15 ms·

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• willdr 3mo ago
  Interesting article (I tend to agree with you re SNG in the programming field). But unfortunately I couldn't easily absorb the substance as your site needs some work on mobile: - text completely overflowing the background - body text is arguably too small - the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually - footnotes appearing out of order
  • bbkane 3mo ago
    I actually enjoyed the layout, even though I had to use landscape mode on my phone to comfortably read it. It's nice to see new formats
• dibujaron 3mo ago
  This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics. Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
  • panzi 3mo ago
    I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.
  • andai 3mo ago
    The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)
    • jibal 3mo ago
      The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else. > Odin was a major influence on Jai. This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.
      • wtetzner 3mo ago
        > The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else. The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
        • dismalaf 3mo ago
          Is C++ a game oriented language because most game engines and games are written in it?
          • andai 3mo ago
            Yeah oriented might be the wrong word here. "Surprisngly well suited for the job" is more like it. It was very ergonomic. In fact, I ended up translating my Odin game to several other languages and the experience was quite painful. (That's one way to measure the quality of a language! How much it hurts to port code out of it.)
        • jibal 3mo ago
          Ginger Bill directly addresses this erroneous argument in TFA: > Many people think Odin is "just for games" at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible. > Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
  • recursivecaveat 3mo ago
    I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.
    • nvme0n1p1 3mo ago
      SISC is there because it's not notable, so the busybodies haven't even noticed the page exists. Odin, however, is notable, and that put it on their radar as a target for attacking its notability.
      • stymaar 3mo ago
        And here's the persecution LARPing the article talks about.
        • HappyPanacea 3mo ago
          So why is that article not deleted yet?
          • lambdaone 3mo ago
            I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.
    • woodruffw 3mo ago
      This is an argument for deleting those non-notable articles as well, not retaining other non-notable articles.
    • 3mo ago
  • dismalaf 3mo ago
    It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server. If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.
  • steveklabnik 3mo ago
    I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.
  • bobbytheblkbear 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  • jibal 3mo ago
    Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.
    • woodruffw 3mo ago
      I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V). (But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
      • jibal 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        • woodruffw 3mo ago
          Thank you, that’s very persuasive.
        • jibal 3mo ago
          What should be persuasive is a simple logical inference from the statements made to my conclusion. From the article: > If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me. If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development". See for instance https://dev.to/dimension-ai/13-languages-are-challenging-c-most-fail-only-five-stack-up-2no5 https://dev.to/dimension-ai/13-languages-are-challenging-c-m... Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects. > Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia. This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake. As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA: > Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists. By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
  • loeg 3mo ago
    It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.
  • krautsauer 3mo ago
    It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 3836293648 3mo ago
    I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.
  • firesteelrain 3mo ago
    I have only heard about it because of HN.
  • baranul 3mo ago
    You never hearing about Odin, is an example of why its article was rejected by Wikipedia, because they failed at providing reputable references. The languages that you likely know of, often are corporate backed, with large marketing budgets and backdoor deals to help saturate traditional and social media. Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.
  • klibertp 3mo ago
    > I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics. Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc. The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck). In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language. > maybe I just happened to miss it? You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.
• smitty1e 3mo ago
  Well, there's always https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language
  • pyinstallwoes 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • SepiaSapient 3mo ago
      Linking to the equivalent of "@groq is this true??" should be mocked.
      • smitty1e 3mo ago
        Your reply was as substantive as my original, but I'll upvote you anyway, because there is no point in being a jerk.
  • countWSS 3mo ago
    Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data. Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.
    • womble2 3mo ago
      Of what use is an encyclopedia with "trash quality"?
      • countWSS 3mo ago
        Ok, suppose you have a "trash/low quality" article and "this article has been deleted", the article with some info will win over the audience as they search for it. Like "Worse is Better", the quality will improve over time and the "deleted article" will stay at 0 recognition. An average internet user will not complain about the Wikipedia article, they just switch to Grokipedia and whatever AI-generated content it has, since they now have it.
• andai 3mo ago
  If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind. e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right. The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability. And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.
  • kibibu 3mo ago
    I genuinely don't think Malbolge, for example, warrants a Wikipedia page if Odin doesn't
    • fluoridation 3mo ago
      Malbolge is basically a meme, and Wikipedia does have articles for memes. Speaking for myself, I have heard about Malbolge, and not about Odin.
    • JBits 3mo ago
      Perhaps it is because Malbolge is notable within the category of esolangs.
      • lifthrasiir 3mo ago
        As an actual esolang enthusiast (and a past Wikipedia administrator two decades ago), I can say that Malbolge is only notable because it remained unsolved for the extended period only due to the lack of serious attempts. It doesn't even pass the meme criteria IMO.
        • dickiedyce 3mo ago
          Although, didn’t it appear in a popular culture reference? I seem to remember an episode of “elementary“ that mentioned it.
• andrybak 3mo ago
  > Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments > > Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources. important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote. For more details, see - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_substitute_for_discussion#Not-votes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Overview_of_the_deletion_process_at_AfD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...
  • econ 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Alpha3031 3mo ago
      > I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. > I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough. You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?
      • econ 3mo ago
        You can't report someone for constructive improvements, quality citations and polite talk page discourse.
        • Alpha3031 3mo ago
          You've openly stated that you were intentionally acting in bad faith, hounding other editors to provoke them and doing so while logged out to evade scrutiny. Retreating to "you can't prove I did anything wrong" is not the defense you think it is.
• greyface- 3mo ago
  For reference, here's the article's content at the time of deletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(programming_language)&oldid=1347982297 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr...
  • cygx 3mo ago
    Yeah, that reference section (odin-lang.org, jangafx.com, learnodin.org, c3-lang.org, odinbook.com, gingerbill.org) is probably not up to Wikipedia's standards...
• brooke2k 3mo ago
  The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can participate. Anyone can advocate for change, such as changing the rules around notability. But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are. I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions. So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion. And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc. Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
  • cindyllm 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • xeric 3mo ago
    I looked and the cultural marxism tweet has zero likes, zero comments, and only 35 views. Although it has caused much consternation for you and the author. So it seems strange that you don't understand why people might be concerned about what Wikipedia has to say about things, and how it works, given its prominence.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• bobbytheblkbear 3mo ago
  I'll just say the obvious: Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge. It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is. The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
  • bawolff 3mo ago
    > edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is. Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
    • loeg 3mo ago
      Are you saying that lying isn't considered poor behavior by Wikipedia or what? I don't believe that.
      • bawolff 3mo ago
        Depends on how you define "lying". Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked. Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring. In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
• bawolff 3mo ago
  > If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face. I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
  • dismalaf 3mo ago
    Zig is more popular. Name a second modern "C competitor" language that's more popular?
    • calvinmorrison 3mo ago
      golang, rust, c++... etc?
      • dismalaf 3mo ago
        The whole "C competitor" category is about minimalism so no one puts Rust or C++ in that category. Also Golang has a GC so most wouldn't even call it a systems language at all...
        • bawolff 3mo ago
          Everyone considers rust a c competitor. Its literally replacing c in the linux kernel.
          • dismalaf 3mo ago
            NetBSD puts Lua in kernel space, is it a C competitor? Rust is an obvious competitor to C++, both are similarly featured. When people talk about "modern C competitors" they're almost always talking about more minimalist languages like Zig, Odin, C3, Jai, Hare, etc...
          • uecker 3mo ago
            I wonder whether the "replacing c in the linux kernel" is not more wishful thinking by Rust enthusiasts. As of know it has less than 1% and less than bash.
• qjack 3mo ago
  The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on. Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all. Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
  • conartist6 3mo ago
    I dunno I just find it silly because they're making such a Thing out of it that soon there's just gonna be a Wikipedia page on Odingate as it is rapidly becoming a notable public event of its own. Then that page will have to link to a page on Odin anyway
    • krautsauer 3mo ago
      Link will be red?
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
    • zerocrates 3mo ago
      The hypothetical "Odingate" article in a reliable source would probably have to discuss Odin enough to also be a viable source for Odin itself; problem solved.
• loeg 3mo ago
  > My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke". Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
• JBits 3mo ago
  It is disappointing to see that the v programming language has a Wikipedia article given it's history of being essentially fraudulent.
  • hmry 3mo ago
    Being fraudulent doesn't make something less notable. It might even make something more notable, provided enough sources report on it.
    • pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
      Indeed. The real shame is that Wikipedia mentions none of that, not that it has an article at all.
  • baranul 3mo ago
    This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older. Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere. Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
    • JBits 3mo ago
      While perhaps this is on me for not stating my position while repeating Bill's comment, I think you are unfairly assuming bad faith. You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy. I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
• SanjayMehta 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • add-sub-mul-div 3mo ago
    Why would deleting a page on an obscure topic earn anyone clout? Did they see into the future to know the public tantrum would follow? People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
    • SanjayMehta 3mo ago
      Ever heard of rage-baiting? Look it up. On Wikipedia.
• staplung 3mo ago
  I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was. For the record, I like Odin. (On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:) zig: 71,565 rust: 304,405 golang: 1,246,300 malbogle: 9
  • fwipsy 3mo ago
    The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.
    • greyface- 3mo ago
      > The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
      • fwipsy 3mo ago
        "That we have rules for the inclusion of material does not mean Wikipedians have no respect for truth and accuracy." Verifiable, in addition to accurate. Not "not accurate."
  • miguel_martin 3mo ago
    fwiw, I think a lot of people just clone odin and build it via `./build_odin.sh release` on MacOS (at least, I do). The compiler builds in ~20s
  • pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
    > it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_in_deletion_discussions#Wikipedia_should_be_about_everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_i...
• daneel_w 3mo ago
  Interesting article until you reach the gooey, messy bottom where the author takes a sudden personal turn and decides to pick apart the "spineless" creator of the programming language - who is the article's actual subject - by wielding their own ideologically and morally superior perspectives as truths. Smug, ironic, personal and somewhat unpleasant. I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
• bakugo 3mo ago
  This article seems quite drawn out for what is essentially an ad hominem attack on the personal views of the creator of the language.
  • hoffs 3mo ago
    I'd say it provides a lot of information about whole situation, including context on how wikipedia operates and history of behavior from the creator of the language. Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
• boca_honey 3mo ago
  I know programming is what's most important to many in this community, but as an outsider I need to ask: literally WTF is Odin? I mean I know about Java and C++, etc. But Odin? That's what Wikipedia policies are for. It cannot include anything and everything about every single profession, subculture, or interest group. An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is? That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
  • fwipsy 3mo ago
    > Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
  • bawolff 3mo ago
    > An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
  • pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
    > Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur In other words, just Reddit mods
• rfleury 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• square_usual 3mo ago
  I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
• James_K 3mo ago
  I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.
• jimbob45 3mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language) If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
  • thunderfork 3mo ago
    I see plenty of references in the articles I clicked on. Surely if Odin is all that notable, somebody somewhere's written something about it in a SIGGRAPH paper, at least?
• chaostheory 3mo ago
  I'm sure the Wikipedia mods have many great, valid reasons for deleting articles. Unfortunately for the ignorant masses, this has bad optics, since it looks like it runs counter to their goal of "cataloging all human knowledge".
  • atiedebee 3mo ago
    But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      I've found myself running into this sort of trap a lot. When I do something I think about the data that will be created and how to preserve it, and sometimes this prevents me from ever doing the thing, while the reality is that any data generated is worthless anyway. For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!
    • chaostheory 3mo ago
      That is obviously no longer the goal. It hasn’t been for years now. However, its original goal was to provide “every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge“.
• ternaryoperator 3mo ago
  When Wikipedia first came out, there was a big debate about articles on people: should it be inclusive (anybody with minor accomplishments gets in) or should there be some threshold to be met? Ultimately, it was decided that if the perception was that the person involved was to become notable principally by having a WP page, then they did not qualify. WP did not want to be used as a means of getting attention/traction/credibility. I like that criterion and I think it’s reasonable to feel that Odin does not meet it…yet.
• mindcrime 3mo ago
  Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search. So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision. And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time. It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
  • mberning 3mo ago
    This happened to me back in college. I authored a couple pages for some bands that I was in to, probably spent weeks pulling together history, lineup, albums, eps, etc. only to have them deleted unceremoniously with no recourse. That was my first and last attempt to contribute to wikipedia.
    • Dfol 3mo ago
      Same, I understand the editors/admins can't be experts on every topic but just because THEY don't think something is notable doesn't mean most people don't either.
      • bawolff 3mo ago
        In general, it should be clear from the article if the subject is notable. Admins don't have to be an expert, they just have to read the article. Notable is not the same as popular.
• nromiun 3mo ago
  > My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke". What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?
  • bena 3mo ago
    He’s not saying that’s why the article was deleted. He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.
• superdisk 3mo ago
  I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
• diimdeep 3mo ago
  Article has a few decent remarks, but ultimately it fails to deliver anthropologic, grounded, humane interpretation without narrow worldview and ideological biases of it's author.
• Reubend 3mo ago
  I'm sorry, but I agree with the wiki editors in this case. Odin is obscure. The author of this blog post seems to think it's well known, but I don't think that's substantiated.
• eru 3mo ago
  See also https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
• shevy-java 3mo ago
  Wikipedia can be strange sometimes, in particular the german variant. Ignoring all other factors, IMO there should be an article about Odin the programming language. Deleting an article about something that exists, is incredibly stupid; not sure why Wikipedia resorts to that. If Wikipdia deems Odin not noteworthy - and I don't really care about Odin myself - then the article could be kept short. That would still be better than deleting it. Wikipedia started with the goal of a database of literally everything. One could argue that Odin is not relevant because it may not be used by anyone, but then this would need to be an objective argument based on numbers and data, because many other programming languages are used by few people yet are mentioned on Wikipedia. So, that seems to be a stupid decision by those responsible on Wikipedia. CensorshipBros are annoying in general - the english wikipedia is much more open than the german wikipedia by the way.
  • Alpha3031 3mo ago
    Wikipedia is very explicitly not a indiscriminate database of everything,[1] and dismissing anyone in the editing community who attempts curate it as CensorshipBros is the same type of twitter bullshitting called out by the blog post in the OP. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not&oldid=8296767 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...
• jancsika 3mo ago
  I don't get the drama here. Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch. There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?
  • tialaramex 3mo ago
    Bill is that exact kind of person who is desperate to tell you that they don't care the mean girls are saying something nasty about them and, lest you mistake this for them actually not caring, will then spend an hour detailing all these accusations they don't care about and why exactly they're all wrong. Here on the orange site, where he can't edit what he wrote hours after finding out that he was wrong, there are a few interactions between me and Bill where I know a topic, Bill blusters but is clueless and so he makes a bit of a fool of himself. On Reddit, where Bill can go back and "edit" embarrassing mistakes the dynamic is very weird, with it appearing (if you go look now) that I keep restating things Bill has explicitly said he knows. Of course if you saw it when it happened it's the same as on HN, I stick to areas of expertise, Bill offers pronouncements on topics he doesn't understand, he looks like an idiot. But the power of the edit button allows Bill to rewrite history so that he knew all that with only the small price that now the conversation looks weird (and there's a tiny asterisk on his comments in some Reddit UIs to hint that they're edited) Now, I don't like what I call "Auteur languages". Programming Languages where a single individual or maybe a couple of people have absolute control. So Odin was never going to be a language I like, same for Jai, Hare, Cpp2† and indeed more relevantly Zig. In that sense it doesn't matter whether I like Odin, but it does seem like feedback on "Ginger" Bill Hall. † I'm sure Herb Sutter would tell you that his "new syntax" for C++ would be overseen by the same committee as the current language. The language as it exists today, largely abandoned, does not have such oversight.
• chris_wot 3mo ago
  Given the people now running the English Wikipedia, this is hardly surprising. Most of these folks have no real interest in article creation, only drama and fiddling with things like categories.
  • Dfol 3mo ago
    Agreed, plus they're weirdly political/politically biased in how a lot of topics are covered.
• lvoudour 3mo ago
  I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules? People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread: Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...
  • stymaar 3mo ago
    Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...
      • DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
        Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it. Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
• SidewaysView 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • marseysneed 3mo ago
    What do you think the world incel means?
    • SidewaysView 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
  • suddenlybananas 3mo ago
    I genuinely don't understand why this article upsets you so much you want the author beaten. Could you elaborate?
    • SidewaysView 3mo ago
      It's simple: make neckbeards afraid again.
• bugjoey 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• brador 3mo ago
  The fact that any factual text article needs to be deleted from an encyclopaedia fills me with rage.
• armchairhacker 3mo ago
  Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia. Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*. On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article. If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics). * To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
  • bawolff 3mo ago
    Its a good reminder that all wikipedia software is GPL, and the article content is CC-BY-SA. Anyone who thinks they can do better has the right to fork. Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.
    • ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
      Hey, you can fork 100% of the content, and several sites already have; but can you also fork enough volunteer editors, sysops, bureaucrats? Can you fork enough DevOps and cloud architects? Can you fork the WikiMania events and the assets that have been collected & established by the Wikimedia Foundation? I mean, some dudes way back in the day successfully forked Spanish-language Wikipedia because of some advertising disputes. Can anyone truly replicate success with a forked enwiki?
• leecommamichael 3mo ago
  >There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure: >You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information. See who they follow on Twitter. This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill. My politics are left-leaning and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya) If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right. Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.
  • willdr 3mo ago
    Encyclopedias are not designed to report on pop culture. The entire nature of an encyclopedia is to be downstream of good secondary sources, ideally academic, and summarise what those good secondary sources have said about specific topics. Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?
• LoveMortuus 3mo ago
  I don’t get why they would ever delete knowledge… that’s like burning books…
  • sethaurus 3mo ago
    Are you sincerely advocating that Wikipedia should never delete anything, regardless of notability or verifiability? Do you think that would make it better or worse?
• skotobaza 3mo ago
  The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter? And then I read this: > Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view > There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure: > 2. See who they follow on Twitter What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?
  • vor_ 3mo ago
    If you read the whole article, you'll understand the context and how its relates to Wikipedia. The fact GingerBill accuses Wikipedia of having a political bias against Odin when (spoilers) it was actually a "constitutional conservative" who triggered the deletion is amusing.
    • skotobaza 3mo ago
      I don't see anyone (especially GingerBill) stating that article about Odin was deleted because of "political bias". The only thing I see is a general statement about Wikipedia being an "ideological playground". But I don't see that anyone thinks that people who removed the article were of the opposite views. The author makes the connection because of some Twitter accounts that GingerBill follows (and because of what he allegedly said in some videos), but I don't think it's a good proof, especially by the author's own standards.
      • atiedebee 3mo ago
        Right before the statement in Wikipedia being an ideological playground: > Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language and don't want it on Wikipedia as any form of "advertisement". It doesn't directly say "political bias", but it certainly is implied (not as in national politics, more like ideological)
• amval 3mo ago
  What a fantastic article. I could not care less about the actual topic, but in these times of literacy scarcity, it is refreshing to see someone actually being able to read through sub-text and present their views in a well-reasoned manner. Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
  • leecommamichael 3mo ago
    I think part of being well-reasoned is being honest, and they're certainly being honest. I don't agree with their means, though. Bill is a complex person, and you don't have to stalk him to learn about him. He interacts with newbies plenty in the Discord server. I find him to be pretty nice in those interactions.
    • amval 3mo ago
      I think the article is pretty fair at presenting GingerBill's legitimate grievances, Wikipedia shortcomings, acknowledging that GingerBill can be constructive and, at the same time, recognizing that the current interactions are coloured by his particular ideological grievances. It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".
      • leecommamichael 3mo ago
        That’s fair, I think I’m mostly referring to their assessment of how they could possibly come to evaluate his position as BDFL (which I realize is totally subjective) and I disliked that they didn’t bother trying to talk to him… which I’m not being super rational about, people in his position aren’t always accessible.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
• PakistaniDenzel 3mo ago
  Funny how GearsDatapacks (https://github.com/gearsdatapacks https://github.com/gearsdatapacks) votes to delete the Odin page because it's "non-notable" yet is a core member of the non-notable Gleam language which shockingly has a Wikipedia page
  • arijun 3mo ago
    But the Gleam Wikipedia page is littered with references? Including to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey page, which has gleam very high on "want to learn" but doesn't have Odin at all...
  • chris_wot 3mo ago
    Even more incredible that someone who represents an organisation is allowed to edit the English Wikipedia under that username! Anyone else would have their account banned. But hey, don't expect consistency or fairness from the ones on the English Wikipedia.
    • Gander5739 3mo ago
      GearsDatapacks appears to be a pseudonym, not an organisation.
      • chris_wot 3mo ago
        Except that didn’t stop others from being banned. But hey, admins could never be damned with accusations of consistency (or basic fairness).
        • Gander5739 3mo ago
          Such as?
  • cygx 3mo ago
    Well, Casey Muratori argued github stars should be considered a metric of notability, and the Gleam repository has almost twice the number (21.6k vs Odin's 11k)! Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...
• petesergeant 3mo ago
  Underlying this whole drama, and indeed as much of the article as I was able to stomach, is that there is a large degree of politicking, personal taste, and arbitrariness in the enforcement of Wikipedia’s policies, while pretending that there isn’t. At least on Reddit the mods don’t pretend they’re not biased
• pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago
  > Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search. Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.
• 20k 3mo ago
  I'm glad someone's calling this out for what it is. These twitter influences are professional horseshit mongers that pretend to be acting in good faith, but flip what they're saying 180 degrees to fit whatever will drive maximum engagement in the moment. Its something that tends to slide by unless you stop and actually try to reconcile all the disparate things that someone has said, at which point you realise literally none of it makes any sense Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't
• asibahi 3mo ago
  I like this article. It puts to words something that has been in my mind for a while.
• 217 3mo ago
  slop in its purest non ai form
• greenoracle9 3mo ago
  The awkward part is that modern software communities often do not produce the kind of durable secondary sources Wikipedia wants.
  • pilgrim0 3mo ago
    It’s also intriguing how an academic article read by no one would pass as valid source but an YouTube channel with multiple videos about the thing reaching millions of people across several countries and languages would not. I understand it’s not about reach, but trust and such. And it’s weird that Wikipedia, a Website, does not trust, in essence, its very medium.
• ChoosesBarbecue 3mo ago
  Firstly, I think the visual design of this article (at least on a desktop display) was beautiful, and a delight to read. Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.
• amiga386 3mo ago
  I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language. There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola) If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either. "Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ... If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable. > In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
  • selectnull 3mo ago
    Well, you're one of today's lucky 10000. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  • notarobot123 3mo ago
    There is a fair question here (though presented with questionable integrity) about what notability means in programming languages. Especially for more recent and perhaps not widely used programming languages. I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of). Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality. On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.
• movpasd 3mo ago
  I despise the "what's true is true" attitude exhibited by Casey and Bill in these tweets. I find it to be an instant flag of unreliability. The smartest human alive is still a human. We have a stake in every conversation, we bring our baggage and our allegiances. So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them. It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.
  • embedding-shape 3mo ago
    Nothing here is about "truth" or "objectivity", it's about Wikipedia's subjective view of what counts as "notable" or not. Seems like a really strange confusion here, as you're giving some meta-perspective on the discussion while seeming to miss the entire point of the discussion you're trying to provide a new perspective to?
    • movpasd 3mo ago
      You're talking about the material of the Twitter discussions where I'm more discussing the article itself, which is about the community and discourse surrounding it. If you want my opinion on that, Odin seems pretty notable to me, and I would expect there to be a Wikipedia article for it, and I'd be all for engaging with the editors on that. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia moderators to be plugged into the world of programming languages the way I am, though. Like the article says, this seems like subject-specific notability guidelines could help. It's definitely true that the programming world is missing the kind of institutional material that works well for, say, science or news.
• Rochus 3mo ago
  I find it strange that they deleted the article. The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. I think there is a deeper bureaucratic pattern behind it. In every once-useful organization, there comes a point where the rules stop being instruments and become relics: nobody asks whether they still serve the original purpose, because the bureaucracy now exists mainly to defend its own procedures. That is basically Parkinson territory, and also the classic drift into cargo cult administration. The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away. That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.
  • Gander5739 3mo ago
    > The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. According to what authority?
    • Rochus 3mo ago
      I'm not an Odin user, but interested in programming languages. Concerning Odin, we have these figures: GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016. I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.
      • cygx 3mo ago
        Wikipedia doesn't care about Github stars, forks or discord members, but "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.
• WhereIsTheTruth 3mo ago
  Textbook example of using fame as leverage against a rule, while claiming indifference to the rule itself
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• andrepd 3mo ago
  > The Wikipedia Mods view themselves as "journalists" and trying to do the "morally ideological" thing by only allowing certain posts on there I don't know any of the people in this post, since I firmly believe that not having twitter, instagram, or tiktok is the #1 thing anyone can do to improve their mental well-being. From this sentence alone however, I can exactly establish what kind of person this is. The persecution complex, the "journalist" as an insult, it's all there. > I know that as of now, GingerBill follows: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Libs of TikTok. Nailed it.
• CM30 3mo ago
  I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic. For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events. And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority. The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background. But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape. Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News. However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering. Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
  • ajross 3mo ago
    > The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background. I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is. But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period. And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys. We trust people first, up and down the scale.
• lambdaone 3mo ago
  The sad (or wonderful) fact is that anyone can write a new programming language now; I could for example use Claude create a wrapper on top of an existing languge (for example, a Python-like syntax wrapper for Scheme) in a few hours and start marketing it as a new language. So how can Wikipedia tell toy languages from real ones with actual useful adoption? It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
• mwkaufma 3mo ago
  Took a looooong time to get to their point (that ragebaiters don't actually care about neolangs _or_ wikimedia policy).
• zdc1 3mo ago
  This is silly. If you're language isn't getting enough coverage to get onto Wikipedia, stop complaining and get it some coverage. Ship features. Evangelise it. Get people using it. Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).
• strenholme 3mo ago
  I have read the entire blog entry while waiting for all of MaraDNS’s automated tests to pass so I could release MaraDNS 3.5.0038. My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion. That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that something Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with. I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.
• tulio_ribeiro 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• rurban 3mo ago
  Nim was also constantly threatened to be deleted. Then still named nimrod. This is when amateurs decide on professionals. I stopped contributing long time ago, though I was in the first 10
• cess11 3mo ago
  Apparently it's important to these odinists to be featured in a particular encyclopedia, so why haven't they spent some time over the last decade or so wooing some press and getting some doctoral students to use their language? That would have solved this issue for them.
• yellowapple 3mo ago
  Given the argument that “Odin must be notable because JangaFX uses it in production!”, it seems worthwhile to note that JangaFX itself doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page. Maybe the case for Odin's inclusion would be stronger if someone fixed that?
• torginus 3mo ago
  Honestly this article ends on a bit of an antagonistic note, but this whole situation is hilarious to me. GingerBill, a person who cares deeply and has very specific ideas about how some obscure stuff the public doesn't care about should work, meets another group of people who are exactly like him, except for they happen to be fixated on other stuff, fails to recognize this, and assumes the world is out to get him. He reaches out to Jimmy Wales, who acts like the adult in the room, and tells him to follow the rules just like anyone else, immediately gets added to the list of evil co-conspirators. After running out of ideas, he tries to follow the rules, and lo and behold, his Wikipedia page gets added. As an open source maintainer, Bill likely constantly deals with the kind of person who tries to get a PR merged, who, after getting told what needs fixing before the merge, cries injustice and goes on an internet crusade instead of doing what they've been told.
• pillmillipedes 3mo ago
  I know of odin, it seems alright, but it feels like every post or comment I see about what odin is like was written by its creator ginger bill. my $0.02: if they think odin is notable enough for wikipedia and all they need is for someone to actually note it, now is the time to hire a pr firm. seriously. that's what they're there for.
• pillmillipedes 3mo ago
  on mobile firefox, I'm seeing tons of numbered footnotes that don't link back to anything. is this a styling issue or what? [4] like this
• pilgrim0 3mo ago
  In the day and age of tweets that move entire markets, countries that have official online profiles and use them as a major mean of public communication, Wikipedia policies feel so lame, mostly because it is not even an encyclopedia, but a website that pretends to be one
• SpyCoder77 3mo ago
  Crazy that nobody has mentioned the standup podcast on this
• psychoslave 3mo ago
  [dead]