Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chalst 5600 days ago
None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up.

Impact is not a measure of whether a source is reliable, peer review is. One can argue that journals with higher impact factors are likely to have more rigorous peer review, but the AfD's have not talked about journal impact factor.

Note that TOPLAS, a source for the Nemerle article, had an impact factor of 1.92 in 2010, the highest PL journal, and among the higher CS journals overall.

Also note that the high-impact CS conferences are peer reviewed. This fact, and the general importance of conference publications in CS, appeared to have escaped the participants in the AfDs I looked at.

The article was deleted for lack of reliable sources: what does the number of citations that this or that article has have to do with that?

Nazi/asshole/whatnot - These people are pathetic. Don't be put off by them.

2 comments

There's a big debate to be had about the utility of journals in 2011, but when a Wikipedia editor writes about TOPLAS that "I'm not sure about this journal [TOPLAS], more research would be necessary, it may have a low impact factor as it does not have a wikipedia page, which indicates that the journal itself is not notable." then you know you're in trouble. I'm only sorry that my articles which referenced Nemerle wern't enough to save its Wikipedia page - I hope it's reinstated. I don't know whether all of the articles deleted were worthy or not, but Nemerle, in my opinion, has justified its place in the world.
I don't think they are pathetic. I think they are at a loss for words.

Besides, the word "nazi" has regrettably come to be used loosely to describe someone who is too strict with respect to an agenda ("grammar nazi" etc), which I would say is quite applicable here. Still a bad choice of a word, in my opinion; at least a veneer of decency should be maintained.