I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?
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...
leecommamichael 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
armchairhacker 11 minutes ago [-]
Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia.
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
bawolff 22 seconds ago [-]
Its a good reminder that all wikipedia software is GPL, and the article content is CC-BY-SA. Anyone who thinks they can do better has the right to fork.
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.
mindcrime 3 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
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.
stock_toaster 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
pphysch 47 minutes ago [-]
The fact is GingerBill or someone else could have kept the article up with enough money spent on the right PR firm that knows how to turn the Wikipedia knobs.
hatefulheart 29 minutes ago [-]
This is also why the conclusion of the article is extremely bizarre. I’m not keeping my eyes peeled for more articles from this individual.
zarzavat 2 hours ago [-]
I was researching a public company the other day and I open their Wikipedia page: deleted.
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.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I also noticed this myself.
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.
Morromist 2 hours ago [-]
"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"
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.
zerobees 2 hours ago [-]
> "It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"
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.
NordStreamYacht 2 hours ago [-]
They even roll back corrections to grammar. Power tripping overrides common sense.
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
This could be automatic. I noticed this myself because I corrected
both typos in english and german wikipedia; sometimes they are
reverted, sometimes not. There seems no logic in it, so I assumed
that in some cases this must have been automatic wiki bots
reverting something.
NordStreamYacht 42 minutes ago [-]
This was like 10 years ago. Long before the real invasion of the bots. I don't even remember the username or password of my account any more.
questiona 1 hours ago [-]
Two comments about the submission:
First:
The author, katamari64.se, is clearly an incompetent, dishonest, manipulative wretch, deeply similar to some of the wretches he criticizes. And there is absolutely no good reason for the article being as long as it is. The article also is full of completely obvious errors, like footnotes being broken, indicating that it might have been partially or fully generated without review.
Second:
For whatever reason, the article fails to question this claim:
> Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists
Specifically, the "million hobbyists". That number is not sourced and is likely utterly false. The claim about thousands of public projects might be true, judging by https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language:Odin , but many of those repositories are for tiny projects that have not been updated for a long time, or have even been archived. Redmonk does not even seem to list Odin: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-2... . I don't care too much about Odin having a Wikipedia entry or not, but some of the more important claims in favor of Odin's notability are potentially utterly false, yet this article doesn't even address them despite its utterly and unnecessarily bloated length.
To summarize:
The article, its author, and Wikipedia, are, at best, trash.
It is fine that the Wikipedia article was removed, it would also have been fine if it was kept, Wikipedia is trash or worse. If the Odin community wants to be available on Wikipedia, then give credible sources about a million users, and source noteworthy projects written in Odin, not only a few companies using Odin. Odin could also play the shill game, somehow, maybe by paying journalists to write about it or pay shills to promote and upvote it here on Hacker News and other social media, that is common these days for some programming languages, but I generally dislike that, and I don't know what the journalists would even write about. Odin's author could also pay for hitpieces on competing languages, that also seems to be common these days. Was the submission a wretched, low-quality, cultish/ethnic-warfare hitpiece on Odin; paid for by a competing language community; or both? It is reminiscent of the kind of hitpieces and threats of violence and attempted murders that the Rust community is infamous for committing.
7bees 2 hours ago [-]
> once whatever discussion happens
Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.
Barrin92 56 minutes ago [-]
>an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time
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.
mberning 3 hours ago [-]
This happened to me back in college. I authored a couple pages for some bands that I was in to, probably spent weeks pulling together history, lineup, albums, eps, etc. only to have them deleted unceremoniously with no recourse. That was my first and last attempt to contribute to wikipedia.
Dfol 1 hours ago [-]
Same, I understand the editors/admins can't be experts on every topic but just because THEY don't think something is notable doesn't mean most people don't either.
dibujaron 7 hours ago [-]
This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
recursivecaveat 7 hours ago [-]
I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.
woodruffw 6 hours ago [-]
This is an argument for deleting those non-notable articles as well, not retaining other non-notable articles.
nvme0n1p1 7 hours ago [-]
SISC is there because it's not notable, so the busybodies haven't even noticed the page exists. Odin, however, is notable, and that put it on their radar as a target for attacking its notability.
chris_wot 1 hours ago [-]
Not more obscure than Brainfuck.
traes 11 minutes ago [-]
What? Brainfuck is the single least obscure esoteric programming language. It's the most famous example of a simple Turing complete language and its provocative name gets it a fair amount of media coverage outside its niche.
chris_wot 9 minutes ago [-]
Could you use it in production?
traes 6 minutes ago [-]
From Cambridge dictionary:
obscure (adjective)
not known to many people:
- an obscure island in the Pacific
- an obscure 12th-century mystic
Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.
andai 7 hours ago [-]
The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)
jibal 6 hours ago [-]
The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.
> 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.
wtetzner 6 hours ago [-]
> The author knows the orientation of his language better than anyone else.
The author knows the intention of the language better than anyone else, but that doesn't mean it isn't especially game dev oriented.
dismalaf 5 hours ago [-]
Is C++ a game oriented language because most game engines and games are written in it?
andai 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah oriented might be the wrong word here. "Surprisngly well suited for the job" is more like it. It was very ergonomic. In fact, I ended up translating my Odin game to several other languages and the experience was quite painful. (That's one way to measure the quality of a language! How much it hurts to port code out of it.)
andai 5 hours ago [-]
I clearly remember Jonathan Blow talking about how Jai's syntax was influenced by his conversations with Bill. But it was 10+ years ago, so I might have gotten it mixed up.
I think the influence ended up going both ways eventually though.
jibal 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, you have it mixed up ... Jai development started 2 years before Odin. And the claim was
I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.
panzi 7 hours ago [-]
I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.
loeg 6 hours ago [-]
It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.
firesteelrain 3 hours ago [-]
I have only heard about it because of HN.
krautsauer 6 hours ago [-]
It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?
dismalaf 7 hours ago [-]
It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server.
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.
5 hours ago [-]
jibal 6 hours ago [-]
Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.
woodruffw 6 hours ago [-]
I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V).
(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.)
jibal 6 hours ago [-]
Then you don't.
woodruffw 6 hours ago [-]
Thank you, that’s very persuasive.
jibal 1 hours ago [-]
What should be persuasive is a simple logical inference from the statements made to my conclusion.
From the article:
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development".
Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects.
> Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.
This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake.
As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA:
> Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists.
By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
Barrin92 1 hours ago [-]
No it's an indication that notoriety in Discord servers isn't a basis for relevance in an encyclopedia. Which is a good choice. A streamer mentioned a language? Wikipedia isn't Twitter.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
jibal 56 minutes ago [-]
I'm talking about a universe of developing systems programming languages, not "the attention of social media" -- that's a silly shallow bad faith reduction. And I see that elsewhere you have written "a archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the articles criterion for the relevance of Odin" -- it doesn't seem that way to anyone who is remotely intellectually honest ... clearly it is ideology about the scope of Wikipedia articles that is work here totally independently of any knowledge of or details about Odin.
There is also virtually no attention in these comments to the content of TFA, e.g.,
> the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was deleted -- you won. People are still entitled to think that it was a mistake and to say why.
steveklabnik 6 hours ago [-]
I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.
bobbytheblkbear 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andai 7 hours ago [-]
If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind.
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.
w10-1 7 hours ago [-]
In wikipedia-land, I read "primary source" as "motivated source", given their need to prune biased edits.
netbioserror 7 hours ago [-]
The fatal flaw here being that secondary sources and tertiary ad infinitum are all always motivated. It's inescapable.
Dfol 1 hours ago [-]
Yep, good point.
wavemode 7 hours ago [-]
You've almost got it, except:
> 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.
aeontech 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
andai 5 hours ago [-]
>Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.
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.
dcrazy 3 hours ago [-]
This is a poor attempt to imply an equivalence between deletionism and non-impartiality (influence campaigns and reputation managers).
altmanaltman 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
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
jasonlotito 3 hours ago [-]
> Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
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.
wavemode 2 hours ago [-]
The broad strokes of what Wikipedia considers notable has not changed significantly in the last 20 years.
What has mostly changed is that there are more editors now, and thus more eyes and also more serious discussion (rigor?) about such things.
chris_wot 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have proof there are more editors now? By an order of magnitude? Or don’t mean there are people who like to participate in Wikipedia drama and who don’t actively contribute to article creation?
altmanaltman 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
James_K 5 hours ago [-]
Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.
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.
kibibu 7 hours ago [-]
I genuinely don't think Malbolge, for example, warrants a Wikipedia page if Odin doesn't
fluoridation 6 hours ago [-]
Malbolge is basically a meme, and Wikipedia does have articles for memes. Speaking for myself, I have heard about Malbolge, and not about Odin.
JBits 6 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it is because Malbolge is notable within the category of esolangs.
lifthrasiir 2 hours ago [-]
As an actual esolang enthusiast (and a past Wikipedia administrator two decades ago), I can say that Malbolge is only notable because it remained unsolved for the extended period only due to the lack of serious attempts. It doesn't even pass the meme criteria IMO.
dickiedyce 1 hours ago [-]
Although, didn’t it appear in a popular culture reference? I seem to remember an episode of “elementary“ that mentioned it.
lifthrasiir 31 minutes ago [-]
Oh, sure, the "In Popular Culture" section is a prerequisite for every Wikipedia article. ;-)
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
brendoelfrendo 5 hours ago [-]
Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.
andrybak 7 hours ago [-]
> Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments
>
> 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.
Everything is decided by favors. If I list something and you delete it I will support you the next time. Non of the guidelines are really relevant to any process. If my team says a source is or isn't reliable you just have to accept it however absurd or bizarre it is. Suck it up.
Programming articles exist because no one bothered to delete them. I've actually joked about it a decade ago.
I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. That way they will collectively oppose everything i do. The game grows increasingly absurd as the true colors shine though. I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
Behind my back they write walls of text how to get rid of me. (I wrote some tools to dig into article and user edit history)
But all I do is contribute citations with quality sources, sure I do it in places they don't want to see developed but the decision to have an article was already made, only the real work remains.
The easiest are the articles listed under the fringe category. They are all in terrible shape, sources are easy to find and it instantly enrages the fringe warriors.
Note: You don't actually have to believe something is real to be able to cite a source.
Jimbo is such a fan of tag team editing it can hardly be considered a mistake.
If the wiki followed its own rules and guidelines you could write a guideline for the notability of articles in the programming category.
If you do that now the guideline guardians will tell you with a straight face that no amount of GitHub stars is enough and that no such guideline is needed.
If you provide example articles they will be deleted to prove the point.
One could probably train an interesting llm on deleted wp contributions. There might be more content there than in main space.
Alpha3031 2 hours ago [-]
> I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way.
> I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?
ternaryoperator 3 hours ago [-]
When Wikipedia first came out, there was a big debate about articles on people: should it be inclusive (anybody with minor accomplishments gets in) or should there be some threshold to be met? Ultimately, it was decided that if the perception was that the person involved was to become notable principally by having a WP page, then they did not qualify. WP did not want to be used as a means of getting attention/traction/credibility. I like that criterion and I think it’s reasonable to feel that Odin does not meet it…yet.
square_usual 5 hours ago [-]
I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
bawolff 6 hours ago [-]
> If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud
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.
dismalaf 6 hours ago [-]
Zig is more popular. Name a second modern "C competitor" language that's more popular?
calvinmorrison 6 hours ago [-]
golang, rust, c++... etc?
dismalaf 5 hours ago [-]
The whole "C competitor" category is about minimalism so no one puts Rust or C++ in that category. Also Golang has a GC so most wouldn't even call it a systems language at all...
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
Everyone considers rust a c competitor. Its literally replacing c in the linux kernel.
uecker 48 minutes ago [-]
I wonder whether the "replacing c in the linux kernel" is not more wishful thinking by Rust enthusiasts. As of know it has less than 1% and less than bash.
dismalaf 3 hours ago [-]
NetBSD puts Lua in kernel space, is it a C competitor?
Rust is an obvious competitor to C++, both are similarly featured.
When people talk about "modern C competitors" they're almost always talking about more minimalist languages like Zig, Odin, C3, Jai, Hare, etc...
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
ok maybe you are zoomed to far in.
forrestthewoods 3 hours ago [-]
> one of
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!
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?
staplung 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was.
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
fwipsy 5 hours ago [-]
The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.
greyface- 5 hours ago [-]
> The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete
The point of Wikipedia is to be verifiable, not accurate.
Is it notable for being written in Rust? Maybe for supporting an agenda?
Reubend 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, but I agree with the wiki editors in this case. Odin is obscure. The author of this blog post seems to think it's well known, but I don't think that's substantiated.
willdr 7 hours ago [-]
Interesting article (I tend to agree with you re SNG in the programming field). But unfortunately I couldn't easily absorb the substance as your site needs some work on mobile:
- 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
boca_honey 6 hours ago [-]
I know programming is what's most important to many in this community, but as an outsider I need to ask: literally WTF is Odin? I mean I know about Java and C++, etc. But Odin? That's what Wikipedia policies are for. It cannot include anything and everything about every single profession, subculture, or interest group.
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.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.
fwipsy 5 hours ago [-]
> Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur
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.
qjack 6 hours ago [-]
The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on.
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.
conartist6 6 hours ago [-]
I dunno I just find it silly because they're making such a Thing out of it that soon there's just gonna be a Wikipedia page on Odingate as it is rapidly becoming a notable public event of its own. Then that page will have to link to a page on Odin anyway
zerocrates 6 hours ago [-]
The hypothetical "Odingate" article in a reliable source would probably have to discuss Odin enough to also be a viable source for Odin itself; problem solved.
add-sub-mul-div 4 hours ago [-]
If the language is too irrelevant to be of interest then why would any bickering about it be notable? There must be thousands of topics people whine about for not making the notability threshold.
krautsauer 6 hours ago [-]
Link will be red?
5 hours ago [-]
wmorgan 5 hours ago [-]
FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.
brooke2k 6 hours ago [-]
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can participate. Anyone can advocate for change, such as changing the rules around notability.
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.
xeric 6 hours ago [-]
I looked and the cultural marxism tweet has zero likes, zero comments, and only 35 views. Although it has caused much consternation for you and the author. So it seems strange that you don't understand why people might be concerned about what Wikipedia has to say about things, and how it works, given its prominence.
cindyllm 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
brador 11 minutes ago [-]
The fact that any factual text article needs to be deleted from an encyclopaedia fills me with rage.
chris_wot 1 hours ago [-]
Given the people now running the English Wikipedia, this is hardly surprising. Most of these folks have no real interest in article creation, only drama and fiddling with things like categories.
Dfol 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed, plus they're weirdly political/politically biased in how a lot of topics are covered.
James_K 5 hours ago [-]
I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.
It is disappointing to see that the v programming language has a Wikipedia article given it's history of being essentially fraudulent.
baranul 13 minutes ago [-]
This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older.
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.
Being fraudulent doesn't make something less notable. It might even make something more notable, provided enough sources report on it.
diimdeep 2 hours ago [-]
Article has a few decent remarks, but ultimately it fails to deliver anthropologic, grounded, humane interpretation without narrow worldview and ideological biases of it's author.
bobbytheblkbear 6 hours ago [-]
I'll just say the obvious:
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.
bawolff 6 hours ago [-]
> edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.
Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.
loeg 6 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that lying isn't considered poor behavior by Wikipedia or what? I don't believe that.
bawolff 5 hours ago [-]
Depends on how you define "lying".
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.
bakugo 6 hours ago [-]
This article seems quite drawn out for what is essentially an ad hominem attack on the personal views of the creator of the language.
hoffs 2 hours ago [-]
I'd say it provides a lot of information about whole situation, including context on how wikipedia operates and history of behavior from the creator of the language.
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?
superdisk 2 hours ago [-]
I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
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.
7 hours ago [-]
daneel_w 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting article until you reach the gooey, messy bottom where the author takes a sudden personal turn and decides to pick apart the "spineless" creator of the programming language - who is the article's actual subject - by wielding their own ideologically and morally superior perspectives as truths. Smug, ironic, personal and somewhat unpleasant.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
chaostheory 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the Wikipedia mods have many great, valid reasons for deleting articles. Unfortunately for the ignorant masses, this has bad optics, since it looks like it runs counter to their goal of "cataloging all human knowledge".
shevy-java 2 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia can be strange sometimes, in particular the german variant.
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.
Alpha3031 11 minutes ago [-]
Wikipedia is very explicitly not a indiscriminate database of everything,[1] and dismissing anyone in the editing community who attempts curate it as CensorshipBros is the same type of twitter bullshitting called out by the blog post in the OP.
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
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?
6 hours ago [-]
loeg 6 hours ago [-]
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
It’s actually sad you’re downvoted. Oh well. Thanks for sharing an honest alternative.
SepiaSapient 2 hours ago [-]
Linking to the equivalent of "@groq is this true??" should be mocked.
SanjayMehta 6 hours ago [-]
The real "engagement farming" is from the Wikipedia editor attempting to delete the article for clout amongst the Wikipedia community. That's all this is about.
add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago [-]
Why would deleting a page on an obscure topic earn anyone clout? Did they see into the future to know the public tantrum would follow?
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.
Rendered at 07:06:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
First:
The author, katamari64.se, is clearly an incompetent, dishonest, manipulative wretch, deeply similar to some of the wretches he criticizes. And there is absolutely no good reason for the article being as long as it is. The article also is full of completely obvious errors, like footnotes being broken, indicating that it might have been partially or fully generated without review.
Second:
For whatever reason, the article fails to question this claim:
> Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists
Specifically, the "million hobbyists". That number is not sourced and is likely utterly false. The claim about thousands of public projects might be true, judging by https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language:Odin , but many of those repositories are for tiny projects that have not been updated for a long time, or have even been archived. Redmonk does not even seem to list Odin: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-2... . I don't care too much about Odin having a Wikipedia entry or not, but some of the more important claims in favor of Odin's notability are potentially utterly false, yet this article doesn't even address them despite its utterly and unnecessarily bloated length.
To summarize:
The article, its author, and Wikipedia, are, at best, trash.
It is fine that the Wikipedia article was removed, it would also have been fine if it was kept, Wikipedia is trash or worse. If the Odin community wants to be available on Wikipedia, then give credible sources about a million users, and source noteworthy projects written in Odin, not only a few companies using Odin. Odin could also play the shill game, somehow, maybe by paying journalists to write about it or pay shills to promote and upvote it here on Hacker News and other social media, that is common these days for some programming languages, but I generally dislike that, and I don't know what the journalists would even write about. Odin's author could also pay for hitpieces on competing languages, that also seems to be common these days. Was the submission a wretched, low-quality, cultish/ethnic-warfare hitpiece on Odin; paid for by a competing language community; or both? It is reminiscent of the kind of hitpieces and threats of violence and attempted murders that the Rust community is infamous for committing.
Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.
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.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
obscure (adjective)
not known to many people:
- an obscure island in the Pacific
- an obscure 12th-century mystic
Why does its use in production matter? Perhaps the syntax itself is obscure, but we're not discussing syntax but general awareness. Anyway, the most common "real" use of brainfuck is to prove Turing completeness of other things by finding a way to compile them into brainfuck.
> 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.
> Odin was a major influence on Jai
which simply isn't true. Just google it, e.g.,
https://handmade.network/forums/t/1338-the_odin_programming_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jai/comments/1j2idvz/is_odin_kind_o...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317815
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.
(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.)
From the article:
> If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.
If you are active in discussions of other systems programming languages like Zig, Nim, Jai, D, V, Hare, C3, etc. then you have heard of Odin. If someone hasn't heard of all of those languages then it's an objective fact that they don't "keep up with PL development".
See for instance https://dev.to/dimension-ai/13-languages-are-challenging-c-m...
Deletion of this article is an indication of inadequate processes at Wikipedia for determining the notability of certain sorts of subjects.
> Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.
This is not true ... if it were then there would not be disputes about notability. And simply reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability makes it clear that it is not "a well-defined property". And beyond that, one of the points being discussed is that Wikipedia's criteria for notability have not adapted to the current state of affairs. If Wikipedia did have a rigid "well-defined property", that would be a mistake.
As GingerBill is quoted as saying in TFA:
> Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists.
By a sensible rational evaluation, that makes it notable.
As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.
There is also virtually no attention in these comments to the content of TFA, e.g.,
> the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was deleted -- you won. People are still entitled to think that it was a mistake and to say why.
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.
> 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.
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.
What has mostly changed is that there are more editors now, and thus more eyes and also more serious discussion (rigor?) about such things.
Seems like Wikipedia sucks at enforcing its policy from what I am reading?
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.
In seriousness though, the Malbolge article (2003) significantly predates the TV series in question (2012--2019). I wouldn't be surprised that writers got the info from Wikipedia.
>
> 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...
Programming articles exist because no one bothered to delete them. I've actually joked about it a decade ago.
I use to play this game where I gently rub as many established users as possible the wrong way. That way they will collectively oppose everything i do. The game grows increasingly absurd as the true colors shine though. I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
Behind my back they write walls of text how to get rid of me. (I wrote some tools to dig into article and user edit history)
But all I do is contribute citations with quality sources, sure I do it in places they don't want to see developed but the decision to have an article was already made, only the real work remains.
The easiest are the articles listed under the fringe category. They are all in terrible shape, sources are easy to find and it instantly enrages the fringe warriors.
Note: You don't actually have to believe something is real to be able to cite a source.
Jimbo is such a fan of tag team editing it can hardly be considered a mistake.
If the wiki followed its own rules and guidelines you could write a guideline for the notability of articles in the programming category.
If you do that now the guideline guardians will tell you with a straight face that no amount of GitHub stars is enough and that no such guideline is needed.
If you provide example articles they will be deleted to prove the point.
One could probably train an interesting llm on deleted wp contributions. There might be more content there than in main space.
> I do this as an IP editor as I've seen them fabricate excuses to ban users often enough.
You know there's no need to fabricate an excuse to indefinitely block someone for trolling right?
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.
Rust is an obvious competitor to C++, both are similarly featured.
When people talk about "modern C competitors" they're almost always talking about more minimalist languages like Zig, Odin, C3, Jai, Hare, etc...
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!
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?
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."
Is it notable for being written in Rust? Maybe for supporting an agenda?
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
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...
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?
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language
People, when you're working backwards from the party you want to criticize rather than starting from a real point, you have to land on a point that would make any kind of sense.