[svat]

I've gone ahead and restored the article, but not knowing much about Rich Hickey I hope someone here can edit the article to actually contain some (sourced, i.e. with citations) content, as it's pretty bare right now (looks/looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Hickey&oldid...).

The article was created in 2008 and its deletion was discussed and happened in July 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Someone recreated it (without discussion) in August 2013, and it was reverted to its "redirect" state in January 2014. I suspect that notability has changed now (e.g. Clojure itself is more popular, there are other things, and if nothing else his notability as a speaker is probably worth mentioning) and my guess is that if the article were to be discussed again, it might survive. But this is assuming there is actually content for the article that someone can add to it! Otherwise what's the point of an article about a person that doesn't say anything?

If you look at the other articles mentioned in this thread so far (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Odersky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Syme, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike) all of them contain some information about their article's subjects, beyond simply mentioning the language they were involved in.

In my experience, adding something well-sourced to Wikipedia is usually a more lasting contribution (probably more people will read it, over time) than comments on HN -- the only downside is that it may get reverted quickly on flimsy grounds and you need some experience to make good edits that will stick.

Edit: Or just mention here what can be added to the article and what the source of each bit of information is, and I'll try to add them!

[puredanger]

This is great, thanks for doing that!

It would be great to add this history of Clojure paper. There is also a C++ paper he wrote (http://www.tutok.sk/fastgl/callback.html).

Other things Rich has made:

  - ClojureScript (https://clojurescript.org/)
  - Datomic database (https://www.datomic.com/)
  - edn data format (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) - extensible data notation (subset of Clojure's syntax)
  - Transit (https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format) - format for conveying values between languages
  - Fressian (https://github.com/Datomic/fressian) - extensible binary data notation, used by Datomic
  - REBL (http://rebl.cognitect.com/download.html) - graphical tool for browsing Clojure data
  - Codeq (https://github.com/Datomic/codeq) - Clojure+Datomic application to do code-aware queries on git repos

List of talk transcripts: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/tree/master/Hi...

Playlist of many talks on YT: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZdCLR02grLrEwKaZv-5Q...

pre-Clojure projects:

  - http://jfli.sourceforge.net/
  - http://foil.sourceforge.net/

[svat]

Thanks! I've added most of that (there are no Wikipedia articles for Transit/Fressian/REBL/Codeq, so not sure how to mention those without external links which look weird inline).

Still, an editor who doesn't like the current state could simply revert it, as there are no sources for any of this. Note that the criterion is “verifiability, not truth” — Wikipedia is supposed to be a summary of what has been said about a topic/person in books, newspapers, etc., so even though all of these are obviously true, it would be best to find a source that mentions these things and cite that!

[Similarly, in general, if you are the subject of a Wikipedia article and you find that it has some incorrect information about you, then rather than editing the article directly it is best to get something published or write something yourself—even a blog post—and cite that. :-)]

[imdhmd]

That's great. Thank you for going ahead with that. I'll try to add some more relevant details with citations over the weekend or atleast put it here. Do you think if we start a new thread, it will gain more traction? Just a thought.