Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
katamari64.se
katamari64.se
People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:
Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...
That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end.
Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.
Yes, for the encyclopedia project. But they are many use cases where saving who said what, when, within which contextual summarizable frame can also prove very useful.
Luckily we still have things like archive.org still covering a large part of such a need. Because otherwise, anyone can say anything and its contrary just before denying reality never happened, and then the web becomes saturated of every assertion and its contrary being all covered in some farmed nonsense without any way to weight them in the hand of general public.
what's the gate being kept and by whom?
Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.
From the page: https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement
JangaFX, LLC, a North Carolina Limited Liability Company located at PO BOX 27...Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.
source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing
Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.
Apparently that one is "notable" but Odin is not.
"The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves.
If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.
This is the Odin article as it existed when it was deleted by that AfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr...
The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.
I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
The fact that you are pointing that language out specifically is reason enough.
Rules should be treated as such, strict guidelines that exist because the easier options failed and they will punish or hurt the innocent but that's the price we pay for living in a rules based system.
I think they could surely be more forgiving to programming domain but then everyone will ask for similar benefits.
If your best sources for a project are that you and people you work with use it that isn't very conveniencing and the fact that supposedly you have a lot of fans on twitter shouldn't make it any different.
I think a more comparable language would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
if people want there to be an article on Odin they can contribute to the current draft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers:
https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096
https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432
If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion.
I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Learning brainfuck was a wildly known challenge back in my uni days (and not only for IT studunts, but in mathematician circles as well). I have yet to know any students that would get competitive over writing in Odin.
694 public odin repositories on gh vs 2064 public brainfuck repositories. And most of the brainfuck fame was before using github so wildly popular.
Brainfuck is the definition of not widely used, but notable
Now do Odin. I bet not even one in ten knows what Odin is.
I did write a compiler that targeted brainfuck
Argument of Casey was that it is not.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.
Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.
> If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".
Please RTFA and address the rebukes to this very point that are presented herein... -.- "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable, but how to establish this fact is the problem; a tweet by the CEO is not enough to establish this, secondary reporting by a reliable and archived source would.
I'm not even sure that would count, really. A world-class product that gets a lot of coverage is notable, for sure, but that wouldn't be enough to make some implementation detail of that product notable unless the sources really leaned on it.
> If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable"
Notability is not transitive. If you make a notable thing using a non-notable thing, it doesn't make the non-notable thing notable unless somehow the notable thing sparks a wave of public interest and thus reporting on the non-notable thing.
Also EmberGen doesn't seem terribly notable either.
How many SIGGRAPH papers go in-depth into EmberGen? As far as I can tell: zero. A Google Scholar search shows a single paper where EmberGen is not just a passing mention, and it's in a journal with low reach: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22e... -- also somewhat damning in its conclusion that EmberGen is faster than Blender, but if you need "precise artistic control", keep using Blender.
Has EmberGen won the Academy Scientific and Technical award, like, say, Houdini, Renderman, After Effects or Dragonframe? No it hasn't.
Wikipedia doesn't even have an article on Houdini's HScript.
What do you mean by “proprietary language”? To me “proprietary” means closed source, where one can only download binaries, not source code. “proprietary” can also have source code available, but with a license which is not open-source.
Odin, however, is an open-source language with an open-source license:
I don't see the point about why making a closed tool open source suddenly give it enough notoriety to put it on Wikipedia.
I say that as someone who has used Odin, I do decently like the language but it's just moot to try to fight over this randomly.
I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).
Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.
On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.
It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.
Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug
It is an encyclopedia of topics that meet its standards of notability (ie there exists "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"[1]).
So have I. But what's notable for many HN users, may be muuuuch less notable for average dude on the street.
Wikipedia's policies on this seem pretty clear & reasonable to me. And not too high a bar to clear, imho.
So perhaps a better question is why Odin hasn't - so far. Or just agree that maybe it's not as notable (yet!) as some may think.
Odin is pretty notable imo, but what I had for lunch yesterday is a fact and it does not belong in Wikipedia. A house is a shelter for people, thus my house is a shelter for people; you are a person, but that doesn't that you belong in my house.
Nope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
Trust me, they would delete facts if they could. It's not a site for smart people.
So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.
And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it". Consider AI spam, or a company (or government!) paying, or forcing!, people to write articles with whatever focus/leaning/slant they desire. It seems like a hard problem!
Maybe people forget how things were before wikipedia existed? Like many things run primarily by volunteers, it is messy and imperfect. It's arguably still pretty great, and I'm glad it is around.
It was an article that really just slipped between the cracks of the rules, probably like the Odin one. All I did was take a breather for a few weeks, come back, edit it judiciously down to its core and resubmit it. It passed.
If Odin is important enough then one day there will be enough relevant citations to make it notable and it will be approved. Take a breather and come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...
No, and I'm not arguing for that. Just pointing out that that insidious nature makes contributing to Wikipedia a questionable activity for (a few|some|many|???) people.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for having NO standards at all for what's included, but I think there's room to rethink the nature of some of those standards.
Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.
this isn't a meaningful criticism. An encyclopedia is a reference for established and public knowledge. It's by definition archaic, not an archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the article's criterion for the relevance of Odin.
An encyclopedia shouldn't prioritize article creation, it should be restrictive about what it adds and make sure the content is long term relevant, accurate and sourced. If anything Wikipedia has already been way too lax with what it lets stand on the site. They should honestly do a big cleaning and remove more articles that barely cite any meaningful source or seem like they're self-promotion, because there's already too much of it.
And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).
Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.
Very few people do, which actually makes it worse: of course the spammers and the hustlers are still motivated, so the needle moves more firmly into the territory of "most newcomer contributions are made in bad faith". Editors and admins feel increasingly under siege, so they respond more aggressively to everything.
It's basically the same problem as with real-world policing: because the cops overwhelmingly have deal with "problem" cases (you call them about burglars or drug dealers, not to tell them you baked some cookies), they develop a skewed perception of the average citizen and... well.
Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.
The professors should probably be the ones who decide what is notable in my view. That a small group of wikipedia editors did not appreciate the significance of the persons isn't surpising, they can't be experts about everything.
Hard drives can hold lots of data these days, and text compresses rather well.
Notable is not the same as popular.
I guess the reason people aren't content with that approach and still want a Wikipedia article is because Wikipedia has much higher visibility. Great for SEO! Except if you can't get reputable third parties to publish about you, maybe you're not important enough to deserve that visibility.
I get it, probably it had been massaged by their PR department. But deleting the article punishes the readers by removing the very space for critical discussion of a topic with good SEO. Now if you want information on this company you will likely end up on their website, it seems like a reward to me.
I’m saying neither, but in that case the article on Wikipedia puts weight behind the statements on the webpage.
I do see your argument: „But it would be adjusted to reflect the truth about it“. Honestly I don’t know enough about Wikipedia to agree or deny it. But given the amount of articles on it, i would lean in the direction that the motivation of a single few would win over the curators. Which means applying a vector that cannot be influenced by those few.
Deleting the article means you can't even see the edit history to see why it was deleted. Whatever good work was done by other editors is gone cannot be built on. It's extreme.
I understand that Wikipedia does not want corporate propaganda or other forms of propaganda, but whether a company exists or not at the time is an objective yes/no answer. It is probably more work to correct propaganda though, so articles are deleted. Would be better to simplify an article down to the bare bone instead, though, so I agree with you here.
Hence why, to even be in wikipedia, the company has to be notable, otherwise every LLC and partnership would want to boost their reputation (while ruining wikipedia's): the barrier to entry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(organiza...
Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.
There is more assymetry between writing yourself and checking other people work.
And it's by design, the work of one person could only be reliable if checked over and over by other people. People that agree on common rules
If you want to write a good article that wouldn't go through this rigorous checks and made abhor rigid rules, may I suggest writing a blogpost
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
For example, Go got famous because of how much they pushed channels and launching thousands of green threads per app as the next big thing.
Over time, people kind of soured on these ideas, but Go was a great, simple language with good DX that built static executables.
As a contrast, languages like Kotlin or Swift also brought huge DX improvements to their respective audiences, but didn't really have any standout (novel or divisive) features that made people talk about them.
Odin's like that - it's basically C (or more accurately Pascal) with better generics and some gamedev related features, so it's not as painful to write as plain C.
If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.
Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai.
This is a popular joke because of the release timeline. The reality is the inverse, and Ginger Bill has acknowledged the influence of Jai.
The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.
Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.
The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).
In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.
> maybe I just happened to miss it?
You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.
(But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)
There are probably thousands of JavaScript packages on NPM that are more well-known than Odin, that doesn't mean they deserve their own Wikipedia page.
Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.
The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
For more details, see
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.
I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.
But other than that?
Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
I do understand what you are saying though and I don't think that I have a meaningful thing to add in that and Odin is relatively popular within some circles but the question seems to be if its popular (enough*)
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.
And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.
> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them
No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.
This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.
Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.
This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
That's not been my experience, tbh - in my view the deletionist fraction of the editors has essentially "won", if one can put it in those terms. I _think_ there is a (maybe small) group that have decided it is their mission to guard Wikipedia against what they view as cruft or non-notable, regardless of how many years of work these articles may have accumulated. They do not need to be paid for this - they enjoy it. Destroying is always easier than creation.
I seem to recall some study showing that the vast vast majority of edits/deletes on Wikipedia are the work of just a few hundred long-standing editors (citation needed) - which to me confirmed my gut feeling that most new editors bounce off and give up on contribution in short order.
I contributed for a few years, but gave up eventually - it was exhausting to spend time collating sources, collecting information, editing, rewriting, and then having someone come along and propose discarding your work with very little investment from their side.
Stackoverflow has gone through similar calcification - it's nearly impossible to contribute now, or build reputation as a new user, as posts get closed as duplicates or not-relevant.
I'm fairly sure I've seen statistics that say the opposite of that (citation needed), so I'd like to see that study.
Actually there are organizations -- several of which brag about it openly -- that employ people to carefully manage what ends up on Wikipedia, and which side of a story ends up in popular articles.
There has to be a better way to do this at that scale than just "oh we forgot to notice it and now its too awkward to remove it"? Maybe i am missing something idk
More like policies evolve and older articles are grandfathered in by the fact that they aren't edited and people aren't going back and reviewing old articles that don't meet the newer standards.
> Maybe i am missing something
You are.
> idk
That says it all.
>You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information. See who they follow on Twitter.
This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill.
My politics are left-leaning and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya)
If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right.
Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.
Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?
Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.
"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.
Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.
But how do you moderate? Do you establish your own ministry of truth? Only allow contributors with a university email address (shoutout to the arXiv)?
Wikipedia decided to externalize part of the vetting process by placing formal restrictions on the sources you're allowed to collect information from.
Sadly, there currently aren't any such sources for Odin.
Maybe I just met him on a bad day.
These culture war “hot takes” at the end of the article distract from what was otherwise a reasonable look at how online culture brings out people who believe conspiracy theories, don’t care about objective fact, and post content with far more heat than light.
And then I read this:
> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view
> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
> 2. See who they follow on Twitter
What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language and don't want it on Wikipedia as any form of "advertisement".
It doesn't directly say "political bias", but it certainly is implied (not as in national politics, more like ideological)
Also this is the only post on the blog, with no further clues as to who the author is. So this post is some sort of hitnrun attack as well?
Does this guy have beef with Bill making Odin?
For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.
And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.
The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.
Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.
However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.
Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.
But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.
And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.
We trust people first, up and down the scale.
On the other hand, if you're talking about Star Trek, the MCU, Taylor Swift or the Legend of Zelda series, the most reliable source is probably not going to be either an academic journal or the New York Times. Many of my videos and articles are about games in the latter series, and the reliable sources for that would probably be something like speedrunners, dataminers, etc. For most of those things, the reliable source would either be the artist or company that owns the rights, or some fansite/video creator that's been documenting them for the last three decades.
Plus, a lot of the time the sources Wikipedia accepts are just laundering the same info anyway. It would be very, very easy to get misleading or incorrect information about the next Pokemon game to go viral, just by sending a few publications a link to a random blog and letting them take it at face value. In a depressing number of fields, fact checking and research is minimal even from name brand publications, and some guy's post on Reddit can get treated like gospel.
You lost me here. I mean, yes, there's serious fan community interaction around those subject which is unauthenticated and anonymous. But that's interaction and not research or journalism. You might cite the existence of a favorite lore or fan theory in a wikipedia article, but you don't take the fan stuff as a source for the original material!
To take your specific example: Swift is literally getting married today, I gather. Why do I gather it? Because trusted human beings in my information space (Twitter feed, news articles, etc...) are telling me! Would I trust an anonymous fan source telling me someone got married? Almost certainly not.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
zig: 71,565
rust: 304,405
golang: 1,246,300
malbogle: 9
The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...
Verifiable, in addition to accurate. Not "not accurate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_i...
Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.
There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?
Here on the orange site, where he can't edit what he wrote hours after finding out that he was wrong, there are a few interactions between me and Bill where I know a topic, Bill blusters but is clueless and so he makes a bit of a fool of himself.
On Reddit, where Bill can go back and "edit" embarrassing mistakes the dynamic is very weird, with it appearing (if you go look now) that I keep restating things Bill has explicitly said he knows. Of course if you saw it when it happened it's the same as on HN, I stick to areas of expertise, Bill offers pronouncements on topics he doesn't understand, he looks like an idiot. But the power of the edit button allows Bill to rewrite history so that he knew all that with only the small price that now the conversation looks weird (and there's a tiny asterisk on his comments in some Reddit UIs to hint that they're edited)
Now, I don't like what I call "Auteur languages". Programming Languages where a single individual or maybe a couple of people have absolute control. So Odin was never going to be a language I like, same for Jai, Hare, Cpp2† and indeed more relevantly Zig. In that sense it doesn't matter whether I like Odin, but it does seem like feedback on "Ginger" Bill Hall.
† I'm sure Herb Sutter would tell you that his "new syntax" for C++ would be overseen by the same committee as the current language. The language as it exists today, largely abandoned, does not have such oversight.
Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.
Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.
If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).
* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.
I mean, some dudes way back in the day successfully forked Spanish-language Wikipedia because of some advertising disputes. Can anyone truly replicate success with a forked enwiki?
At least there, the Odin article still lives on.
Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
It is only at the end of a very long, well-argued article that he is very critical of GingerBill's positions. I don't think I agree that calling someone out on their contradictions or political opinions constitute "stalking".
- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
- footnotes appearing out of order
Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.
Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...
They both don't belong there, TBH. I'm a PL nerd and have been one for nearly 20 years. Wikipedia is the last place I would search for information about even the TIOBE Top 20 languages, let alone anything newer or more niche. The only reason new/niche languages have a Wikipedia page is for advertising - they all hope to attract new users and convey an impression of being mature enough for serious work. It's a failure of Wiki that some pages like that were not flagged and deleted quickly enough. Enthusiasts will keep creating those pages as long as there's a chance they'll fly under the radar long enough to make them hard to delete. If they put that effort into RosettaCode (also a wiki) pages, we'd be all the better for it.
But hey, don't expect consistency or fairness from the ones on the English Wikipedia.
It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.
Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.
Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).
Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word for it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!
So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.
It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.
If you want my opinion on that, Odin seems pretty notable to me, and I would expect there to be a Wikipedia article for it, and I'd be all for engaging with the editors on that. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia moderators to be plugged into the world of programming languages the way I am, though. Like the article says, this seems like subject-specific notability guidelines could help. It's definitely true that the programming world is missing the kind of institutional material that works well for, say, science or news.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.
In other words, just Reddit mods
my $0.02: if they think odin is notable enough for wikipedia and all they need is for someone to actually note it, now is the time to hire a pr firm. seriously. that's what they're there for.
That would have solved this issue for them.
If you feel ambivalent about this, consider the “Influenced By” and “Influenced” sections on the Rust page (or C++ or Java) and decide for yourself if Odin is more or less notable than those languages that have blue links.
Surely if Odin is all that notable, somebody somewhere's written something about it in a SIGGRAPH paper, at least?
Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?
Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.
Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
You are wrong to state that I am motivated by fanatism or jealousy.
I have no involvement whatever with Odin and am in agreement with the parent article (though I think it's personal criticisms veer a bit too far). The creator of Odin using Odin at jangafx is not an appropriate source in my view.
Rather, the shooting of such strays appears to reflect old competitor propaganda pushed on certain social media sites (that traces back to Ginger Bill and other competitors in different ways) and a sentiment, often regurgitated by certain fanatics of his, where they appear to be upset by vlang's level of success.
> Our best hypothesis is quite simple: some of the mods just don't like Odin as a language
Even here, where this quote is taken directly from Ginger Bill's post, shows how wrong he and certain of his followers are about the issue. It is not about about Wikipedia mods not liking Odin or even about the articles of other languages. Wikipedia has certain rules and reference requirements for articles to survive an AfC or AfD "challenge" and Odin failed.
What a sh*tshow. When I look up a programming language on Wikipedia I am trying to learn about the programming language only. What does the political views of the creator of the language has to do with this at all?
He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.
Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).
GingerBill, a person who cares deeply and has very specific ideas about how some obscure stuff the public doesn't care about should work, meets another group of people who are exactly like him, except for they happen to be fixated on other stuff, fails to recognize this, and assumes the world is out to get him.
He reaches out to Jimmy Wales, who acts like the adult in the room, and tells him to follow the rules just like anyone else, immediately gets added to the list of evil co-conspirators.
After running out of ideas, he tries to follow the rules, and lo and behold, his Wikipedia page gets added.
As an open source maintainer, Bill likely constantly deals with the kind of person who tries to get a PR merged, who, after getting told what needs fixing before the merge, cries injustice and goes on an internet crusade instead of doing what they've been told.
Ignoring all other factors, IMO there should be an article about Odin the programming language. Deleting an article about something that exists, is incredibly stupid; not sure why Wikipedia resorts to that. If Wikipdia deems Odin not noteworthy - and I don't really care about Odin myself - then the article could be kept short. That would still be better than deleting it.
Wikipedia started with the goal of a database of literally everything. One could argue that Odin is not relevant because it may not be used by anyone, but then this would need to be an objective argument based on numbers and data, because many other programming languages are used by few people yet are mentioned on Wikipedia. So, that seems to be a stupid decision by those responsible on Wikipedia. CensorshipBros are annoying in general - the english wikipedia is much more open than the german wikipedia by the way.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...
[4] like this
For example: if I move my email off Gmail, how to archive my YouTube notification emails? I worry about that and I just can't get myself to realize it's a non-problem and I can just delete them. There could be some historical value in an archive of YouTube notification emails over 20 years but (unfortunately for future historians studying YouTube) the weight of carrying those around us not worth the low expected value. Even though the reason I put them in their own folder was to declutter my inbox, not to archive them!
My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion.
That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that something Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with.
I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.
That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.
According to what authority?
GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016.
I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.
The problem, of course, is that such measures are arbitrary and probably gameable. Not that the current criteria aren't, of course, but it's the best we've got.
As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.
> I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.
Then by all means, flag them for deletion. Although I would understand if you don't want to make that effort (I mean this genuinely, not as a rebuke).
Wikipedia admins get it wrong more often than they get it right, and the general process for Wikipedia is obtuse, ignorant, and generally backward, with most of the favor given towards "people with old accounts" as opposed to actual knowledge.
It's beyond simple to get new editors banned for simply creating edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
The only reason it's good for things like science is that it's generally hard for the kind of lowIQ populace their older accounts and admins have to argue about definitive numbers. But I am sure if they could they'd say things like "Hydrogen doesn't actually always have 1 electron", and so on.
Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
Misrepresenting what another contributor said? yeah you can be blocked.
Disagreeing on what should be in an article? That won't get you blocked. Getting into an edit war about it might. Being "right" is not a valid defense for edit warring.
In general, its not the place for admins to decide what is "true". Its their job to make sure people are behaving in accordance to the rules.
I don't know any of the people in this post, since I firmly believe that not having twitter, instagram, or tiktok is the #1 thing anyone can do to improve their mental well-being. From this sentence alone however, I can exactly establish what kind of person this is. The persecution complex, the "journalist" as an insult, it's all there.
> I know that as of now, GingerBill follows: Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool and Libs of TikTok.
Nailed it.