skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's been some progress on fixing them over the past few years, mostly in terms of making them more specific to different areas. For example, there's now things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academics... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music).

Factor is an interesting case. I tried to improve that article at one point by adding references, but I was unable to find any. As far as I can tell, it's almost never actually mentioned in the programming language community: not mentioned in a single book, even books about Forth-like languages, has no articles about it (in workshops, conferences, or anything), and its website has been mentioned in passing in four papers according to Google Scholar (the papers provide no real info on it besides mentioning in passing that it exists). It appears to have some level of notability among PLs aficionados, but if you were trying to discern that by reading the PLs literature, you wouldn't know it.

Clean is quite easy to find references for, though, so not sure how someone could've argued about that one in good faith.

It is something of a problem for things that are "known" in an area but don't have many references, because I do think Wikipedia's insistence on third-party sources is a good idea: an article based entirely on a few sources written by the subject and associates of the subject isn't great, like an article about a band that only cites the band's website, MySpace, and a few mentions on people's blogs. But how do you distinguish that case from the well-known-but-has-few-good-references case, and then how do you write an article about the latter? Here's a music example that might be analogous to some of these programming languages, a record label that's well-known in the postindustrial sphere, but has no good sources as far as I can find: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europa_Cafe. How should one improve the article, and what should the information in it be referenced to?

The long-term solutions here are to improve the literature: someone needs to write a more recent book or survey article on emerging programming languages, and someone else needs to write a book on 1980s/90s independent postindustrial record labels. Then Wikipedia can just cite those books. Until then, since Wikipedia works best when it's a summary of the existing literature, it runs into trouble when the existing literature itself is deficient.
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did nothing of importance

I think this one is very good advice. Allow yourself to do nothing you consider important and don't feel guilty about 'wasting time' or any of that.
Has this page been changed since it was posted? Perhaps I'm missing it, but I don't see anything that indicates that he's giving up.
I'm trying to figure out what that quote has to do with anything brought up in this thread.
Flash runs poorly on everything, in addition it's sucks battery power like crazy and the language itself is bad.

Compare it to the jvm which has been optimized for a decade and a half.

But they shouldn't fix it, because it is unfixable. The underlying architecture of the flash language means that performance on an arm processor will always be poor.

In summary flash needs to die in a pit of fire and molten brimstone.
IANAL, but I know there are existing cases. I confirmed it through a friend who's been doing HR here for years. So: either lawyers or HR people or both, I suppose.
What's wrong with the underlying architecture of Flash that makes it poor on Arm?
Not that I should talk, since I suck at writing tests, but this sounds like something that could have easily been caught by an automated test suite. A program as old and venerable as tar should have one of those by now, one would think.
Dear NSF and DOE,

Thanks for the internet, google, fusion and fission research, alternative energy research, quarks, thousands of PhD students, supercomputers, etc...

Given your general success with things, we no longer think it's viable to fund you. You see, we intend to buy 2,443 F-35 fighter planes over the next decade or so. It's unfortunate, but given that each one of those planes cost close to $130 million a pop (not including maintenance), we can't really justify science anymore.

Yours truly,

The American Public (specifically the red ones)
Bandwidth, servers and staff. Storage is most certainly not their problem; the English language Wikipedia is only about 5TBs of text. That's cheap.
He didn't say he was sorry. He just said he will stop.
Nokia share price after the Microsoft partnership news
Thankfully, he is not an admin.
Yep, nail+head. Sounds like this is going to be a big institutional focus for the next couple of years as well...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wiki...

Somethingawful even made a game out of it, the results of which were quoted in that article:

For example, the article on "Women's suffrage" is around the same length as the "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", and Shakespeare's Henry VIII is given as much attention as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Of course this is not real, but funny anyway. http://www.snopes.com/computer/program/stroustrup.asp
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I use your app on iPhone, and yes it is a significantly better experience.

BUT I have good eyesight, so I really wish I could make the font smaller. ;-)
A personal stake? I don't see any reason to believe Prof. Walker is so lacking in perspective that he would automatically regard every esoteric language he works on as notable enough to deserve a place in Wikipedia.
Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.
Air wraps flash which is why the grooveshark client takes 30 of my cpu (or used to do).

But the main problem is that the apps will never be well integrated into the host system. This doesn't matter for games but it does matter for almost any other app.
I couldn't see the change on the mobile edition of Wikipedia. It's there on the full version.
I was just trying to make a point with the only N.E.Asian language I know anything about.

If the Japanese had used 讓 in a programming language, someone somewhere would have added 让 as an alias, which would have quickly spread. As for 井, it looks like # , which I call "hash"; again, it might have spread.
he already succeeded deleting all natural crops in america!
Given your other answers all I can suggest is that you email PG direct and ask, including names. His email can be found in or deduced from the various FAQ files. I don't have it to hand.
But the argument from maintainability is stupid too.

Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not.

Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification.

They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.
When an entrepreneur gets a "rejection" by a venture partner, that is only very weak evidence that there is anything wrong with the entrepreneur's project. Instead, the project might become very successful. Uh, a venture partner is not some wise judge obligated to thoroughly evaluate all the projects and pick the best ones. In particular he is not obligated to fund all the good projects.

Instead a venture partner is just a person, with some time, energy, interests, expertise, obligations, and, usually, funds. So when an entrepreneur contacts venture partners, major fractions of those partners:

(1) are fully busy with their current investments, e.g., helping troubled CEOs, doing triage, or trying to arrange exits,

(2) are busy raising a new fund from the limited partners (much like the entrepreneurs try to do from the venture partners),

(3) are near the end of their last fund and maybe making some follow-on investments but no new investments until they get a new fund (if they do),

(4) are close to retirement and just winding down,

(5) are looking to leave their present firm for another venture firm or maybe something else,

(6) are focusing on investments at a stage different from the entrepreneur's project,

(7) are focusing on a 'space' different from the entrepreneur's project,

(8) have their voice-mail and e-mail in-boxes full and are only looking at deals already filtered for them by a few people they know,

(9) have already made a lot of money and just are not working very hard now,

(10) are geographically too far from the entrepreneur.

Also, venture partners just rarely look at seed or Series A deals in any great detail. In particular only a tiny fraction of venture partners have the time, patience, and qualifications for looking at details.

Instead of details or anything thorough, to save time and brain energy, venture partners concentrate on a few surrogate decision criteria. For a seed deal for, say, a Web 2.0 project, they see if the area of the company is hot and if the team has made money for venture partners before and maybe try the user interface and evaluate the user experience. Again for Web 2.0, for a Series A, they look at ComScore numbers and revenue and earnings numbers.

Or, a venture partner tries to invest in some deals where they can make some money but do not put in all the extra effort needed to invest in all good deals or find the very best deals. They don't worry that they might miss a good deal. For missing the next Google, they believe that no one in venture capital can detect the next Google in seed and Series A deals so don't worry about that.

This isn't the best they would, could, or should do; and it's not what their Web site or public image suggests they do; it's just what they do do.
I hope Samsung sticks with hardware... they should stay far, far away from software.

I (sadly) still use a Samsung Instinct and the OS is of their own design. If you've ever used Samsung's Instinct you'd know it's absolutely terrible and slow. I can't remember the last time I typed something - and I don't even type fast - and it wasn't at least a couple of seconds behind my fingers... pretty annoying when the touch screen won't calibrate and you make at least one typo every other word!

The only upside to the phone is the relative ease of "unlocking" it for use as a 4G modem.
The notability requirements do not sufficiently cover "expert" subjects like PLs. Chris mentioned this himself, yet used it as a justification for these articles, this is known as Doublethink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink) and clearly indicates a second agenda.

Not anyone can invent a programming language, it's not comparable to your pet rock band. Chris, you clearly displayed that you are not capable of handling this subject satisfactory and you've displayed arrogance in response to peoples distress.

Simply put - marking the articles for deletion was rash, and in the larger sense unjustified.
It seems the notability requirements really serve Wikipedia's own notability. It can't say "we'll take our list of topics from Encyclopedia Britannica" but it's what it would like to do.

In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat.

But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.
It is about whether minority viewpoints get a fair shake on Wikipedia.

As it turns out, no.

And it turns out minority means "outside the male, machismo-dominated world of the alpha techno-geek."

It also turns out that even esoteric technogeekery is outside the tiny circle.

And it only takes one alphageek to make it so.

This is an organizational problem with Wikipedia, not just an isolated incident.
So? Isn't the most important thing that he's stopping?
If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped... )

they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons.

I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P

† upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.
It's showing as the current version for me, but here's the permalink: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...
Aww, C++ would make a lot more sense if this was real. :)
I repeat myself, but: "The damage is already done."
File s corporation 
file s corporation
Hm, that was probably the wrong phrase to use. I was just thinking that as a researcher on programming languages, he would have more insight into the issue, and have an idea which languages were influential.
I know I belong and sometimes I wonder don't seem to belong together here. We all have busy chores to do and things that we know that we NEED to do, but what you're studying, working on and 'doing' with your life should be something that you absolutely LOVE. I love coming up with ideas that solve hard problems, I love coding and I love staring into the dark abyss known as the global market economy and asking, "What do you want?".

If you have difficulty staring at yourself in the mirror and saying "I love what I do every day", then you should seriously reconsider what you're doing.
as a (currently 'idle') tastemaker/music blogger, this seems like a sweet job opportunity to me. shazam, holla!

that aside this is a real interesting article, i always wondered how they are getting ahold of all the music and was really stunned when shazam recognized rather unknown tracks from random mixtapes.
If anyone wants an invite I've still got two.
Right... notability guidelines are broken, but he doesn't mind following it to the letter.
Hm? It was just a counterpoint to your quote.

I'm just saying, wikipedia most likely can't and probably shouldn't contain an article about everything. It's just not possible, nor desirable, although it makes a good quote. It seems like deleting useless crap is one approach to that, and encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics is another approach.
Wikipedia relies on volunteers to do updates, corrections, and repair of vandalism. Storage is cheap but their time on this thankless work (just look at this thread—and we're relatively civil!) is a limited resource, and the thinner you spread them, the more unusable (outdated, mistaken, and actively misleading) the results will be. If you want a boundless supply of crap content, the union of everything anyone ever bothered to write, we already have one: the web.
Plains with trees and rivers. Traditions with music played with 1000-year-old instruments and funny masks. That's what we have.

Netflix? Hulu? Tons of other interesting startups like this place? I'd pay them twice if I could get them here.

Even BBC is not broadcasted in my country, you see. (Ok, I'm not starving at least.)
Actually, it seems like a roughly even split between salaries+wages, internet hosting, in-kind expenses, operating, travel, and deprecation (in 2007, at least, because it was easiest to find)[1]. Wikimedia may not be a publicly traded company, but they do release their financials.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikime...
Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".
Plan A doesn't work. It is actually easier to delete things from pages than deleting pages themselves. If you edit war over it you will lose.

Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is.

Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work?

Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki.

This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it.

On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.
In another comment in this thread our deletionist actually mentioned being behind the ACM paywall as a relevant criterion for notability.
Perhaps more experienced Wikipedians can correct me, but my understanding is that the vote for deletion isn't actually a vote. At the end of the day, a Wikipedia admin decides based on the arguments presented, not the number of opinions in either direction.
You're quite right. But pretty much every strategy a search engine uses is susceptible to black hat SEO. I think there's something to be said about having the system use how others are reacting to your comments rather than just what your content is and who links to it. Yes, you could farm out Delicious accounts and have them bookmark your site, but from a SE perspective it's easier to remedy this problem (Delicious requiring captchas periodically, looking for accounts which have an uncanny amount of similar bookmarks in a span of time, etc) than it is to come up with strange rules about content that the black hat is free to change.

Judging by the votes, apparently it is more valuable to point out why a certain idea might not work, even if all of the alternatives have the same problem, than it is to suggest something with exciting possibilities. Nothing against you, personally -- your comment is quite right and I agree gaming is a major concern.
You're not interested in an apology... You don't care that he stopped.

What exactly do you want from him then?
Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.
Trying to delete stories? He nominated them for an open discussion to be decided by an admin. But that doesn't sound nearly as malicious. There are valid criticisms about the AfD process, but most people are blaming Chris as if he just walked by and deleted the articles on his own.

I fear that this issue has become less about fixing broken Wikipedia policies that encourage people like Chris to delete articles, and more about "teaching him a lesson".

The amount of ad hominem attacks in the original story is much higher than anything I'd expect from HN. And, considering HN is self-policed in a lot of ways, I think the issue needs to be pointed out.
Child novelist Barbara Follett, "the saddest reading in American literature"
If he'll remember this situation next time he starts clicking buttons, I don't care about his understanding.
Oh yeah, that's a great point!
> Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge.

This is the problem. Most of us just assume that Wikipedia's mission is being the repository for all human knowledge. But it's not. The last time rampant deleting happened (and I lost a page related to one of my projects) they clearly made the argument that being an endless repository was not their goal. Their goal is simply to be an encyclopedia. And even I had to admit that the page on my project is useful information but it would never belong in an encyclopedia.

If anyone wants to start a project that contains all human knowledge, on all subjects, without any constraint -- I think that would be a very interesting idea -- but that project is not Wikipedia.
How does deleting nerd topics help you produce more information about the rest of the world?

And, if you have 2nd class citizens riding in the back of the wikipedia bus via wikia, i fail to see how interlinking them into the main Wikipedia makes things worse in any way shape or form.
I am interested in an apology. He has not given one, despite this so called "reversal".

A sincere apology would involve 1) apologizing/admitting wrong-doing and 2) undoing the damage. I could certainly settle for only the second.
Ask HN: How does the average user browse?
I've been wondering - how do people browse the internet in terms of the websites they visit as well as the amount of websites they visit each day. I very well can't extrapolate from myself because I'm not the average user (300+ daily RSS feeds, introduced to various new sites on HN, Quora, RRW etc.) so I have a high churn rate for websites.

The average Joe, IIRC, has 4-7 core websites that they will visit with each browsing session, and because they don't go through as much online estate as someone like me or you, they're more likely to discard or be ADD-like to pointless, entertaining start-up sites. Do you think this assumption has any substance?
He's already turned up on this comment thread. I think would be inadvisable to ask somebody to talk to him IRL. At worst it can look like intimidation, which is not cool.
This is where companies like Laundry Locker in SF really help out.
I don't see why not. You would have to make your time count whenever you developed you application or project, since you would also probably be working to fund this project. Good luck!
Yeah, this is probably the most disappointing HN flamewar yet, full of outrage and attacks but very little information or people wanting to educate themselves. There's lots of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but it requires people to: 1) become familiar with how things work; 2) become familiar with why things came to be that way; and 3) come up with workable proposals to improve things that take into account various problems those proposals themselves could cause.

But pitchforks and flamage are easier, I guess. It's embarrassing how similar this response is to what happens when some minor band's article gets proposed for deletion, and all the angry folks from the band's mailing list show up arguing that Wikipedia Fascists Are Damaging Knowledge.
The answer is: changing stated Wikipedia policy is a painful, politicized process. Editing articles is annoying, and deleting articles is annoying and political, but trying to change deletion policy is the exact kind of direct frontal attack that gets you maximum political resistance and minimum effective gain.
What that means is that Ruby simply wasn't very notable until 2000. Trying to make obscure things more notable is not a legitimate use of Wikipedia. It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse. And there can't possibly be any objective measure today of what independent sources in the future may be writing about.