Why there isn’t an Apache Arrow article in Wikipedia
dremio.com
dremio.com
Dremio does benefit from Apache Arrow publicity and notoriety, even if they don't profit directly. Having a de-facto standard data format and open-source engines is a selling point for some. That's why Dremio explicitly calls it out on their own website. It also never hurts in the recruiting department. (edit: there's a reason the article was submitted by someone working in marketing & strategy)
>> I’m wondering if Wikipedia can continue to be considered a reliable source of information for technical folks who want to learn more about the vast system of Apache open source software projects.
Sign up for the Olympics, because that's a hell of a leap. You didn't get your page in, it's really not much of a reflection on the rest of Wikipedia. It's an open-source project. It should have it's own freely available documentation that fills much the same purpose anyway. If I want to learn about Apache X, I go straight to x.apache.org. They concede that it's not an end-user product anyway, so I'd think their key audience knows how to find an open-source project website. Lower the bar too far the other way, and there are plenty of semi-open-source project's marketing departments would be all over using Wikipedia to their own ends - I've seen my own former employer do this for their Apache projects.
I'm confused why the writer thinks it should be!
The Apache Foundation is a big tent. There's some clearly notable projects in there (like Apache httpd), but there's also a lot of really obscure crap that basically nobody outside ASF cares about (like Apache Creadur or Apache Pony Mail). Expecting Wikipedia to document every Apache project is ridiculous.
Is this particular project notable enough for a Wikipedia article? I don't know a lot about it, so I can't say for sure. But the article drafts that I've seen don't convince me that it is.
Wikipedia has a lot of rather obscure entries. Long, long lists that I think easily under-rank the Apache project.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the bar for notability is kinda vague. Lists of every episode of a series, every kind of kim-chee, etc.
The idea that Apache software projects are too obscure to include, while every single individual episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a detailed article, is pretty typical of the site.
As it stands, the Apache Arrow entry reads like a press release. I would recommend that Justin has a non-marketing copy editor clean it up before pressing the case further.
I agree. Personally, I don't think I've ever used Wikipedia to learn about an OSS project.
I think I might be part of the silent majority that actually does -- I often use Wikipedia to learn about the origin story of an OSS project. (not random tiny OSS projects, but more established ones)
Project websites don't tell you stuff like the original author, key people, context, adjacent categories of software, the history, the original problem that it was trying to solve, the drama (fights, competitors, disagreements between folks involved), and evolution of the project over time. The Wikipedia article often does.
This type of intelligence is invaluable when evaluating projects/products. If you're not wiki'ing your OSS project, you'd have to google and wade through mailing lists and piece together the story from blogposts, tweets, etc.
Here are some examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Labs
Thus, Wikipedia is violating its own policies. It follows that decisions on whether a page should be created becomes arbitrary which opens up the door for corruption. Some company pays Wikipedians and get their page(s) created, others don't and don't get any page(s).
I certainly use Wikipedia to understand what various companies are. There are companies whose own websites seem deliberately designed to obfuscate what the company is. I don't see why Wikipedia couldn't provide the same benefit for open source projects.
Then it becomes a game of jumping through hoops and hoping you end up with a kind wiki-landlord or knowing a friendly wikipedia admin.
Doing the latter by anouncing your concern on social media and hoping a sympathetic admin picks it up, might be the easiest on human time and resources, just let them copy your reasonably well sourced article draft from your personal space and see what happens.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log?type=delete&page=A...
This has been the ethos of the project practically since its inception. It's always startling to see people questioning Wikipedia's premises, since it seems pretty clearly to be one of the most successful volunteer projects in the entire history of the Internet.
I've personally given up on editing Wikipedia (too many fanatics with infinite time), but IMHO it needs to be much more deletionist than it is now. There is value to its current wide scope, but its maintenance model has trouble with long tail articles. It shouldn't have an article unless it can consistently gather medium-sized quorum of active editors to watch over it.
This was the ethos of the project in the beginning but is not the ethos anymore. People have realized how valuable it is for companies and other actors to have their own article on Wikipedia. Therefore Wikipedians have created a very bureaucratic system for deciding which articles should be created. And people like to wield power. For example, by rejecting perfectly good articles.
Be careful about doing this. It's harmless if you're simply a concerned user, but once you're actually in a dispute with someone on wiki it can easily be in breach of their guidelines.
It's likely that Arrow does deserve a WP article. But Arrow's sponsors misunderstand more about Wikipedia than Wikipedia does about Arrow. Writing a defensible article about their project will require work; in particular, they're going to need to spend the time tracking down authoritative sources for why Arrow is notable, and those claims will probably need to be something more persuasive than "hundreds of companies use it"; hundreds of companies use all sorts of things that don't, and shouldn't, be featured in their own encyclopedia articles.
I understand the impulse behind "this project is important; it should have a Wikipedia article". But when you take a step back and accept what Wikipedia actually is, rather than what you think it should be, you're left with the question: do we really need to feature this particular piece of software in its own encyclopedia article? 20 years from now, will people still be getting value from it? Whatever value that might be, will it outweigh the 20 years of other people's volunteer efforts to maintain the article, keeping it free of vandalism and ensuring that it doesn't surreptitiously turn into a promotion piece for some company or another?
The answers might be "yes". But I don't see much evidence in this piece considered the questions.
Lots of things that don't seem deserving have in-depth Wikipedia coverage. Many of those things probably really don't belong in an encyclopedia! But there are two sides to this problem: the merit of the topic, and the cost, in volunteer time, of including them. A marginal topic can be defensible if it's easy to reliably cover it. A seemingly important technical topic might not be if the only way to say anything interesting about it is to write original research directly into its article.
Late edit
A useful tip for getting your open source project covered in its own Wikipedia article: don't have the Chief Marketing Officer of the company that owns the project write the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldog_clip
s/bulldog clip/many other random office supply items/
Edit: Swapped to bulldog clip as a better example of a less notable office supply.
That paper clip article is itself extraordinary. Go look at it again. It delves into the history of the paper clip, covers different designs, has excerpts from paper-clip-making-machine patents, and describes an actual controversy(!) over its invention, all carefully illustrated (illustrating things on Wikipedia is a bitch, by the way, because of IPR rules). People went through a lot of effort to make a good paper clip article.
And Wikipedia considers the paper clip article to be a "C-class article" (C here means approximately what it means in school), and the topic of "low" importance. Just so we're clear on what the bar is here.
Compare that with the author's attempt at an Arrow article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Apache_Arrow
It's a paragraph of promotional material, a brief comparison to other systems, and a citation to a blog post saying "I do not see any reason not to embrace the Arrow standard".
Come on.
I think there probably should be an Arrow article. The authors have found a bunch of reliable sources covering it; they just haven't distilled from them a defensible claim to Arrow's notability. I think it's a matter of putting the work in.
I picked the first office supply object that came to mind. There are better examples.
For example, why have the bulldog clip as it's own article when you already have binder clip?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldog_clip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binder_clip
I highly suspect that with some actual effort I could find an even less deserving office item.
And you may be right that Arrow needs to do more to be notable and ready for its own page. But ignoring some objective standard and instead looking at a relative standards of other articles, it does feel like there are some unequal requirements in this regard.
I think it's pretty clear to anyone why bulldog clips are in the encyclopedia, and it is only clear to subject matter experts with strong opinions why Arrow would be.
If your topic requires subject matter expertise in order to recognize its importance, the standards are unequal: you are going to need to do more work to establish its notability, because you cannot reasonably expect the layperson volunteers in the Wikipedia project to do that work for you.
You can take issue with this goal, but that's how it works, and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked.
Well... Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Otherwise I'd argue that verifiability isn't worth much. What is different from traditional encyclopedias is that they did make determinations about what was important (which is at least akin to notability) and would allocate articles and pages as appropriate. From today's perspective we might dispute the judgments of importance but they were there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
Argue with it if you must, but let's try not to make the thread tediously recapitulate it.
Not as much as you would hope.
I have two sisters with Wikipedia articles. Let's pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly for one of them. It claims that her mother was Irish and Finnish, and goes on to list how many siblings she has. Those statements are verifiable but false. You can find an article written by reporters that said those things.
She isn't Irish, her step-father (my father) was. She also has 2 more brothers than are listed in that article. That is true, but not verifiable. Nor will they ever be verifiable. And therefore Wikipedia will never be corrected.
The problem here is that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... for an explanation) guarantees that there will be lots of verifiable statements that aren't so. Wikipedia builds a coherent view of a subject on that sand, and it is very hard to find what it is mistaken about. But it is riddled with errors that will never get fixed because they were wrong in a verifiable primary source.
And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in. For example her grandfather was the T in https://www.cmtengr.com/. Good luck verifying that one!
Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".
It doesn't look like CMT has a Wikipedia article at all. Should it?
Sometimes?
I've yet to read a feature article written by a reporter on a subject that I know well which didn't have multiple mistakes.
Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".
Actually I am one of the brothers that Wikipedia does not know about.
Back in the 2007-2008 period I decided to make some obvious corrections. They got rejected. I left some comments in talk. A couple of my comments are still there on Jennifer's talk page.
If you want to try to fix the page, you could use http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ and http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ as evidence that Meg has at least one brother that Wikipedia doesn't know about. Good luck getting it changed.
As for CMT, you tell me. It is a civil engineering company that has existed for decades and has a significant presence in multiple states. But there isn't much about them online other than the company website. Which, by definition, is not considered reliable.
It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether.
It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with.
My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet.
It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject.
It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.
In theory. In general? I was just looking at an article where I have a lot of personal knowledge.
Is mostly True, as far as much of my first-hand knowledge can tell. And leave aside a couple of the random personal insertions that are definitely True if outside of all proportion to the rest of the article.
But there's one section in particular that goes into even more detail than I knew even as someone fairly in the depths of this particular thing. (But it's very plausible and consistent with what I do know.) It's certainly not something that's ever been written about publicly AFAIK and the actual references in the article are minimal.
Which comes back to that notability/verifiability/etc. are nice theories--and may even make sense in the abstract--but there's a huge amount of inconsistency depending upon whether someone has taken notice of an article or not. (And, in at least some cases, I'm often happy with people not looking too hard.)
Jennifer Tilly is your sister, but her mother's step father is your father?
Her grandfather is her brother's father?
Jennifer and I are siblings. Our mother's mother was Finnish. Our mother's father (the Tilly in CMT) was a complicated mix. Jennifer's father was Chinese. My father was Irish.
She was born Chan, I was born Ward, our names were changed to our mother's maiden name after her divorce from my father.
All clear?
On the other hand, whether you're talking open source projects beyond the big names, corporate executives, or just people who are reasonably well known within fairly large communities, there just isn't a lot of independently sourced published material about them, especially in mainstream pubs--which (somewhat both understandably and ironically) Wikipedia tends to prefer. You even have people with tons of hits on Google but there isn't a ton of info about them online.
But I came quickly to realize the project was right. Without a reliable secondary source, I was effectively conducting research in the pages of the encyclopedia. What I learned from that was: I shouldn't be writing encyclopedia articles; the technical writing I do tends not to be tertiary.
It's fine – good, in fact – if most people don't write much in Wikipedia. It's its own special thing. You can't argue with its success: it might be the most successful project in the history of the Internet, and a long-term contender for one of the most successful volunteer knowledge projects ever.
I really don't think a 20-year-view is a good measure of whether or not an article should exist. Even if something is forgotten in the future, if it has relevance and importance today than that alone makes the article worth existing.
The problem with OSS is that lots of projects probably do merit pages, but it's hard to see which ones.
I like to think I'm fairly techy for a non-programmer but I have no idea what that means. That might be part of their problem if that is the description in their wikipedia entry.
So: find conference papers/talks by people not affiliated with Apache or the Apache Arrow project and that discuss Apache Arrow. Figure out how to incorporate the tidbits about Arrow from those papers into the article text. Add sources in footnotes. Done.
If the case is that no research was performed because the author is already an expert in the area, they are still expected to provide citations so that the same standard can be applied to all authors.
https://www.xenonstack.com/insights/what-is-apache-arrow/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4842-1311-...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/08/23/071...
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3110000/3103003/p138-Maas.pd...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/17/apache_arrow_toplev...
https://www.cio.com/article/3034279/big-data-gets-a-new-open...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3033446/hadoop/apache-arro...
https://sdtimes.com/apache/guest-view-first-release-apache-a...
https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/12/le-dem-apache-arrow/
http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2017/10/apache-arrow-vs-parq...
https://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2017/10/apache-arrow-vs-par...
The 2nd mentions Arrow only in passing, after several pages of coverage of Spark; Arrow is covered only in relation to Spark. It's a reliable source but doesn't clearly establish notability.
The 3rd mentions Arrow hardly at all; it's an implementation detail, mentioned just once, in a paper about something else.
I can't fetch the 4th.
The 5th, a story in The Register, is reliable and probably does go towards notability, though it seems to sort of argue against it (the gist of the article is that it's surprising that Arrow has been made a top-level project at all).
The 6th, in CIO, is a recap of a press release. Trade press PR recaps shouldn't be WP:RS, but WP will often accept them, or would when I was patrolling AfD; it's luck-of-the-draw. The admins who shot down Arrow's page were smart enough not to accept it.
The 7th, in InfoWorld, is promotional as well, but it's at least written in some depth. It's a straightforward notability claim. The Arrow article should draw more clearly from it, in the opening paragraph.
The 8th, in SDTimes, is written by someone affiliated with the project itself; it's citable, but WP probably won't accept it independently as grounds for notability.
Same, in effect, for the 9th, which is just a recap of an interview with the project author.
The 10th and 11th are just blog posts. They're citable if they're not contentious, but they usually won't be acceptable as WP:RS for notability.
"Recognizing that Value Vectors meet the needs of other data processing engines, in February 2016, the Apache Software Foundation announced Apache Arrow as a top-level project, bypassing the standard Incubator process. Committers to the project include developers from other Apache projects such as Calcite, Cassandra, Drill, Hadoop, HBase, Ibis, Impala, Kudu, Pandas, Parquet, Phoenix, Spark and Storm.
Apache Arrow enables execution engines like Spark to take advantage of the latest operations included in modern processors, for fast analytical data processing. Columnar layout of data allows for better use of CPU caches by placing all data relevant to a column operation in as compact of a format as possible. ...
Apache Arrow software is available under the Apache License v2.0.
Dremio, a startup led by Jacques Nadeau, chair of the Apache Drill and Apache Arrow Project Management Committees, leads the development."
In the past, this and the other sources would have been more than enough to establish notability. I know that because I have created Wikipedia articles on subjects much less notable than that. The problem for Apache Arrow isn't that it isn't notable enough, it is that people have already tried four times to get it included in Wikipedia so the Wikipedians voting on new page inclusions are getting suspicious about it.
Obviously, they can't always be WP:RS, because then literally everything would be "notable", since anyone can stand up a blog about anything. You can't even logically assemble the argument you're trying to make.
I'm not making anything up either; I have penned several articles on Wikipedia and gotten them through the AfC process with much less notability evidence than the Apache Arrow draft had. The difference was that I used to be an established contributor so the rules were not as harsh against we as they are against newbies and unknown contributors.
Also, you can look at the link I gave you and see that the notability rules are not uniformly applied.
Of the other half, one appears to be some sort of marketing blogspam, one is a paper that briefly mentions that they used Arrow, and two I can't access for various reasons. That leaves one blog post that actually discusses Arrow, and the sentence it's used as a reference for in the draft article isn't about Arrow specifically, but the tradeoffs of in-memory vs on-disk storage.
Yes, these links may be independent of the Arrow project, but I'm not convinced that they add anything of substance to the actual content of the article. Mostly it looks like they were added in an attempt to game the number of references.
As a critique of Wikipedia, not so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Apache_Arrow
And some possible additional sources:
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/09/24/dr...
* https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180906005114/en
* https://thesiliconreview.com/2016/02/apache-arrow-is-the-new...
The second is a press release by Arrow's sponsoring company, which, obviously, WP won't accept as an RS.
I have no idea what "The Silicon Review" is; this is the first time I've ever seen it. To the extent it's not a pay-to-play trade publication, it might qualify as a notability-establishing source. The fact that the "Review" does not itself have a WP page might make it harder to claim it's reliable, since it suggests nobody else knows what it is, either.
The "Silicon Review" one looks like a pay-to-play as well after further review, it's used in citation on a few other Wikipedia articles, but as far as I can tell, and due to some anecdotal stories, it doesn't look good.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicRelations/comments/bha6hs/sil...
* https://arpr.com/blog/4-pay-for-play-scams/
Good catch, thanks for spending the time to review my links. Reading your comments above, I largely agree. It's a high bar (mostly) to get an article on Wikipedia, and that's a good thing. It allows us to read the majority of content on Wikipedia without too much suspicion.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but it's obvious advertising and has no place on Wikipedia. Maybe a Medium post would be more appropriate.
Wikipedia already has a problem with bad software articles like this.
What I think should disqualify it is that it's missing a lot of detail that would make the entry genuinely useful. As it is, it's as useful as a press release. Also, it does appear to have a problem with appropriate references.
Generally speaking, I have a hard time disagreeing with the reasons listed on that page for the rejections.
Wiki articles are not videos, they take humble disk space to host so I can't recognize any reason in dismissing "insignificant" information other than a stupid rule.
IMHO whatever can be considered a piece of knowledge should be there.
BTW nearly the same applies to StackOverflow - thanks to high reputation points I earnt during the early days I can see deleted questions and answers and I often see really interesting (having three-figure upvvote scores and dozens of stars) questions and very informative (also heavily upvoted) answers deleted.
> REVIEWERS: Please note that the submitting editor is the chief marketing officer and vice president of strategy at this company.
Yeah, sorry, big no no there.
Disclosure: consider myself a Wikipedian to some extent, got a couple hundred edits on Wikipedia.
2. Tons of companies use open source for marketing. This one is no different as far as I can tell. Even had the chief marketing officer submit a Wikipedia article for their project.
It's near impossible to put article's up over prolific female journalist for example, because all this can be enforced since, the publications are all from the same source (the publisher they work for) or are interviews or some sort of talk or award, where it's almost never for men, which get away* by linking to a podcast.
tldr: *WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS
One hell of an understatement. Search for Apache Arrow and look at the top results.
My aging colleague tells me, just keep doing the changes, they cant stop everything. However, my direct (and limited) experience is.. they do stop everything (that I try). I was logged in twice and used anonymous three times, and added citation a bit, too.
To the point of the article, FOSS projects in wikipedia ? hmm maybe there could be a clear category for that ? software projects are proliferating rapidly.. dunno
Wikipedia is much like Stack Overflow these days, the community has become hostile to newcomers who fail to meet their somewhat arbitrary but very exacting standards for what is allowed on their site.
Fortunately, you can just publish your own web site. No need to be bothered about not being on WP.
One of the best examples I've encountered demonstrating this is a 19th century edit revision war between the British and American publishers of Chamber's Encyclopaedia, on the topics of Free Trade, Protection Duties, Slavery, and certain salacious particulars concerning His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...
What's novel concerning Wikipedia is that these disputes (as with those of free software vs. proprietary software) tend to occur, or at least leave significant evidence, in the open public record.
Bandwidth and hard drives are cheap.
Just spitballing, but it'd be nice if Wikipedia worked a little more like Linux distro repositories. Keep the tightly curated articles in a "core", but leave room for "community" or "nonfree" collections if you want to turn them on.
I think that's a fantastic idea, especially if it would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of articles served from the main Wikipedia domain (to a number that can meet some reasonable quality and maintenance standard, maybe 10 times the size of the most comprehensive print encyclopedia, or a 1/6 of Wikipedia's current size) [1].
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/101795/encyclopedia-britanni...: "The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words..."
Wikipedia seem to me to be in that situation. StackOverflow is on its way there. It has exactly the same kind of problem with "deletionists" that Wikipedia has. Perfectly good questions are often closed for very arbitrary reasons.
I created an article for NodeBB, a piece of forum software used worldwide by companies small and large (including several triple A gaming companies). We got AfD'd, and now every time someone creates an article for NodeBB, the AfD is brought up and the entire discussion ends as soon as it has begun.
We even created an article the _suggested_ way, by submitting a draft for review. It got reviewed alright... instant rejection because they felt it looked like an ad. We made changes, but nobody ever took a second look at the article.
Of course, a number of defunct open-source (and some proprietary) forum softwares with zero sources are still allowed on Wikipedia, simply due to the fact that they made it through when nobody was looking :)
One could argue that we shouldn't be writing our own articles (and they'd be right), so we just quietly accepted our judgement and market NodeBB based on the merits of the software, instead of whether it appears in some arbitrary ranking of forum software.
That said, it'd still be nice if we were listed in the Wikipedia list of forum softwares.... _sigh_, a guy can dream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Apache_Arro...
Geez if you want to use Wikipedia as an ad, put a bit of effort in, when did marketing become so lazy and blame the platform.
Although this meta ad is possibly a far better payoff.
There was a time when there was a comparison page for XML parsers, and many parsers had articles.
Still existing parsers on Wikipedia that should be removed; if they are to stay true to their war on having useful software info in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:XML_parsers
The original argument was that if you can find a citation in print you can have whatever it is on Wikipedia, but that ceased to be true years ago and it has become a popularity contest and power struggle with obnoxious Wikipedia editors.
This reads like it was written by the guy who wrote it. It can do this. It efficiently does that. It’s all promotional content. Not useful.
Cry more, company I never heard of either.
It does sounds like maybe Dremio's CMO wrote the original articles and it came off centered on them? (Did not have a chance to read.)
riboflavin, genuine suggestion: ask one of the PMC members or committers to rewrite the article from scratch from an engineer's perspective, source everything, demonstrate notability, and resubmit. If they still don't take it, move on with your life. ... but you might have generated a lot of ill-will with the Wikipedia elites here already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Minetest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
It's the nature of the web.
Someone decided all the technical information on the subject are irrelevant and deleted all Data Rate and Technical Improvement section. Another reason was because those details were not finalised.
While it was a little frustrating that those useful information were gone as one could always found those in other source and media, but they also deleted the whole section on DensiFi [1], where all the major companies ( Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung and others ) behind the 802.11ax decided to do the work behind close door. TL;DR They were trying to push 802.11ax to the market earlier despite of all the un-resolved issues.
So I decided to add only the DensiFi section, and it was constantly being deleted within 24 hours. After a few weeks of fun the page simply got back to the original, where Data Rate and Improvement are back but DensiFi section is totally gone. So it turns out it wasn't the technical section they were trying to get rid of.
P.S We should be glad someone in the working group discovered this and called out on the action. The current WiFi 6 / 802.11ax situation and UX is much better than what we had when 802.11ac were shipped. Although this is at the expense of somewhat 2 years delay of the standard.
[1] https://mlexmarketinsight.com/insights-center/editors-picks/...
There's many interesting and good points in the discussion here, thank you!
To add my 2 cents:
- Apache Arrow is notable, deserves a Wikipedia page. It might not have been when someone first tried to create a Wikipedia page for it in 2017 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Apache_Arro...), but in the three years since it has become a major project, see e.g. https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... Notability is clearly subjective, depends on what the author and reviewer find interesting. In the variant I submitted yesterday I tried to make it clear why it's notable - Apache arrow is a standard format that connects different languages, runtimes, data systems, communities, e.g. the Python and Java data communities. See e.g. https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/ - Apache Arrow is to my knowledge partly the brainchild of Wes McKinney, creator of pandas, it's his attempt (looking strongly like success) to resolve a major issue in data science. - I think it's a good point Justin made at https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/ that it's bad that Wikipedia editors reject articles on stuff they know nothing about - if you look at their profiles, they don't seem to have any knowledge or interest about technology or software. That's not a good system. - I haven't contributed to Wikipedia really before, and I don't understand the rules, I admit that. Probably what I did yesterday was just not following their process, and that's the reason my edit was reverted. I guess it's also true that Justin at first didn't do a great job at submitting an impartial, non-PR article. However, my understanding from looking at some drafts and the talk page is that he then took the editor comments into account, and the last variant of the page he tried to submit in July 2019 was OK. - So overall I think the answer to the question "Why isn't there a Wikipedia page on Apache arrow?" is that it's an unfortunate case of authors and editors not doing a great job. At least I'm pretty sure I didn't do a good job yesterday, I wanted to help, but only had an hour, not a day to learn how Wikipedia ticks and to do more research to find better references. I hope someone with more experience in Wikipedia and Arrow will try to re-write and re-submit the Wikipedia article in the future. - The rule to discourage (or forbid?) people involved with Apache Arrow from contributing to its Wikipedia page is unfortunate. I recently started to use it and learn about it, but I don't know much about it at this point. E.g. Wes McKinney has written at this point 8 high-quality blog posts about it (https://wesmckinney.com/archives.html) - those don't count as references? Even if he or the Apache Arrow team wrote a paper about it, it wouldn't count because it's a primary source, and Wikipedia only wants secondary sources to establish notability? There are ~ 100 videos on YouTube, and many blog posts and a few podcasts (e.g. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/07/17/apache-arrow...) that mention Apache Arrow. Naturally almost all of them are from Apache Arrow contributors, or from companies using Apache Arrow. - Apache Arrow has an interesting story, and it has evolved over the past years and will keep evolving, so I think exactly for that reason a Wikipedia page would be good to have, since the current project page and old blog posts don't capture that well.
Seriously, though, bytes are cheap, and an article sitting somewhere in Wikipedia doing nothing and bothering no-one is pretty damned cheap too.
There are obvious and important costs if Wikipedia articles start being perceived as promotional material rather than encyclopedia entries.
There is a cost, but it's measured in hours of maintenance labor not bytes of storage.
If Wikipedia wants to maintain a semblance of accuracy [1] in the face of declining participation, it needs to concentrate its labor resources rather than spread them out.
[1] which IMHO is vital given its unwise prestige as arbiter or truth
[1] Among other reasons, more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...
I'm not as interested in the viability of Wikipedia's culture than the reliability of Wikipedia as a resource given its prominence. I'd take a dead Wikipedia over one that's lively and fun but full of crap and poorly-checked influence attempts.
It's never going to recapture its halcyon days, so it's going to have to evolve with the times in more ways than one.