In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc.
When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!
And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
If there is a band out there with an active online community numbering in the hundreds (which means their offline following is a few orders of magnitude greater), I don't see why they shouldn't have a wikipedia page.
If there are good sources to write an article from, sure. But if there aren't any sources besides the band's website, their MySpace, and a few fans' blog posts, what goes in the article? The usual result is that fans just write a bunch of stuff about the band they like, which doesn't make for the best article. I don't personally care that much, but I don't think the world is greatly harmed by not having those articles, either; for that kind of stuff, there are always fansites and fan wikis, so they don't have to go on Wikipedia.
>Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia, isn't it?
No, it's not. Wikipedia is a knowledge repository not _the_ knowledge repository. It's not there to hold every little bit of trivia, if you want to find "what is Awesome Band" then use a search engine. Wikipedia is there to house notable instances and information that has wider application than mere trivia.
Unless Awesome Band started a new genre, influenced well known bands, is a well known band (eg number 1 tracks, headlining particularly large events, etc.) or is known for something else then it's probably enough to mention them as a footnote as a band that played at Event X or possibly as a notable example of a genre or whatever.
You have a basic, fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia is then.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. - Jimmy Wales
That's clearly not what is being done if you either assess the linked content guidelines or look at Wikipedia itself.
One can either contest that this is simply a soundbite for the press or look at the definition of "knowledge" being used if one cares to square the apparent contradictions.
Why would Wikipedia even attempt to record all information about everything, who wants to know what I had for breakfast or what image is on my son's pyjamas; I contend that everyone that really needs that information already has it.
Why would Wikipedia even attempt to record all information about everything, who wants to know what I had for breakfast or what image is on my son's pyjamas; I contend that everyone that really needs that information already has it.
Who knows? I needed information on Alice ML today, but alas that was not to be. You are not the personal arbitrator of what I need to know any more than Chris Monsanto is of what languages are notable!
For at least the first half of it's life, wikipedia grew at an astonishing rate precisely because it wasn't being moderated by pedantic self-appointed editors. The rise of the editor class in wikipedia may have irreperably broken it as a compendium of knowledge. Imagine, people who know nothing about a subject telling you weather that subject is important to you!
Ridiculous? That's the current state of affairs. One could argue there is even a growing movement of people, like minded with yourself, that it should simply be reduced until it contains no more information than any other run-of-the-mill encyclopedia.
I have news for you, we have plenty of free, scope-limited, hand curated encyclopedias.
Here's what I came up with in 30 seconds. Go entertain yourself with these if you think having articles on obscure, but important topics is simply too much for you to handle.
The point of Wikipedia is to go far beyond these approaches by crowdsourcing the content. So that people can add what they personally know about obscure subjects. If I happen to be an expert in Korean clam harvesting operations, should I be able to write an article on that? Who the hell cares if you don't personally take an interest in it.
You're right if your response is "well we don't want to just copy what's on the web!" An encyclopedia is supposed to provided a summary of a subject, a launching off point, a confirmation of a subject's existence. It should provide exhaustive breadth. In wikipedia's case, it was even able to provide a bit of depth through external citations, and through hyperlinking to other parts of itself. But the number of subjects should be virtually unlimited. Wikipedia should provide the long-tail. As a pedagogic device, limiting what I'm allowed to look up limits what I can learn about.
To your example, it might be of fantastic importance to me to know what are popular breakfast foods in your country or what kinds of logos kids are wearing these days. A page about Breakfast practices or marketing to children then would be fantastically important to me, but maybe not to you.
For at least the first half of it's life, wikipedia grew at an astonishing rate precisely because it wasn't being moderated by pedantic self-appointed editors.
This is simply factually not true. If anything, Wikipedia is considerably looser on inclusion standards now than it was a few years ago. Most of the people with more traditional views of inclusion standards left around the time that Larry Sanger forked to form Citizendium, plus a few waves after that. It's also gotten much more permissive than it used to be when it comes to things like covering famous internet memes (which used to be deleted on sight).
>Who knows? I needed information on Alice ML today, but alas that was not to be.
Are you seriously telling me you sat down with an internet browser and couldn't find any information about that specific programming language? It's far less notable than I assumed in which case (it took <30s to find http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2007/1262/ which suggests to me you're lying).
>Imagine, people who know nothing about a subject telling you weather that subject is important to you!
That's not what is happening - Wikipedia uses a democratic process to determine if something is considered notable by the community. We/They say nothing about whether something is important to you. If something is considered not to be sufficiently notable for Wikipedia that doesn't mean you can't write about it, blog about it, even create your own wiki about it.
>If I happen to be an expert in Korean clam harvesting operations, should I be able to write an article on that? Who the hell cares if you don't personally take an interest in it.
Of course, I'd be interested in that, I'm also interested in obscure programming languages too.
However, if Korean clam harvesting is no different to Japanese clam harvesting, which is more-or-less the same as Chinese clam harvesting, then they should be noted on a general article about clam harvesting you don't need a separate article for each country (given the imaginary constraints I've set) nor do you need a different article on each company that does clam harvesting, each location, each person working in each location, ...
>To your example, it might be of fantastic importance to me to know what are popular breakfast foods in your country or what kinds of logos kids are wearing these days. A page about Breakfast practices or marketing to children then would be fantastically important to me, but maybe not to you.
And there you have it, AFAICT you just argued for my point-of-view.
The point is that it is largely irrelevant what I had for breakfast, what the design on my son's pyjamas are but a general page about breakfast is apposite, a general page about use of cartoons in merchandising is apposite.
Similarly it's not important to list every programming language and variant ever. If it's important to you then you'll find the information in a relevant place that gives fine esoteric information about this specific field.
Are you seriously telling me you sat down with an internet browser and couldn't find any information about that specific programming language? It's far less notable than I assumed in which case (it took <30s to find http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2007/1262/ which suggests to me you're lying).
good, then let's just get rid of Wikipedia altogether. Since I can just get whatever information I need by googling there's really not a point to the site anyways. Is that your argument? At this point I'm 50% thinking that you're just trolling.
That's not what is happening - Wikipedia uses a democratic process to determine if something is considered notable by the community. We/They say nothing about whether something is important to you. If something is considered not to be sufficiently notable for Wikipedia that doesn't mean you can't write about it, blog about it, even create your own wiki about it.
That is exactly what happened in this case. One person flagged, one person deleted. The community voted consistently against the deletion. Check the AfD discussions yourself if you don't believe me. There was not a single vote agreeing the the AfD flag. You can carry on all you want about how WP has various procedures and policies and what not, but that is not what happens de facto with shocking regularity.
However, if Korean clam harvesting is no different to Japanese clam harvesting, which is more-or-less the same as Chinese clam harvesting, then they should be noted on a general article about clam harvesting you don't need a separate article for each country (given the imaginary constraints I've set) nor do you need a different article on each company that does clam harvesting, each location, each person working in each location, ...
But I should be able to create a page if any of those things are interesting or notable enough, if there's enough information on it. Korean clam harvesting may be special and unique in the world. It may have hundreds of thousands of adherents, it may have it's own culture, equipment, techniques etc. It may appear prominently in Korean culture, movies, newspapers or other media. In fact, there could be an entire musical genre of clam harvester music.
But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging", and none of that information ends up compiled and summarized in an article like it deserves to be because some overzealous ignoramus decided to flag it as an AfD and the community who could discuss its importance generally doesn't speak English and even if they did and could vote to keep the article, would probably just get ignored by the editors anyways -- just like in this case.
Similarly it's not important to list every programming language and variant ever. If it's important to you then you'll find the information in a relevant place that gives fine esoteric information about this specific field.
I personally think that listing top-40 pop stars is esoteric information about a specific field I could care less about. But since lots of people seem to like it, we end up with countless pages to that dreck. These languages actually are important to computer science in the same way Fra Angelico is important to Renaissance art. Is Fra Angelico considered a notable master of painting in the same way well known artists are. No. But it's important to have his information summarized and presented, with notes regarding his influence and hist works.
Similarly, Alice ML is the Fra Angelico of the functional programming world. To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability and then a similarly ignorant editor agrees and BAM! it's gone for all time.
>Since I can just get whatever information I need by googling there's really not a point to the site anyways. Is that your argument?
Absolutely not, and you clearly know it. That's like me saying your argument is that we should get rid of the rest of the internet because one can post lolcats to Wikipedia as notable examples of, er, lolcats.
>But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging"
No I don't. But you're getting sidetracked by the fabricated analogy and forgetting that the removed articles don't have the [fictional] notability of the subject of your story and would have been very unlikely to have been removed if they had and would have certainly been reinstated.
>To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability
Let's try this as a first approximation on notability. The internet is probably the main repository of CS info - 120 Google Scholar articles mention "'Alice ML'" (appear to be some false positives). Arguably art history is better represented in works that are yet to be fully integrated online - 17000 Google Scholar articles mention "Fra Angelico".
How about books as a further approximation. 33 book results for "'Alice ML' programming" (18 are obvious false positives too). "'fra angelico' ~painting" (I don't think it's ambiguous without the addition of "~painting" but for equivalence ...) gives 133000 book results.
Popularity and plurality don't dictate notability of course. Notability in this case is a function of the appearance of notability to the authors and editors too, hence pop-stars, etc..
The oppositions are clearly poor. Most of them are based on the false assumption that Alice (software) is what is at question. A couple mention notability based on being in a book and the proposer convincingly counters these IMO. Vorov2 is the only dissenting voice that appears to know what they are talking about and gives a reasonable argument. Again, it seems clear that the proposer was most knowledgable about the subject, knew the relevant reference works (so had researched) and knew the WP policy well. SarekOfVulcan makes the deletion.
So in summary, one flagged, another gave good opposition, yet another deleted.
In many ways the fact that there was no other decent opposition to this deletion leads me to believe that it was the correct course of action. Note that Alice ML is still present in Wikipedia in a priori relevant places (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksH...).
I'm now 100% convinced that you are just trolling. No reasonable person could come to the conclusion that you just came to without ignoring nearly all of the evidence because it doesn't fit some arbitrary criteria that you've decided to use to make sure your contrarian view is right -- in precisely the way Monsanto did in ignoring the evidence thrown up in opposition to him.
The opposition is strong, they cite references to the language (a few cite references to the software, true), but all are summarily ignored because, just like you, Monsanto decided they don't fit into whatever arbitrary set of requirements you woke up and decided to use today.
And, as of today, it turns out you were wrong anyways since the page has been reinstated.
>And, as of today, it turns out you were wrong anyways since the page has been reinstated.
If you read what I wrote you'll note that I argued that if a sufficient argument for notability was pressed that this would be a reason for inclusion.
So, by your account that I am wrong I'd have to assume that the article was reinstated without presentation of evidence of notability or logical argument for such?
I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
Yeah, there's definitely a difference in scale and possible harm done. Unlike some minor cruft in other parts of science, they don't seem to attract much kookery either, so "fringe PLs" versus "fringe physics" is at worst clutter, not full of actively misleading nonsense.
I'd have to try to look at archives to be sure, but I think fringe-physics is actually one of the reasons some of the science-related policies are written as they are. The answer to, "how do we keep this crap off Wikipedia?" was to have some sort of policy about the existence of peer-reviewed sources. (The peer-reviewed part is necessary, because a lot of fringe physics has papers up on arXiv.)
