6 ms·
Is Randal L Schwartz notable enough for Wikipedia?
- andrewcooke 15y agoheh. i think this is a generational thing. he was pretty damn central to the early perl culture, but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him. i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were? to give some idea of relative fame, i'd say he was no less famous in his community that, say, paul buchheit is these days. [and i'd like to know more details about how the prosecution ended up being expunged - whatever that means. he did time, right?]
- mbateman 15y agoNotability is not temporary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_is_not_temporary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability...
- andrewcooke 15y agointeresting, thanks. so he should stay.
- tptacek 15y agoThe notion that maybe he shouldn't is a false controversy. Even if he wanted the page removed, the page would stay. You can't be written up in tens or hundreds of news stories over a decade and not have a WP page written about you. Wikipedia is not suggesting that Schwartz be deleted. One random guy is. FILM AT 11.
- apike 15y agoAlthough notability is not temporary in theory, Wikipedia has always (and probably always will) suffer from presentism. Things that are important today get a disproportionate amount of attention. It is maybe easier to evaluate something's historical notability with the benefit of hindsight. That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.
- dwyer 15y ago> I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like. Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that... * [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj] Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it? I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does. Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.
- carussell 15y ago> Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? This is a pretty naïve argument. Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.
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- gojomo 15y agoNotability is not temporary. Indeed, and backpropagating this principle through time, with a few other rough assumptions, suggests there are at least 1 million people who were once notable who will never get their own Wikipedia article. There is, however, a userspace article to commemorate these 'Unknown Notables': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of_the_Unknown_Notable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of...
- carussell 15y ago> i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were? This has been addressed, somewhat, but I'll say a bit more about it. This is, sorry to say, a wrongheaded approach. Editorial decisions should be made with some prescience, or at least an attempt at it. To suggest that a contrary approach is an acceptable one has a couple of negative effects: 1. There's the obvious problem, which is that it says after a threshold has been reached, it's okay that this stuff will be lost. Not even through neglect or inaction, but as a matter of policy and very deliberate action. This is, in a word, dumb. 2. It encourages people to spend unfortunate levels of effort on ephemera that's just going to disappear. To put it another way, it squanders an already-scarce resource on stuff that doesn't matter in the long run. That's a lot of churn, and there's enough as it is.
- Zigurd 15y agoMore people know him as a TWiT Network host, nowadays.
- RandalSchwartz 15y agoI've noticed that at the past few open source conferences. Most people know me from FLOSS Weekly now. Since we already went through a "FLOSS Weekly deletion" action, can't some of that apply back to my article?
- watmough 15y ago"but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him" Isn't this why encyclopedias exist, and exactly why this entry shouldn't be deleted? Personally, I'm in the 'keep' camp, I can't understand why people would want to delete this, unless it's a manifestation of the trolling culture that seems to be springing up in a variety of places.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoEvery time I think Wikipedia couldn't slide any further into craziness, I see something like this. Nobody ever seems to step back and ask "what exactly are we accomplishing by campaigning to get content deleted?". Somewhere between "preventing spam, vandalism, and vanity pages" and "delete everything" there's a line; the exact placement of that line seems non-obvious, but individual cases like this seem incredibly obvious (and spam, vandalism, and vanity pages seem rather obvious as well, so it works in both directions).
- tptacek 15y agoRespectfully, you don't know what you're talking about. Nothing crazy has happened here. The whole point of Wikipedia is that anyone can do stuff like "propose that WP delete a page". Note that the page hasn't been deleted yet. When Randal Schwartz is actually deleted from Wikipedia, then you have an argument.
- rbanffy 15y agoI get the point, but it starts to become annoying when people repeatedly propose deletion of pages nobody with an IQ above room temperature would consider deleting.
- tptacek 15y agoLike I said downthread: this article actually was crappy. The AfD is going to improve it.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoThe danger of using an AfD as a tool for improving an article is that it forces people to improve it or remove what already exists, which discourages people from adding articles if they can't add an extensive article (or even if they can). An AfD should not get filed unless the article itself has negative value to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia would be better off with the article gone. There do exist such articles, but that should be a pretty high bar.
- tptacek 15y agoYes. No reasonable person could even contest this. Randal Schwartz has been written about in reliable sources extensively, owing to an incident in which he was convicted for a felony involving breaking into Intel servers. •••• PEOPLE OF HN: ANYBODY CAN PROPOSE ANY ARTICLE ON WP FOR DELETION. THERE IS NO BAR FOR IT. •••• If you make comically stupid proposals, like "[Barack Obama] isn't notable and should be deleted", an admin will shut you down. But otherwise, if even an iota of thought is required to make the decision, it will go to AfD and get shouted down. This AfD is not going close "deleted"; by WP's own rules, it basically can't be deleted. This isn't newsworthy. If we had an HN story any time anyone made a misguided AfD posting, that's all we'd ever talk about here. Meanwhile, before anyone suggests that they've done the world a favor by directing attention to the AfD: canvassing support for a "keep" vote actually makes the admin's job harder. It muddies the issue. It means that every well-reasoned comment will carry a subtext of "maybe this is a sockpuppeted comment". Not a win. And: before anyone complains about the damage done to the encyclopedia by the big ugly "this page might get deleted" tag: this article actually is poorly sourced and needs improvement. WP's immune response to non-notable articles is going to end up improving this particular article by inciting WP nerds to dredge up the (numerous) news stories that reference him. PS: Not for nothing, but WP's coverage of Randal Schartz is wanting, in that it drastically pares back what is notable about him (his felony hacking conviction) in favor of what he is "locally famous" for (his Perl advocacy). This is a consequence of a very vocal FORS contingent that watches that page.
- ErrantX 15y agoIf it drags in my interest I might try to rescue the article tomorrow. The lack of sources at the moment means it runs a reasonable chance of people mindlessly !voting delete. (but to echo tptacek; if you are going to follow this link and comment on the proposed deletion ''please'' take a moment to review the notability policies and make a sensible, valid argument rather than the "this is ridiculous" sort that has already appeared. If anything, that sort of thing usually goes against the article)
- burgerbrain 15y ago"Meanwhile, before anyone suggests that they've done the world a favor by directing attention to the AfD: canvassing support for a "keep" vote actually makes the admin's job harder." I think that's all we can really hope for. In reality, you should say it makes it easier.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- m0nastic 15y agoThe notability link that was posted [‡] would seem to indicate that there is a difference between a work being notable and the inclusion of a biography of the author of that work. If I was somehow involved in some notable event (like, oh...say I go on a large-scale bank robbing spree), there is an argument to be made that even if that event should be included in Wikipedia, a separate page just about me shouldn't be. (I also don't think his article should be deleted, but I don't think it's nonsensical to have a distinction between a notable event and a notable person). EDIT: Included the link, as mentioning the position of the comment doesn't make any sense when comments order changes. [‡] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2910731
- jamesbritt 15y agoThis is a Web site that thinks it appropriate to offer a synopsis for every episode of Burn Notice. There's a page for each season, plus a page for the show itself. Why is the inclusion of Randal even an issue? "Reasons for deletion ... Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia" I like Burn Notice, it's fun and entertaining. But does it need to be in an encyclopedia? More so than Randal L Schwartz? Talk about intellectual mob rule[0]. 0: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_kahn http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_...
- JoshTriplett 15y agoI frequently use Wikipedia as a source of information on a TV series, and that includes an episode list and synopses. If people might want to look it up, why should they have to move that content elsewhere to one of the various TV summary sites, most of which suck a lot more than Wikipedia (with the exception of special cases for shows popular enough to have dedicated sites, like Memory Alpha).
- jamesbritt 15y ago* I frequently use Wikipedia as a source of information on a TV series, ... * So do I, and it's quite handy. But if Wikipedia is to be the host for what is, essentially, mass-media trivia, then why would it not also be the host for arguably less mundane content, such as a page on Randal Schwartz. Or me, for that matter? It just depends on how Wikipedia's owners decide to handle it. But they're currently defining themselves as an encyclopedia.
- andrewguenther 15y agoIf you look at the discussion you will see that Randal himself has made multiple contributions to the page, which is against Wikipedia's policy, and could be the perceived grounds for deletion. Aside from that, this is still only a proposal for deletion, like many others have said. I don't think this is any real cause for alarm.
- RandalSchwartz 15y agoSeriously? I've been very very careful to abide by WP:BIO. The only changes I've ever made are to add ISBNs or my photo. I even stay out of the talk page for the most part as well. I call "troll".
- tptacek 15y agoI have a problem with you calling people a "troll" when they are merely wrong in the particulars of WP policy. The fact of the matter is that your changes to that page have not been restricted to ISBNs and your repeated photo changes... and that's just the stuff that's in the history of the page with your name on it; it does't account for the advocacy you've made on the Talk page for the removal of the coverage of your felony conviction.
- burgerbrain 15y agoMaking accusations such as he did without taking the time to verify them may not be purposely trolling, but it does have a very similar negative effect on the quality of the discussion.
- RandalSchwartz 15y agoSeriously? you're going there? My first response is "URLs of edits please". Particularly, my talk page edits are not subject to WP:BIO, and the only edit I made there was not "for the removal of the coverage of [my] felony conviction", but quite the opposite: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Randal_L._Schwartz&diff=111829981&oldid=111745104 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Randal_L._Sch... - and if you find that any of my further edits weren't strictly about "correcting any factual errors", please call me on it.
- m0nastic 15y agoThe one takeaway I see from these "Wikipedia article deletion stories" is that as time progresses, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the notability requirement as society progresses from a smaller number of more authoritative sources to a large number of less authoritative ones.
- bugsy 15y agoThe real question to ask is why does anyone take wikipedia serious as a source these days? I would trust Schwartz's opinions on Peruvian copper mining, quantum physics, square dancing, or any other subject long before I would trust any article on wikipedia because Schwartz has more credibility.
- carussell 15y ago> The real question to ask is why does anyone take wikipedia serious as a source these days? Who's saying you should? And what's different about "these days" versus, I don't know, 2005? Feel free to substitute there your favorite year from any point on the timeline of Wikipedia nostalgia. Edit: Goddamn. I really hate to do it, but challenges, please? The notion that you can/should/could ever trust Wikipedia is some weird inference that has been tacked on by uninvolved bystanders following Wikipedia's success, and does not originate from within Wikipedia. Wikipedia's stance on the reputability of itself and other tertiary sources is as well documented as the limitations of liability in GNU software.
- lincolnwebs 15y agoIt's not worth the time to fight Wikipedia deleting its own content. I've seen more notable pages get deleted by petulant administrators. The bureaucracy of that site stinks more than the US Senate.
- bprater 15y agoOne of Randal's additions to the world is the "Schwartzian transform", something I remember using extensively a decade ago when I was doing web programming in Perl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform
- joh6nn 15y agothe whole "notability" requirement on WP really bothers me; it's not like this is britannica, where there's a limited number of pages to cram all this info into. i'd much rather have a definitive resource, than one that only covered "notable" material.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pbreit 15y agoIt would be ironic of Schwartz is listed in Britannica. I didn't downvote you but I can understand the sentiment. Your comment is nonsensical and does not add value.
- tzs 15y agoI've just added my "keep" to the discussion. The following is OT, but I'm curious: Does anyone else find the fact that the Wikipedia talk pages are wiki pages to be about the stupidest thing ever? Wikis are designed for occasional edits, not active discussions. It's very annoying to try to save a comment and find that it is rejected because someone else got an edit in while you were editing. It seems clear to me that the talk pages should use an HN or Reddit like system, not wiki pages. Or am I missing something?
- pbreit 15y agoService idea: pan-web Disqus-like discussion widget that works like HN.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mindcrime 15y agoAnd the result of the discussion is KEEP, just as it should be. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Randal_L._Schwartz http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles... Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion. I did my part (adding a pile of references to places where Randal had been interviewed and presented as a notable authority), and between all our effort, we have a better article than before (hopefully). Proof that - sometimes - this Wikipedia thing works the way it should. ;-)
- T_S_ 15y agoI recently read the article with interest. Before this HN thread. Is that sufficient?
- mgkimsal 15y agoAs others also stated, I'm not sure why this is even an issue. He was infinitely instrumental in early web culture through his perl work - influencing an entire generation of developers (if only to drive some of them to PHP!) :) What seems to be missing from Randal's wikipedia page is his karaoke skills. Perhaps those are best left to wikimedia instead.
- WardCunningham 15y agoThere would be no wiki without Randal. I learned all I knew about Perl from his book. -- Ward Cunningham
- warmfuzzykitten 15y agoI would be offended, too, but when I went to his page I see no signs it is under threat of deletion. Tempest in a teapot fugit?
- drallison 15y agoYes. Over time, if Perl is no longer significant either practically or historically, perhaps his wikipedia entry could be archived as "ancient history", but for the moment it is relevant.