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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

The wikipedia entry for jq was deleted because the person who decided it should be deleted thought it was Stephen Dolan's personal project and not a proper programming language, so fuck it, it's gone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JQ].

I gave up arguing about it. It's truly unbelievable. Yeah, it is Stephen Dolan's personal project, and yes, it deserves a wikipedia entry because it's a fascinating and very popular programming language that now has more than one implementation.

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I can't find that previous entry in the edit history, and the talk page history just has one question about Dolan's jq. Where can I see the background you're talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet...

> Expired PROD, concern was: The only reference is primary, as are all external links. No indication that this is more than a personal project. Article was created by Jordinas, whose contributions all involve adding links to jq from other pages; COI likely.

Thanks for digging this out, because it's an educational example.

Surprisingly, this type of moderation is what made Wikipedia thrive. You can be as flabbergasted as I once was about the process. But exactly those "dumb" criteria make the system work. The admin did his job here and probably on twenty more identical deletions the same day.

There's definitely a deletionist vs. an inclusionist school. And even if most of us agree that either taken to an extreme is problematic, many of us would also argue about where that line should be drawn. And, in practice, a lot depends on how much has been written about them/it in relative accessible literature or even whether someone at some point cared enough to create an article with good citations.

I don't know how to find the talk on the original page and its deletion. All I know is that the editor who deleted it refused to consider all evidence that it wasn't just a personal project, or that it was worthy of a wikipedia page.

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