It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.<p>Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnanensis" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...</a>), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.<p>I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.
Honestly, who <i>is</i> Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.<p>Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.<p>If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.
He seems to be notable enough to be considered a "reliable source" for several other articles ...<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yegge" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...</a>
I think the real debate is what it means to be a <i>notable</i> programmer. The criteria for inclusion in the list is debatable:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers</a><p>Discussion:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers</a>
Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.
I used to love editing Wikipedia to the point of obsession, but after going through a grueling process of defending an article from deletion I decided I had better things to do with my life. The subject of the article in question was the author of at least half a dozen highly influential books in his field, the subject of a biography published by a mainstream publisher, cited in publications by his peers probably hundreds if not thousands of times over the past thirty years, interviewed and quoted in mainstream media around the world etc etc etc. Unfortunately there was a clique of editors who didn't like his ideas. Essentially they thought he was a quack and therefore couldn't stand the idea that he'd be given exposure in Wikipedia. I have no opinion on whether he's a quack and it really has nothing whatsoever to do with his notability. Eventually I was able to establish that the guy is influential and the article is still there, but the stupidity of having to endlessly argue the point made me say to hell with it and I haven't edited anything since.
Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their standards for inclusion, any ideas?
My big problem with Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that they're too general. I don't accept that "notability" has to mean "known worldwide" or "known by a large number of people regardless of their domain." I believe that notability within a given domain (say, programming) should be enough. And I don't think there's much - if any - question that Steve is "notable" within programming circles.<p>Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time" versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."<p>Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and <i>everybodY</i> is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people expect and want to use Wikipedia.
F#@ng Deletionists. Grrrr....<p>Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC, Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."
And he's back. Right after I re-created the page, somebody tagged it - again - for "speedy delete" but the admin rejected the speedy delete request. Thankfully. With the citations and references I included, I hope that particular article will be safe from deletion now. But if anybody else feels like working on it a bit, have at it.