Steve Yegge is a "non-notable programmer"
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
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.
The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.
Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.
If they're not high quality, said famous people are likely to sue or otherwise cause hassle for Wikipedia. That's something a rare flower is not likely to do.
The closest it's ever come was this incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy
where some guy's article stated for years that he was a suspect in the Kennedy assassination. He never tried to sue wikipedia, though he did complain a lot.
Incidentally, though, this shows another reason why wikipedia articles on borderline-notable people are bad: the fewer people look at an article the more likely it is that crazy non-facts will persist in the article.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/dumb-idea-su...
[2] http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/american-academy-anti-agi...
While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.
People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.
It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.
This is the problem. Wikipedia takes its lead from encyclopedias, but it's not an encyclopedia, because it's fundamentally different. It doesn't have the same space constraints, it isn't written in the same way, it isn't referenced in the same way, etc.
"Does this article feel like it belongs in an 18th century concept of an encyclopedia" kind of test for inclusion or deletion in Wikipedia just seems wrong-headed to me.
I've never understood why those who do want wikipedia to be wiki-random-non-notable-factia don't just start wiki-random-non-notable-factia. I predict it will be fairly unmaintainable, but I'm totally keen to be proven wrong.
I suggest that you start an "expanded Wikipedia" project with more inclusionist criteria. I'll be happy to contribute, although I'm pretty happy with the English Wikipedia's notability policy. I'm sure thousands of other people will be too, especially if the result is any good.
Jimmy Wales already did something like this, by the way.
Articles about random Internet personalities or some garage band are thus inherently not in the scope of the project, until they become more notable.
If you write articles purely in certain controversial areas, like recent internet memes, I can see running into a lot of problems. But the vast majority of areas don't really have any rampant deletion. I've written articles on mathematical formulas, on prominent computer scientists, on important physics books, on 18th-century politicians, on famous paintings, on well-known children's toys, and on varieties of cheese, among other things, and never gotten any problems with any of them.
Gatekeepers focus on the gate. The garden it keeps? Not so interesting.
Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).
The whole notion of an encyclopedia is outdated, anyway. The whole internet is the knowledge base, Google is the index.
Other than that, I've heard he writes great blog posts on programming and works at Google.
His article on "Java is the kingdom of nouns" and various writings explaining why lisp matters and the virtues and pitfalls of static typing/dynamic typing really made me question a lot of implicit assumptions I did not realize I had.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers
Discussion:
But if someone claims a particular technical person is important, yet they've never had a biography written about them, never even had a newspaper article written about them, never been mentioned even for a page or two in a history-of-technology book, and have basically gotten no writeups anywhere, Wikipedia shouldn't really be the first place they get a bio. The problem is really with the rest of the world: if indeed the person is important, why haven't any historians or journalists ever written about him/her? Once they do, Wikipedia can easily follow, citing those sources. As a tertiary source, Wikipedia's goal is to just summarize the existing literature, but if the existing literature itself is deficient, that's a problem that needs to be fixed elsewhere, in the primary and secondary sources. Someone in history, or in journalism, or in some similar field, needs to ask, "why aren't we writing about [x]?"
Some might just be patience. Pop culture is very time-sensitive, so is covered almost immediately-- books, journal articles, and newspaper articles appear within months or even days, which the Wikipedia article can cite. Important computer scientists do eventually get mentioned in biographies and history of technology books, but it sometimes takes years--- nobody is rushing to put out biographies right now covering "Important Computer Scientists of 2010" or anything.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.
(There really are a bunch of really small businesses trying to insert ad blurbs into Wikipedia, so it's not a purely hypothetical problem. Minor academics pasting their CVs and bio blurbs into Wikipedia is another issue.)
It is therefore sensible to assume limit what you put into the encyclopedia, but since the same limit does not apply to the online edition of wikipedia, it does not make sense to apply it there.
If one allows articles that have little interest
To whom? The "general public"? I'm not sure anything has interest to the general public anymore. The world has become massively fragmented.
Also re: fragmented world, I'm not sure that the world has ever been as connected as it is right at this moment.
Agreed. Maybe we differ on what size makes a critical mass.
I'm not sure that the world has ever been as connected as it is right at this moment.
That's precisely what's making it so fragmented. People no longer need to join one giant popular culture, and are bonded with others all over the world in tiny interest groups. Anecdotally, I've never seen American Idol or America's Next Top <whatever>, and yet there is a notable population that worships those shows. For their part, they've never heard of _why or World of Warcraft or most anything else I'm interested in. I'm talking about cultural fragmentation, specifically.
For varying definitions of consensus and neutral point of view, of course.
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."
Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and everybodY 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.
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."