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by skotobaza 28 days ago
Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?
1 comments

what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias rely on secondary and not primary sources because they must be authoritative. The CEO of Kelloggs doesn't get to write the wikipedia article for kelloggs even if millions of people eat his cornflakes.

If a programming language is widely used in production then sourcing an article with secondary sources ought to be trivial. But the appropriate content for primary information and original research for a language.. is the language's website.

But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still... The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).
> But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it?

Yes, but that implies filtering on all things that are false. And in this day and age, filtering truth is a very hard thing to do, so instead they set the bar a little higher at “a reputable source checked that it is indeed true”. As a result, there's plenty of things that are both true and well known to plenty of people that aren't on Wikipedia, but that's fine, and encyclopedia doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful.

But on the flip side, if they didn't, it would soon be filled by tons of made up things fabricated for marketing reasons.

Note the bad faith of your correspondent:

> As a reader thank god not everything that has grabbed the attention of social media gets an article.

...

> what I want doesn't matter for an encyclopedia.

please stop crying about bad faith every time someone disagrees with you. If you think everyone talks with you in bad faith maybe you didn't articulate your points very well.

What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work. The Encyclopedia Britannica which comes in at a frugal 120k entries doesn't add new ones because you yell at the manager long enough, they choose what to add.

Encyclopedias are not consumer or user driven but curator driven. It's not want or popularity that determines inclusion, it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance. It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes. I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.

The goalpost moving is by definition bad faith.

> What I said isn't bad faith, that's literally not how encyclopedias work.

Changing the subject is yet more bad faith ... what I called bad faith wasn't anything about how encyclopedias work, it was about an evasive rhetorical move.

> it's judgement by trusted authors and maintainers that something meets the quality standards and relevance

That's quite an admission and contradicts other claims on this page that WP's notability guidelines are objective. And neither quality standards nor relevance are the same as notability -- it's almost as if this person has no idea what he's talking about and is simply doing apologetics for a position that he's planted his flag on.

> It's not reddit, there's no upvotes or downvotes.

Silly bad faith strawman. The complaints from people like Ginger Bill (which I don't necessarily endorse or agree with) are about gatekeeping, and the previous comment gave that away.

> I know that's difficult to understand in an age where everyone thinks they're right because they yell loud enough.

Bad faith smug hypocritical virtue signaling.