Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia

Here's the main offender:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto</a><p>One of his arguments is that these languages are often only mentioned in conference proceedings.<p>How you get to be a PhD student in computer science without realising that conference proceedings are the <i>leading distribution mechanism for knowledge</i> in the CS research world is a mystery.<p>I may only be a humble honours student, but the central importance of conferences over journals has been drummed into me over and over by my professors.

The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers.<p>The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because the system is re-enforcing the belief that their only talent, destroying information, is also a valid form of contribution. It is no statistical accident that rampant wiki deletionism is even more intense in ..."strict" countries such as Germany.<p>At the same time it is important to note that a lot of articles have serious shortcomings and are in need of improvement. While deleting them is in my opinion unforgivable as long as they contain useful information, I believe Wikipedia could profit from a more modern approach to article rating and validation. If substandard articles were allowed to continue existing albeit with low ratings and missing validation tags, Wikipedia as a process could focus more on improvement as opposed to gleeful pruning. If they concentrated on more constructive measures and included better ways of gathering user feedback for quality control, they could also provide former deletionist users with a UI option that simply prevents them from ever having to see an article that is below a certain quality threshold. Everybody would win.<p>As it stands today, Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge. Sadly, I don't believe it is possible to change Wikipedia in any way, ever. Someday, someone will have to come along and fork it.

In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not...</a><p>The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are.<p>I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but something seriously needs to be done about the requirements Wikipedia has in place. Especially when applied to open source software, the notability requirement, combined with the definition of reliable sources, make invalid assumptions about the common media for discourse.

The thing that makes Wikipedia useful in my opinion is not the notable topics I can lookup somewhere else. It's these long tail articles about esoteric programming languages and non-mainstream topics.

I tend to contribute money to certain projects. I won't give to Wikipedia because they treat conference proceedings with less respect than an episode of Gossip Girls.

I don't remember who said it, but I read something recently which I thought was amusing <i>and not serious</i> (paraphrasing):<p>&#62; All that donation money, and they still can't afford enough hard drive space to avoid deletionism.<p>The guy allegedly doing the flagging has responded on his user page: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto</a><p><i>Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'.</i>

Christopher has posted this update on his profile:<p>Dear internet,<p>You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.<p>I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.<p>Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(<p>This was fun. Now back to real work, I guess...

I'm working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.<p>The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at <a href="http://infinithree.org" rel="nofollow">http://infinithree.org</a> and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

I'm sort of surprised by the surprise here. As a graduate student myself, my peers and I have all come to the sad conclusion that Wikipedia is good for breadth and bad for depth, at least in CS (I cannot speak for other areas). The primary issue seems to be the combination of deletionists and campers. The former we see in this case.<p>The latter is something my theory friends complain about. According to two of them who have tried, attempting to expand or correct any of the fringe topics in algorithms and graph theory is futile because of the instant-reverters who will simply revert any change they make.<p>Of course, what's most disturbing to me about this is... dear gods, man, you're at Princeton! If you don't understand what the contributions of Alice ML are to the field, walk down the hall and talk to Andrew Appel! Or David Walker, if Andrew is too hard to track down. I would hope that by this point this student has learned that there is a lack of fidelity in the search engines for anything published in the 90s and earlier, as the scanned PS converted to PDF is neither as well-indexed nor as comprehensively available (e.g. Springer-Verlag work from that time is frequently not indexed in scholar/citeseer due to a lack of non-subscription links, particularly if published by someone who is no longer in academia).<p>Fortunately, most of the work in PL was done in the lifetime of people still working. If you're too busy to do a thorough search of relevant work, you can sit down and talk with the people who were there when concurrency was first being introduced and formally modeled to understand Alice's place and contributions (or lack thereof, if that's the conclusion you come to).

Nemerle has 209,000 results on Google, and the first few pages are stacked with relevant, well-written articles. How is this not notable?<p>I played with this language a few years back and thought it had great promise(when C# was much less capable). I have read the exact Wikipedia page you deleted, and it got me to write some code in Nemerle.<p>* Btw, this might get some publicity for Nemerle (and the other languages).

Ahh, time for another Wikipedia deletionist pie fight! On the one side, elitist editors who are so saddened by even a single unnecessary HD spin that they want to clean clutter. On the other side, fans of (supposedly) esoteric knowledge.<p>The narrator of <i>Foucault's Pendulum</i>, when he decides to be freelance researcher, says that his main principle will be that <i>all</i> information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other.

I find it funny that the guy hasn't made a single contribution to Wikipedia. All his edits either directly remove content or nominate it for deletion. Apparently besides the dislike for programming languages, he also hates it when certain scientists have "Dr." next to their names on their Wikipedia articles.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&#38;limit=500&#38;target=Christopher+Monsanto" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributi...</a><p>Examples:<p>&#62;Raj Reddy ‎ (dr. is so unnecessary)<p>&#62;Randy Pausch ‎ (dr is unnecessary)<p>&#62;Benjamin C. Pierce ‎ (Don't need dr.)<p>and so on

The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons</a> .<p>This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no bureaucratic pseudo-procedure for a deletionist to wield against such practice.

If the problem is pollution of the main lists of programming language articles by entries that Mr. Monsanto considers to be inappropriate for listing...wouldn't an appropriate compromise be removing them from these programming languages lists? This seems like a shortcoming in Wikipedia's policies? This way the data is preserved, but not related to the main search spaces. If you look a language up on Google, it will still be there because it will be indexed.<p>Otherwise, Mr. Monsanto has every right to push his agenda on Wikipedia insofar as it is within the bounds of legal play on the site. Attacking his character gets nobody anywhere, and probably adds credence to whatever he's doing. If you're really concerned about deletions of your favorite PL articles, sit on them. If a request for removal/deletion (I don't know the wiki-jargon) pops up, just dump all over it. Even better, improve the articles. He can't get something deleted that's not mediocre. Agents like Mr. Monsanto will actually improve the quality of your average article one way or the other. I'm impressed that somebody would bother reading so many articles and post meta-data about them....especially on a topic that so few people engage in.<p>It's curious that pages that don't meet Mr. Monsanto's criterion of having been cited in a 'top-tier' publication. There are so many articles on Wikipedia that do not have ties to anything real. Is it really fair to hold PL topics to academic-level standards? What if somebody considers PL an art, or something other than semantics and formalisms? This does happen, and people who create new languages from languages that aren't considered much in the PL community might actually fall into these categories.<p>I think Mr. Monsanto would do well to spell out his criteria for what isn't desirable in precise and formal terms.

While reading Nemerle's deletion discussion page, I can't help but notice what seems to me to be some degree of racism on the part of the deletion advocates, particularly Christopher Monsanto. Where the <i>many</i> sources in English, instead of Polish and Russian, I can't help but think that perhaps they would not have been dismissed out of hand. RSDN.ru being dismissed as a "mere tutorial"? <i>Ugh!</i> Read it yourself and make up your own mind though.<p><a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...</a>

The notability requirements do not sufficiently cover "expert" subjects like PLs. Chris mentioned this himself, yet used it as a justification for these articles, this is known as Doublethink (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink</a>) and clearly indicates a second agenda.<p>Not anyone can invent a programming language, it's not comparable to your pet rock band. Chris, you clearly displayed that you are not capable of handling this subject satisfactory and you've displayed arrogance in response to peoples distress.<p>Simply put - marking the articles for deletion was rash, and in the larger sense unjustified.

All anyone needs to do about this is find reliable sources to improve the articles that are being nominated for deletion. Really. If some wikipedian who knows about published, reliable sources about each of the languages simply adds some source citations to the articles, all will be well.

Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high.<p>I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.

@chrismonsanto has this thread (and the reddit thread) caused you to reevaluate what we, the programming community, consider 'notable'?<p>The easy reaction would be to focus on the flamers, harden your heart and drive ahead. The wise man, here, stops and thinks for a bit.<p>Restore Nemerle.

It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.

Getting people to rally around anything that someone is trying to have deleted is a sure-fire way to get it deleted, protected from recreation, and basically never coming back. It is like some kind of 'defend the hive' kind of reaction.

It's interesting that there is no longer a Nemerle article on the English Wikipedia, but there is one on the Japanese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Tajik, Ukrainian, and Chinese Wikipedias.<p>You can see this by going to, e.g., the Japanese article (<a href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle" rel="nofollow">http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle</a>) and looking at the language links at bottom of the left sidebar.<p>So if you are a speaker of one of those languages, you're still in luck :-P

Wikipedia is about power and the kick you get out of it.

When a graduate student, a researcher, spends so much effort in order to delete knowledge (or, more precisely, hide it), I find it mind-boggling. It goes against the very essence of science.

I certainly oppose deleting programming languages, obscure or not, from wikipedia. I went to the site to try to register a complaint but could not find a way to do that. It seems that meta-comments are not really handled well withing the wikipedia framework. Or did I just miss the right link.

I recently created an article about Sunder Katwala (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala</a>) who is the head of the Fabian Society (a prominent UK think tank).<p>The article had been up for less than a month when someone requested speedy deletion, despite the article having ample evidence of the subject's notability. Deletionists are out of control on Wikipedia, and need to be stopped. I've thought about writing articles and though "no, why bother, some deletionist will just delete it." and I'm sure many others have been similarly dissuaded.<p>To this end I'm building an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. The main difference it will have is there will be no notability guidelines, only verifiability ones.

The Nemerle article is up for deletion review (DRV), and there is at least one admin supporting overturning the decision:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2...</a>

Information on these type of languages is exactly what I expect to find in an encyclopaedia.

There was a time when I didn't understand the need for Wikipedia, as I figured every kind of information would just be retrievable with Google (or another search engine).<p>Now Google and Wikipedia are failing at the same time. Bad.

Somebody just created a new stub for Alice ML and Nemerle. Let's start filling them out!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language)</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language)</a><p><i>edit</i> Nemerle appears to have been frozen and deleted<p>Alice has gone down 3 or 4 times, but it's now up for the last 10 minutes.<p>They're down again, looks like semi-permanently.

So, what languages were deleted? How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion? How much bandwidth will that spare?<p>If someone thinks the language is not notable, there is a discussion page attached to the main article where such things can be expressed. The obscurity of the language can also be communicated in the article itself. While lots of us can be pretty sure Nemerle will have no lasting impact in the field, they can be wrong.

Wikipedia has had deletion issues for a very long time. Note that there are also vague rules that allow admins a procedure called "Speedy Deletion". It lets them remove content w/o debate or public visibility. The deleted page, and all discussions about it just disappear (only an admin on Wikipedia can recover it).<p>One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is:<p><pre><code> No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content) </code></pre> See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...</a><p>It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content.<p>The spam problem is <i>very real</i> for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index.<p>Here's what I wrote about this problem in 2007:<p><a href="http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085" rel="nofollow">http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085</a>

I believe there are specific requirements for something to be considered "notable" on wikipedia. Simply fulfill those requirements for each language page and you're good, no?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability</a>

This kind of stupid crap is why I and many people no longer contribute to wikipedia.

I'm offended on behalf of all of the smaller projects who basically just got told that their work is worthless.<p>I'm also offended that the value of a project seems to be based on how well someone can market it. If your project hasn't made a name for itself, then it's worthless, right? Personally, I'm content to hack away on things that no one has heard of because I enjoy what I'm doing. If someone else happens to find it useful, that's awesome. However, deleting things from the Mecca of knowledge-seekers in an attempt to purify it in this manner is nothing short of crapping on the ideals that Wikipedia was built on.

The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are:<p>1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users<p>2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia<p>Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments.<p>In response to the first argument:<p>Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand.<p>We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough.<p>In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain.<p>Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not</a>

Though, I can see Christoper's Point of view, I wonder about the cost-benefit of this kind a cleanup would be. The main reason seems to be to unclutter the listing of topics in wikipedia. How many people navigate Wikipedia through lists, isn't search more often used? In which case the central argument behind deleting factual information would be more costly than beneficial(even though it doesn't live up to wikipedia' notability standard).<p>BTW, Why the hostility? and the mob mentality. I thought he articulated his arguments clearly and quite well without malice.

I saw that the language he is working on for his PhD was listed on Wikipedia and flagged for deletion. Then I saw that that page had initially been created that same day solely for the purpose of marking it for deletion.<p>Seriously, person who did this? I thought wasting time browsing news sites like HN and reddit was bad enough but this... this proves that the internet is a very serious business indeed.

I think this is absolutely appalling.

Great discussion on wikipedia about this<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Lets_discuss_notability_.22policy.22_.28again.29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...</a>