[cedilla]

I'll never understand the amount of vitriol Wikipedia volunteers must receive. Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

I find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.

[leejo]

> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:

* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?

* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?

* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.

[pwdisswordfishy]

> Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

Nobody is forcing you to use Google. If you can provide an acceptable source without the help of Google, go ahead. But the burden of proof is on the one who claims sources exist.

> An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

Such is life when anyone can nominate anything at any moment... and when many articles that should have never been submitted in the first place slip through cracks of haphazard volunteer quality control. (Stack Overflow also suffers from the latter.)

The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

> Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.

It was wrong to submit the article without sourcing in the first place. Circular sourcing is not allowed.

[leejo]

> The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

The system works if the sources remain available, and in an environment predisposed to link rot that can be a problem. Imagine the hypothetical situation of archive.org disappearing overnight? Should we then delete all pages with it as their sole source if they're not updated within a week?

And the system works if intentions are pure - it seems here the user that suggested the deletion of several Perl related pages is a fan of film festivals[1] and clearly wasn't happy that the "White Camel Award" is a Perl award, since the late 90s, and not a film festival award (since the early 00s). At least according to Google. So they went on a bit of a rampage against Perl articles on Wikipedia.

You could argue "editor doing their job", but I would argue "conflict of interest".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahara_Internatio... # amongst many in their edit history

[slowmovintarget]

These are all bad-faith takes. What are you doing?

24 years ago, some people wrote on Wikipedia instead of elsewhere. So the wiki page itself became a primary source.

"The page shouldn't have been submitted..." This was a Wiki! If you're unfamiliar with the origin of the term, it was a site mechanism designed to lean in to quick capture and interweaving of documents. Volunteers wrote; the organization of the text arose through thousands of hands shaping it. Most of them were software developers at the time. At a minimum, the software-oriented pages should get special treatment for that alone.

You're acting as though this is producing the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, held to a pale imitation of its standards circa the 1980s. The thing is, Britannica employed people to go do research for its articles.

Wikipedia is not Britannica, and this retroactive "shame on them" is unbelievable nonsense.

[Telaneo]

Verifiability is a core policy on Wikipedia, and with time, citing your sources has become more and more important. Wikipedia isn't was it once was in 2001. Articles can't survive on being verified by their own primary sources, for the same reason we don't want Wikipedia to become a dumping ground for advertisers who then cite their own site in an attempt to gain legitimacy. Secondary sources provide a solid ground truth that the subject in question has gained recognition and thus notability. If those secondary sources don't exist, we can't assume notability based on nothing.

Wikipedia isn't Britannica, because by this point it's probably a lot better than Britannica. They were comparable already in 2005,[1] and I have little reason to believe that Wikipedia is doing much worse on that front nowadays, even though they have vastly more content than Britannica.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...

[smonff]

Some of the deleted pages never had the « sources missing » tag set for a significative time. It has been straight to deletion point.

Some pages that survived the deletion (e.g. TPRF) had the « missing sources » tag set since 15 years… What, I have to admit, can justify some action. But it was not the case for the PerlMonks and Perl Mongers pages: those just got deleted on an extremely short notice, making it impossible for the community to attempt any improvement.

[Telaneo]

7 days is policy for a deletion proposal,[1] which I can agree is not really enough time, although it's usually extended if talks are still ongoing.

There aren't really any rules about putting up notices and such before proposing deletion, and if you can't find anything other than primary sources, it doesn't seem unreasonable to propose deletion than propose a fix which can't be implemented. Thankfully, someone did find reliable sources for some of the articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Prop...

[6510]

> If you can provide an acceptable source....

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/the-perl-foundation-...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/perl_dev_quits/

20 seconds.

If I ran Wikipedia I would ban everyone involved in this spectacle.

[dpark]

> And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

This is such an absurd take. “It this one example the system worked so clearly it’s fine.”

[dpark]

People get extremely frustrated and upset about arbitrary rules, especially when they are imposed inconsistently.

From the talk page it seems like exactly three people were involved in deciding if this was worth deleting and they indicated they could not find evidence of notability. Meanwhile I found a Register article about PerlMonks in minutes and there are pointers here to Google Scholar references as well.

When the bar for deletion is “a couple of people who didn’t try very hard didn’t find notability” is it any wonder that there’s pushback? This feels entirely arbitrary.

[pella]

Consider the other perspective: how should Perl programmers feel when Google's index becomes the main criterion for what is considered important or not? This creates a circular dependency that can erase genuine technical contributions from the historical record.

[smonff]

Google index is tailored for each individual. Persons with interest in breeding cats won’t be served Perl results.

If Google index becomes a criterion of notability, we are in a deep deep shit.

[ptrl600]

Because it puts the history of the article behind a lock

I wonder if there are any privileged Wikipedia accounts who have defected and are doing a sci-hub thing.

[hulitu]

> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act

"Those who control the past, control the future"