Odin's Fiasco with Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Odin's Fiasco with Wikipedia

gingerbill.org

I know that Wikipedia is a very just-so community, whose rules I do not comprehend. Yet when I hear that a programming language with a decade of development, and "dozens" of companies using, it isn't worthy of an article, my mind goes to INTERCAL.

I mention INTERCAL to someone, at some point, about 2 or 3 times per year. By my own estimation, it is historically noteworthy. However, is it more deserving of space on Wikipedia than this Odin language, which I know almost about, but which has current applications and is in active use?

I don't have an answer to that question, but that is what comes to mind.

I have been carefully following the following personal rule:

Never edit or comment or contribute to stack overflow or english wikipedia or linux kernel.

It kind of feels like being non-smoker and reading about issues people who smoke have. Only the damage wikipedia causes appears to be much more random and severe.

I understand not all other language wikipedias are like the english one, but it's not worth the risk to your mind.

One of the problems with notability standards on Wikipedia is that, when an article which doesn't meet the notability standards slips through the cracks, it's unlikely to ever get deleted.

The result of this is that there are a lot of articles on Wikipedia which don't follow its own notability rules. This can be confusing and frustrating for people - like, what do you mean the Idris programming language has a Wikipedia article and Odin doesn't? Who even uses Idris?

But the reality is that, the "Idris" article also doesn't meet notability. One day someone decided to write it, and the simple fact is nobody noticed that it wasn't notable, so it stayed. But someone happened to be around to notice the writing of "Odin" and delete it.

There should be a scientific journal of programming in Odin just to reach notability.

We'll call for a yearly online conference.

Does the author not respect the Programming Language subreddit as a platform to discuss these things? Sure, it’s weirdly vacant most of the time but the space is there and ready to be used.

If you're referring to me, I don't use Reddit much at all any more. I used to comment sometimes on that specific subreddit, but I didn't find the community that great nor the conversations that useful for me. There seemed to be more of a focus on Lambda-Calculus-related type theories, and less in other type theories, and less on practical design and implementation of programming languages and compilers. It varied from beginner level topics to very niche technical topics. I usually talk to other language/compiler developers (outside of Reddit) for discussions on programming languages, meaning most of it is not done in the public.

Keep trying. Eventually you’ll find the right combination of external publicity which satisfies the gatekeepers.

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