Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacques_chester 5600 days ago
I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge.

Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?

1 comments

So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless. Most of the languages I propose for deletion have almost no information available about them, and therefore, one can't write a useful Wikipedia article about them. More information isn't necessarily better.

Anything I am not 95% sure about I add a notability tag to or simply leave alone. There are a number of articles that I did in fact find interesting citations for while trying to decide notability. Napier88 is a good example of such a language -- the papers on it received hundreds of citations, yet I had never heard of the language. I've been working on an entire rewrite of Napier88 in my spare time, which has understandably become even more "spare" recently :)

> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

OK, so some of them might not even pass my standard of notability (which would be almost embarrassingly lax).

But it strikes me that you're using notability to solve a user interface issue -- that you find it difficult to navigate the programming language section.

More generally, it strikes me as horribly inefficient to rely on what one might call "outrage-driven notability" to correct for what were, you may now realise, erroneous selections for deletion.

Maybe I'm a dolt for blaming you; you're acting rationally within a broken system.

> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_list_of_programming...

What's useless about that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_object-oriented_program...

I don't see many pet projects here...

> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

Surely a simpler solution to that is to make a list that you feel describes the languages you consider important. Maybe "List of programming languages notable in academia" (which would include things like FeatherweightJava but probably not regular Java). People who want to find languages that meet that criteria can find them all in one place.

Meanwhile, people like me who are interested in new languages, or languages that experiment with syntax but don't push the academic envelope, don't have that knowledge outright taken away from them by you.