[qjack]

The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on.

Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.

Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.

[conartist6]

I dunno I just find it silly because they're making such a Thing out of it that soon there's just gonna be a Wikipedia page on Odingate as it is rapidly becoming a notable public event of its own. Then that page will have to link to a page on Odin anyway

[zerocrates]

The hypothetical "Odingate" article in a reliable source would probably have to discuss Odin enough to also be a viable source for Odin itself; problem solved.

[add-sub-mul-div]

If the language is too irrelevant to be of interest then why would any bickering about it be notable? There must be thousands of topics people whine about for not making the notability threshold.

[conartist6]

Well Jimmy Wales is a kinda notable dude to be bickering directly about it with other internet-famous public figures.

Second, any serious observer of the programming languages would conclude that Odin is in the top 2-3 contenders for the long-term replacement of C. Even if it never attains the goal of supplanting C, I'd argue its historical importance (within its field) is already on par with Betamax or HD-DVD (adjusted for time inflation).

Finally the field of programmers who are able to work on programming languages they made as their full-time profession is extremely rarified, maybe 10-20 individuals at any given time. It is the ultimate measure of having made it -- what we all dream of. At that point you're practically royalty to programmers, and many will know you by name. That is the level of fame (for there is no other accurate word for it) that gingerbill has attained in this community. This dude is a hall-of-famer. Already. Without a single story written about him in a newspaper!

[krautsauer]

Link will be red?

[wmorgan]

FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.