Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming

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.

>

> 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...

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.

Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?

- 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.

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

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.

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.

Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.

I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.

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.