alt Hacker NewsOdin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
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I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.
This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language.
There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. Have any academic journals (which themselves are notable) published papers _about_ the language, directly examining its merits or reporting its usage, as opposed to mentioning it in passing? Has a similar examination appeared in any mainstream generalist publications, that are also reliable sources? (i.e. they don't just publish any old crap for payola)
If the world doesn't care about your novel language enough to include it in even one reliable, notable source, then Wikipedia doesn't care either.
"Wikipedia is not for stuff you and your friends made up in school one day". Or at work, or in a hackerspace, or on programming language forums, ...
If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.
> In August 2006, a Wikipedia article on the iPhone was deleted after discussion. At that point, little was known about the product outside Apple Inc. and it could not have had a Wikipedia article. Following the product's launch and mass-media coverage in January 2007, the article was recreated and has been improved ever since.
Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.
And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
This article makes Odin sound extremely well-known. I've never heard of it before, and I feel like I keep up with programming topics pretty diligently. Admittedly I don't work at the systems programming layer, but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.
Curious if others feel similarly, or maybe I just happened to miss it?
I do feel they've got a good point about notable sources in 2026. Wikipedia seems to have reliable source rules straight out of the 80s or 90s. In the internet era, the most reliable sources aren't usually old school journalists or media outlets, they're enthusiasts and specialists publications dedicated to the topic.
For example, they still seem reluctant to allow Serebii.net as a source for Pokemon info, despite the site being A: credited by all the news outlets Wikipedia does consider reliable and B: being reliable and long-term enough that the Pokemon Company themselves uses it as a source, and has the founder do AMAs/interviews at official events.
And it's a big problem with any topic (games and media, programming languages and frameworks, internet happenings in general) where internet blogs and YouTube channels are the main authority.
The most reliable source about a topic nowadays might not use their real name when writing. They might not have a journalism degree, or work for a mainstream media outlet. They might not have an academic background.
But Wikipedia struggles to deal with that. Their rules are too outdated to deal with the changing information landscape.
Do I feel like Odin in particular is being hit hard by this? Maybe, maybe not. I've not personally come across Odin when looking for programming languages or frameworks to learn. I haven't seen it discussed much on social media, on YouTube, or on Hacker News.
However, the issue still stands. If the 'wrong' sources are the ones covering it, then their notability and popularity is treated as irrelevant, and the language as not worth covering.
Wikipedia needs to figure out a new system for this. Maybe some sort of trust system where a source that's treated as reliable by enough existing 'reliable' sources is taken seriously in its own right. If a blog is treated as a reliable source by the New York Times on multiple occasions, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say it's basically equivalent to the author writing for the newspaper.
> Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments
>
> Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.
important clarification about a popular misconception: "Articles for deletion" discussions on English Wikipedia are not decided by vote.
For more details, see
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_deletion#Ov...
>There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
>You can infer from their descriptions and prescriptions about things—that's slow, takes times, but it will give you the most accurate image to the extent of the public information. See who they follow on Twitter.
This feels like an appeal to tribalism against Bill.
My politics are left-leaning and I sponsor Bill/Odin. I even cancelled several subscriptions to donate more monthly. I dislike the politicizing in this article as a means of deciding whether Bill's statements on Wikipedia are valid. Let his stated rhetoric be as it is written, and judge that. Bill may seem blunt, especially by his word online, but I have seen too much truly benevolent behavior from the guy in the Odin Discord server over the years not to believe he's a decent man. He's very patient with newcomers, has been inclusive to a diverse group of people in the server, and puts in a ton of work to help people focus on their needs/problems in their pursuit to becoming better programmers. The guy really cares, and has managed to attract a host of very reliable people who are uber helpful and knowledgeable. (Shoutout @Barinzaya)
If you haven't tried Odin, it's worth a close look. I believe it has an insane ratio of shipped, production software to popularity for a reason. The language works. There are a lot of ideas in it which point you toward great productivity. It feels like a "common C." C is hard to collaborate with for rich GUI applications. C invites mess in the absence of very strong principles and habits, but having formed those makes for notoriously opinionated programmers. I see Odin as a language which allows "people who like C" to work together. I happen to like it more than the more popular stuff. A lot more. I'd rather use Rust if lives were at stake, but Zig is too much friction for me to still end up with an unsafe program. Odin feels just right.
Whether Odin belongs on Wikipedia or not; it's inarguably popular for a programming language. You have to understand there are tens of thousands of languages, and hundreds created each year... maybe thousands more. You'd probably be irked by Wikipedia as well if you were in his position. Maybe even provoked to say some things which are highly critical of it. Personally, I think Wikipedia is a decent historical encyclopedia, but it's not at all good at "pop culture" and that's what we're talking about.
> If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud
Its hard to believe someone actually said this with a straight face.
I tend to lean more inclusionist, but there is no world where odin is one of the most popular c competitor languages.
If I've got this right: programming these days -- especially niche areas -- meshes poorly with Wikipedia's guidelines on reliable sources and notability, which were designed mostly with traditional media in mind.
e.g. a company saying they use a language is not considered a good source because it's a primary source? Not sure if I'm getting that part right.
The most interesting part to me: Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them, while languages used by thousands of people today get deleted because they fail Wikipedia's specific definition of notability.
And they're reluctant to change that because they expect it would lead to a flood of wannabes making articles about their hobby language.
The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter?
And then I read this:
> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view
> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:
> 2. See who they follow on Twitter
What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?
When Wikipedia first came out, there was a big debate about articles on people: should it be inclusive (anybody with minor accomplishments gets in) or should there be some threshold to be met? Ultimately, it was decided that if the perception was that the person involved was to become notable principally by having a WP page, then they did not qualify. WP did not want to be used as a means of getting attention/traction/credibility. I like that criterion and I think it’s reasonable to feel that Odin does not meet it…yet.
I'm so happy I have something I can link to that clearly and patiently engages with all the people who concern troll about Wikipedia. It genuinely bothers me how the temperature of the conversation about wikipedia (even here on HN) has changed so much because of people who don't know anything, don't care to verify anything, but have an axe to grind.
> Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
Because we should always take everything people say about themselves at face value. If you say you're notable, then you're notable. Obviously.
For reference, here's the article's content at the time of deletion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr...
I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
zig: 71,565
rust: 304,405
golang: 1,246,300
malbogle: 9
I don't get the drama here.
Either Odin is mentioned in at least a handful of what Wikipedia considers secondary sources, or it isn't. Just skimming Rust's entry I immediately see stuff like MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch.
There must be (tens of?) thousands of potential secondary sources that could count toward Odin's notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. Is Odin mentioned in any of those?
The sad (or wonderful) fact is that anyone can write a new programming language now; I could for example use Claude create a wrapper on top of an existing languge (for example, a Python-like syntax wrapper for Scheme) in a few hours and start marketing it as a new language. So how can Wikipedia tell toy languages from real ones with actual useful adoption?
It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
I'm glad someone's calling this out for what it is. These twitter influences are professional horseshit mongers that pretend to be acting in good faith, but flip what they're saying 180 degrees to fit whatever will drive maximum engagement in the moment. Its something that tends to slide by unless you stop and actually try to reconcile all the disparate things that someone has said, at which point you realise literally none of it makes any sense
Also, it seems like almost nobody here has actually read the entire article: the whole point of this is dissecting whether or not the author of odin truly believes what they are saying, which it seems like they don't
Get together and fork (or make your own) Wikipedia.
Seriously. Wikipedia seems very good at providing detailed, accurate, concise facts of well-known, non-controversial topics. It’s by far the best in this area. Unfortunately (perhaps as a sacrifice for this competence) it sets a high and inconsistent bar for “well-known” and has a specific bias in controversial topics*.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines and ChatGPT are basically encyclopedias covering everything, and can give you multiple perspectives, but sometimes at the cost of accuracy and quality. Typing “Odin language” into any search engine that isn’t complete trash yields as the first result Odin’s website, which is a better resource to learn about Odin than any Wikipedia article.
If you want a middle ground, make one. It’s probably hard, evidenced by Grokopedia not being cited or used much to my knowledge (and having embarrassing AI hallucinations at least on launch). But Wikipedia seems to have locked into its current form, for better or worse (IMO better as long as it retains quality articles for well-known, non-controversial topics).
* To be clear, any article on a controversial topic that doesn’t provide multiple perspectives is biased, and those that do are also biased but now in multiple directions. Still, I get the impression that in Wikipedia there’s only one bias direction in all articles
Firstly, I think the visual design of this article (at least on a desktop display) was beautiful, and a delight to read.
Secondly, this piece does a great job at just demonstrating why I've always found the "Casey Muratori" side of programming discourse so unpleasant to wade through, and just how miserable these people are.
Interesting article (I tend to agree with you re SNG in the programming field). But unfortunately I couldn't easily absorb the substance as your site needs some work on mobile:
- text completely overflowing the background
- body text is arguably too small
- the masonry grid layout of posts does not work visually
- footnotes appearing out of order
Funny how GearsDatapacks (https://github.com/gearsdatapacks) votes to delete the Odin page because it's "non-notable" yet is a core member of the non-notable Gleam language which shockingly has a Wikipedia page
Apparently it's important to these odinists to be featured in a particular encyclopedia, so why haven't they spent some time over the last decade or so wooing some press and getting some doctoral students to use their language?
That would have solved this issue for them.
What a fantastic article. I could not care less about the actual topic, but in these times of literacy scarcity, it is refreshing to see someone actually being able to read through sub-text and present their views in a well-reasoned manner.
Unsurprisingly, this seems to make quite some people angry.
The awkward part is that modern software communities often do not produce the kind of durable secondary sources Wikipedia wants.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can participate. Anyone can advocate for change, such as changing the rules around notability.
But if you want to have enough influence to effectively advocate for changing a rule as impactful as the site-wide notability guidelines, then you'd likely want to spend quite a while volunteering, integrating yourself into the community, and learning a lot about how and why the site rules are what they are.
I think that's a good thing. It means the people who have the influence to make huge decisions like that are deeply familiar with the website and the community, and therefore deeply familiar with the consequences of those decisions.
So I just find it frustrating when people who don't participate in the community whatsoever write inflammatory diatribes on why they think the editing guidelines should be changed because their favorite programming language got marked for deletion.
And it's even more frustrating how, when their handful of drive-by tweets fail to immediately enact sweeping change, they and their followers then start a huge flame war, accusing Wikipedia mods of being "cultural marxists" and "shills for the mainstream media" and etc.
Anyways, my point is -- if you want to change things, try participating in the community rather than shouting slurs at it from the outside.
I despise the "what's true is true" attitude exhibited by Casey and Bill in these tweets. I find it to be an instant flag of unreliability. The smartest human alive is still a human. We have a stake in every conversation, we bring our baggage and our allegiances.
So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.
It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.
Nim was also constantly threatened to be deleted. Then still named nimrod. This is when amateurs decide on professionals. I stopped contributing long time ago, though I was in the first 10
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.
This isn’t the first Wikipedia controversy. And I’m happy to learn that Jimmy Wales is actually the bad guy; this isn’t a case of Wikipedia getting out of his control.
That makes it especially unfortunate that Grokipedia, which seemed like the strongest alternative to Wikipedia, is no longer being updated.
I know programming is what's most important to many in this community, but as an outsider I need to ask: literally WTF is Odin? I mean I know about Java and C++, etc. But Odin? That's what Wikipedia policies are for. It cannot include anything and everything about every single profession, subculture, or interest group.
An anime community would complain that a very influential (but largely unknown and mostly lost) OVA from 1987 should have its own article. A Peruvian community could argue that one of its most celebrated local activists should have his own article. Of course they would, but how could Wikipedia know they are really what they claim if there isn't a standard of what a credible/respectable source is?
That being said, Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur, so anything that brings them down is fine by me. Grokpedia has the right idea... I actually think that's the future. Too bad it's controlled by a grifting manchild.
Took a looooong time to get to their point (that ragebaiters don't actually care about neolangs _or_ wikimedia policy).
I don’t get why they would ever delete knowledge… that’s like burning books…
I'm sorry, but I agree with the wiki editors in this case. Odin is obscure. The author of this blog post seems to think it's well known, but I don't think that's substantiated.
This is silly. If you're language isn't getting enough coverage to get onto Wikipedia, stop complaining and get it some coverage. Ship features. Evangelise it. Get people using it.
Their claim of 'one of the most popular "C competitor" languages' is also questionable when we have actual competitors like Rust and Zig (from the top of my head).
I like this article. It puts to words something that has been in my mind for a while.
I have read the entire blog entry while waiting for all of MaraDNS’s automated tests to pass so I could release MaraDNS 3.5.0038.
My impression is that I generally agree that people on social media upvote and make go viral what we called “flamebait” in the 1990s. I also agree that a lot of supporters posted inaccurate hot takes, and that was too much heat and not enough light in this discussion.
That said, I think the blog would be better if it didn’t mention Matt Walsh at all. The final footnote calls Walsh a “White Supremacist”—is that something Matt Walsh calls himself, or is that a pejorative people who disagree with him call him? And then it links to YouTube videos to make the case Walsh advocates right-wing positions that “katamari” doesn’t agree with.
I think katamari makes a strong case that Odin’s supporters post hot takes and make bad faith arguments, and I think that argument would be a lot stronger if katamari didn’t reveal their own strongly left-leaning worldview at the end. Posting culture war content like this tends to generate more heat than light, and compromises the message the blog makes that light is better than heat.
Article has a few decent remarks, but ultimately it fails to deliver anthropologic, grounded, humane interpretation without narrow worldview and ideological biases of it's author.
Textbook example of using fame as leverage against a rule, while claiming indifference to the rule itself
I think the better conclusion here is that most programming languages don't deserve Wikipedia articles. You wouldn't want one for every brand of screwdriver or kitchen appliance. Programming languages are likewise, just tools. An article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative to anyone who reads it, as they'd be better served by visiting the website directly. A bad article should be deleted.
This article seems quite drawn out for what is essentially an ad hominem attack on the personal views of the creator of the language.
It is disappointing to see that the v programming language has a Wikipedia article given it's history of being essentially fraudulent.
Underlying this whole drama, and indeed as much of the article as I was able to stomach, is that there is a large degree of politicking, personal taste, and arbitrariness in the enforcement of Wikipedia’s policies, while pretending that there isn’t. At least on Reddit the mods don’t pretend they’re not biased
> My hypothesis is quite simple: I don't think GingerBill ever cared about Wikipedia's standards for programming. He follows several right-wing figures on Twitter, who have long since made up their mind that Wikipedia has been ideologically captured by activists and "the woke".
Oh, well, if a critic fails your ideological purity test, I guess that must mean there can't be any valid criticisms.
I think Ginger Bill is kind of obnoxious but the first block quote from him is an utter truth nuke.
Interesting article until you reach the gooey, messy bottom where the author takes a sudden personal turn and decides to pick apart the "spineless" creator of the programming language - who is the article's actual subject - by wielding their own ideologically and morally superior perspectives as truths. Smug, ironic, personal and somewhat unpleasant.
I had never heard about the language until today. In my observation, Rust is C's main competitor.
The fact that any factual text article needs to be deleted from an encyclopaedia fills me with rage.
Given the people now running the English Wikipedia, this is hardly surprising. Most of these folks have no real interest in article creation, only drama and fiddling with things like categories.
I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases tenfold. What can an open contribution encyclopedia do in this low trust environment other than enforcing strict, rigid rules?
People seem to focus in the particular case but miss the general case. An example tweet from the article by Casey Muratori: I tell Jimmy Wales that JangaFX was written in Odin. He asks for a source. A JangaFX founder replies to him and confirms that it was. Jimmy ignores his (and my) response, while replying to later posts in the thread:
Maybe the JangaFX founder is a very trustworthy fellow, sure, but does this reasoning work for EVERY founder and CEO of a company? Can it become a general policy? Another tweet talks about github stars...