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Comment by andrewcooke | Hacker News Reader

heh. i think this is a generational thing. he was pretty damn central to the early perl culture, but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him. i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were?

to give some idea of relative fame, i'd say he was no less famous in his community that, say, paul buchheit is these days.

[and i'd like to know more details about how the prosecution ended up being expunged - whatever that means. he did time, right?]

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Notability is not temporary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability...

interesting, thanks. so he should stay.

The notion that maybe he shouldn't is a false controversy. Even if he wanted the page removed, the page would stay. You can't be written up in tens or hundreds of news stories over a decade and not have a WP page written about you.

Wikipedia is not suggesting that Schwartz be deleted. One random guy is. FILM AT 11.

Although notability is not temporary in theory, Wikipedia has always (and probably always will) suffer from presentism. Things that are important today get a disproportionate amount of attention. It is maybe easier to evaluate something's historical notability with the benefit of hindsight.

That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.

> I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.

Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that...

* [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj]

Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him?

Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it?

I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does.

Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.

> Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him?

This is a pretty naïve argument.

Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.

>This is a pretty naïve argument.

Well there are certainly different degrees of ``inclusionism'' but I have read plenty argue that absolutely nothing is too trivial for Wikipedia. I don't care who's wrong or right, but given the standard the Foundation is attempting to set for themselves, it's clear to me why ``deletionism'' rules.

If I'm just a footnote in the history of Perl, you're woefully ignorant.

Maybe more. I'm certainly no Perl historian. But if I were, and I were writing a book about it, I doubt I would include a lot of biographies.

If "author of first book about Perl" doesn't make your book, you're a pretty poor writer.

Nothing I said was meant to be taken personally, so please stop with the ad hominems. I apologize if I offended you. I didn't mean to imply that your life and work are not important. I just don't feel like every single biography is worthy of ``the sum of human knowledge'', even if that person's work is. I guess that's not a fashionable opinion to have in the post-Twitter era, especially on a website where people submit their .vimrc files as potential ``hacker news'', but it is my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

It's not about being taking personally. It's just a fact: I wrote (with Larry Wall) the first book about Perl. And then the second book about Perl, which became the seminal teaching guide. If that doesn't deserve a note in the Perl history, you're confused.

If you're not interested in how the lives of human beings create history, then please write about natural history (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, zoology), not human history. Perl, as software, may instantiate a mathematical ideal, but a history of Perl must talk about its connection to a community of programmers, and Mr. Schwartz is most certainly a leading light of that community.

Yes, but you would mention "The Camel Book", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, right? Or that the capitalization "Perl" was coined by Randal (or so Wikipedia's Perl page claims)? And the "Schwartzian Transform" is kind of famous.

Notability is not temporary.

Indeed, and backpropagating this principle through time, with a few other rough assumptions, suggests there are at least 1 million people who were once notable who will never get their own Wikipedia article. There is, however, a userspace article to commemorate these 'Unknown Notables':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of...

"but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him"

Isn't this why encyclopedias exist, and exactly why this entry shouldn't be deleted?

Personally, I'm in the 'keep' camp, I can't understand why people would want to delete this, unless it's a manifestation of the trolling culture that seems to be springing up in a variety of places.

> i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were?

This has been addressed, somewhat, but I'll say a bit more about it.

This is, sorry to say, a wrongheaded approach. Editorial decisions should be made with some prescience, or at least an attempt at it. To suggest that a contrary approach is an acceptable one has a couple of negative effects:

1. There's the obvious problem, which is that it says after a threshold has been reached, it's okay that this stuff will be lost. Not even through neglect or inaction, but as a matter of policy and very deliberate action. This is, in a word, dumb.

2. It encourages people to spend unfortunate levels of effort on ephemera that's just going to disappear. To put it another way, it squanders an already-scarce resource on stuff that doesn't matter in the long run. That's a lot of churn, and there's enough as it is.

More people know him as a TWiT Network host, nowadays.

I've noticed that at the past few open source conferences. Most people know me from FLOSS Weekly now. Since we already went through a "FLOSS Weekly deletion" action, can't some of that apply back to my article?

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