz band that doesn't have a page on wikipedia, I may be terribly limited in what secondary resources I can call upon. Jazz bands don't get a terrible amount of coverage in main stream media, they don't become top-40 acts, they don't get academic papers written about them in the ACM, etc. But they may be hugely influential, have tens of thousands of listeners, and may have other qualifications for why they should have a page. But if they don't meet <arbitrary person>'s requirement for notability they may flag it AfD and then it ends up working it's way through Wikipedia's impressively broken editing process where it'll probably end up deleted despite any discussion to the contrary. Importantly, my hypothetical jazz band may only be well known in Jazz circles, having never pierced more mainstream circles. But just like a singular academic paper that no lay person has heard about, but been cited hundreds of times, this band may have influenced hundreds of other, highly visible bands. I'm picking Jazz here, but it could be any other fairly insular sub-culture, say Blue Grass, or Model Train collectors. It's not up to me, as somebody not interested in their sub-culture to decide if it's notable. That only tests whether or not something has percolated up to "common knowledge". If that's the test for inclusion, then we don't really need Wikipedia anyway do we? Everybody already knows what's in it!

shekmalhen 16y ago

Even after this "reversal", I'm not sure he understands why people were angry about his AfDs.

pestaa 16y ago
If he'll remember this situation next time he starts clicking buttons, I don't care about his understanding.
T-R 16y ago
Judging from his comments, I'd wager this wouldn't have blown up if it weren't for his attitude toward the whole situation. His use of smileys coupled with his tone leaves the impression of condescension, obliviousness, or apathy toward the people he'd upset.

chris_j 16y ago

"Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages?" Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true: Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the letter of the law but yet seemed so wrong. There is no way that the likes of Factor or Clean should be deleted from Wikipedia so the question becomes how can the guidelines be changed so that they don't allow it to happen.

bendmorris 16y ago
The most important rule of all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules i.e., if something seems to fit in with the "letter of the law" but has no real benefit and lots of reasons not to do it, don't do it!
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Sadly the mostly widely mis-used rule :) IAR is for daily usage, no real application in this case (because unfortunately the wider community will probably agree with deletions)
_delirium 16y ago
There's been some progress on fixing them over the past few years, mostly in terms of making them more specific to different areas. For example, there's now things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music). Factor is an interesting case. I tried to improve that article at one point by adding references, but I was unable to find any. As far as I can tell, it's almost never actually mentioned in the programming language community: not mentioned in a single book, even books about Forth-like languages, has no articles about it (in workshops, conferences, or anything), and its website has been mentioned in passing in four papers according to Google Scholar (the papers provide no real info on it besides mentioning in passing that it exists). It appears to have some level of notability among PLs aficionados, but if you were trying to discern that by reading the PLs literature, you wouldn't know it. Clean is quite easy to find references for, though, so not sure how someone could've argued about that one in good faith. It is something of a problem for things that are "known" in an area but don't have many references, because I do think Wikipedia's insistence on third-party sources is a good idea: an article based entirely on a few sources written by the subject and associates of the subject isn't great, like an article about a band that only cites the band's website, MySpace, and a few mentions on people's blogs. But how do you distinguish that case from the well-known-but-has-few-good-references case, and then how do you write an article about the latter? Here's a music example that might be analogous to some of these programming languages, a record label that's well-known in the postindustrial sphere, but has no good sources as far as I can find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europa_Cafe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europa_Cafe. How should one improve the article, and what should the information in it be referenced to? The long-term solutions here are to improve the literature: someone needs to write a more recent book or survey article on emerging programming languages, and someone else needs to write a book on 1980s/90s independent postindustrial record labels. Then Wikipedia can just cite those books. Until then, since Wikipedia works best when it's a summary of the existing literature, it runs into trouble when the existing literature itself is deficient.

mfukar 16y ago

If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place saying "Christopher, we are upset".

chrismonsanto 16y ago
No, my understanding was that a small, but vocal, special interest group was upset for nominating their favorite programming language. The vast majority of angry people seemed unable to come up with a rational reason for saving the article. The vast majority of calm people seemed to agree with the deletions, and agreed with me for labeling the others as a small-but-vocal-minority. If you felt you were doing something right and no one who thought you were wrong had a convincing case (as convincing as "nazi dickwad deletionist we're gonna e-mail your professor" is), wouldn't you try to push through the intimidation? It wasn't until the wider reddit and HN communities caught on that I understood that it wasn't an annoyed minority, yet I would have caught on earlier if someone had actually tried to reason with me (and maybe brought up the citation argument). I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts. At least you're getting voted up, which should help. It's an anti-spam measure... also, try clicking on the 'link' of something you want to reply to. If there's too much back and forth in a thread, it'll hide the 'reply' button in an attempt to slow down conversation, but obviously this is a bit of a special case.
- copper 16y ago
  For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.
  - 16y ago

yzhengyu 16y ago

Notability is broken, since it is usually subjective and wielded mercilessly as an axe by the Wikipedia mafia to cull material which they deem as not notable. Inclusive? Haha, don't make me laugh.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
There is, however, nothing stopping articles deemed as not notable by consensus at Wikipedia from being included in other references.

burgerbrain 16y ago

The damage is already done. "I'm sorry (but I was still right!)" is the kind of apology I would expect to hear from a child. If you're sorry, then make it right and undo the harm that you did. Otherwise, just shut-up, you're not sincere.

nicelios 16y ago
He didn't say he was sorry. He just said he will stop.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    So? Isn't the most important thing that he's stopping?
    - burgerbrain 16y ago
      I repeat myself, but: "The damage is already done."
      - j_baker 16y ago
        You're not interested in an apology... You don't care that he stopped. What exactly do you want from him then?
        burgerbrain 16y ago
        I am interested in an apology. He has not given one, despite this so called "reversal". A sincere apology would involve 1) apologizing/admitting wrong-doing and 2) undoing the damage. I could certainly settle for only the second.

j_baker 16y ago

Has this page been changed since it was posted? Perhaps I'm missing it, but I don't see anything that indicates that he's giving up.

thechangelog 16y ago
I couldn't see the change on the mobile edition of Wikipedia. It's there on the full version.
natep 16y ago
It's showing as the current version for me, but here's the permalink: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_Monsanto&oldid=413834663 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...

to 16y ago

he already succeeded deleting all natural crops in america!

teyc 16y ago

Right... notability guidelines are broken, but he doesn't mind following it to the letter.

latch 16y ago

Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

afterburner 16y ago
Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.
- _delirium 16y ago
  In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc. When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like! And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
  - afterburner 16y ago
    I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
    - _delirium 16y ago

Osmose 16y ago

Trying to delete stories? He nominated them for an open discussion to be decided by an admin. But that doesn't sound nearly as malicious. There are valid criticisms about the AfD process, but most people are blaming Chris as if he just walked by and deleted the articles on his own. I fear that this issue has become less about fixing broken Wikipedia policies that encourage people like Chris to delete articles, and more about "teaching him a lesson". The amount of ad hominem attacks in the original story is much higher than anything I'd expect from HN. And, considering HN is self-policed in a lot of ways, I think the issue needs to be pointed out.

shekmalhen 16y ago
The AfD process is problematic, but Christopher was also problematic. He was strictly following the rules, even when it didn't make sense, and continued to do so even after other users were telling him, politely, that he was wrong. This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia (at least, according to everyone who comments on ridiculous AfD stories). As for teaching him a lesson: he was caught live. The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce.
- by 16y ago
  "The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce." Let's consider the logic of that statement by taking a different example. A young child is in a shop and is told by its parent it cannot have some candy. Young child "I want candy! I want candy!". The child becomes enraged, more and more enraged, by the behavior of the parent. Should the child now teach the parent a harsh lesson? Since the parent's behavior has induced a great deal of rage a very harsh lesson seems entirely appropriate.
  - shekmalhen 16y ago
    The two situations are way too different: the relationship between a child and his parents implies that the parents have an authority on him. Deletionists have no authority on the content of Wikipedia. They know the policies and how to make Wikipedia work. Those policies grant them an advantage and if they misuse them, the users have little recourses. This, combined with arrogance, enrage the users. I do not approve the harshness that we saw tonight, but it is easily understandable.

Charuru 16y ago

This problem is hardy unique to this instance alone, or even to wikipedia alone. This is a question faced by All publications, that of target audience and market. Obviously on a tech forum like HN we're more likely to be interested in langs like factor. But imagine a journalist looking through langs to report on computer sci or a teenager looking for something new to study... It would be a waste of time. Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites, except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page? We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything, as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

yaix 16y ago

He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. In an open system, once you start ignoring the rules, everybody will want their exceptions and you end up in chaos. Anyone remember the Wikipedia from ten years ago? Today, it aims to have a good standard regarding its content, that is only possible with rules. So just update the rules and everything is fine. More importantly, it will still be fine ten years from now, when nobody remembers this incident anymore.

loewenskind 16y ago
>He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. Everyone is responsible for their own action. You should not follow rules that are bad, you should ignore them or try to change them yourself. "Just doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse and if I had the power I would punish that defense more severely than any other because it's the most dangerous.

chmike 16y ago

Pruning knowledge is a dangerous process.

justincormack 16y ago
Regarding this as pruning knowledge is rather exaggerated. First wikipedia deletions are not deletions, they are just hidden from most users but can be viewed or restored. Second this is not primary knowledge it is a very short and incomplete summary of the primary sources.
- teyc 16y ago
  I didn't realize that deletion is not permanent. In what manner is the content hidden? Will it show up in search engine results? Will an anonymous user like myself see the content?
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Check it out for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_language&action=edit&redlink=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_programming_... > A page with this title has previously been deleted. If you are creating a new page with different content, please continue. If you are recreating a page similar to the previously deleted page, or are unsure, please first contact the deleting administrator using the information provided below.
    - bendmorris 16y ago
      Minor correction here: the "Alice programming language" page was deleted, only to be moved to "Alice (programming language)". The one you want is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alice_(programming...
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        Nice catch -- it still illustrates what a deleted page looks like though.

davidhollander 16y ago

>Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. That's how these things work Chris. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore 1993

slouch 16y ago

chris blanked his talk page on wikipedia. here's the content he removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christopher_Monsanto&action=historysubmit&diff=413834782&oldid=413833989 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christop...

Flenser 16y ago

Stack Exchange process for deleting content > Wikipedia process for deleting content. Having nominations be anonymous until a consensus is reached stops this kind of issue arising. Sometimes complete transparency isn't the best policy.

silverlake 16y ago

As a fan and user(!) of Factor, I agree that it fails the notability test on Wikipedia. I can't find any mention of the language, beyond that by the author, which might convince a 3rd person that it is more notable than my own pet PL projects. But this might be true of many implementations of well-defined languages like Smalltalk, Scheme, or C. Take a look at the big list of Scheme implementations[1]. How many of them are "notable"? Is Ikarus or Chicken notable? Many PL papers describe some minor tweak in a homegrown toy language. Are all those languages notable? I think Factor deserves to have a Wikipedia page (it still does), but I don't know by what general criteria I'm including it. It has a complete, robust implementation and is still actively developed, which is more than could be said of 90% of PLs out there. But how do we codify that into a notability test? [1] http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implementations http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...

daxelrod 16y ago

The permalink for this is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_Monsanto&oldid=413834663 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...

jackfoxy 16y ago

Thank you, Chris. You did the right thing.

Programma 16y ago

What I think is funny: this guy seems to point to a problem with the internet and Wikipedia. But the actual problem is that he is not a programmer (obviously) so he has a skewed view of what is notable when it comes to programming language. In other words, he has no clue what he is talking about. He then blames 'the internet' for calling him out. That is the problem with the internet: this newbie comes into the scene and has no idea why his actions are annoying and detrimental. He says he's looking for 'policies' but he's just a newbie. Hopefully in 5-10 years these dramas will end when we all collectively grow up a bit and stop with the ignorant drama queen games. Good to see that some aren't letting him rest until he acknowledges that he was deleting articles he had no business deleting. Ignorant editor is no excuse.

rkalla 16y ago

I wonder how many people got up in arms when they saw the "Monsanto" and thought a patent-hoarding Satan was running around Wikipedia erasing programming language articles. This wasn't really a valuable comment, but I couldn't help it.

VladRussian 16y ago

that is the outermost danger of tomorrow - the youngs today are made believe in the rule of rule. They will be cutting each other's fingers (of course after due process presided over by the millenium judge) for pressing a button on their own hardware they aren't licensed to press by the EULA or for not using real name on Facebook/Quora.