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Self published uncontroversial statements of fact about individuals or companies are permitted but they don't establish notability, which is the whole issue here. You need broad third party coverage to decide if you should even have an article or topic, and then you can source details to blogs or tweets if it's justifiable.

Yes, I tried saying this to both GingerBill and Casey on Twitter but they were unreceptive. I understand their frustrations and I think Wikipedia does have sourcing gaps for projects like Odin. But you can't really understand the spam problem until you've seen it firsthand, and general case notability requirements are one of the first lines of defence against bad actors.

Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person?

Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Apparently that one is "notable" but Odin is not.

"The rules" are on the hook to justify their existence by providing reasonable and desirable outcomes, they're not a purpose unto themselves.

If your rules are shown to be buggy, fix your rules.

But is trusting the CEO worse than trusting newspapers?

Argument of Casey was that it is not.

Wikipedia's core policy is verifiability, not truth. If you put a factual statement into an article, you're required to have a written source that Wikipedia can cite. "Someone who says they're the CEO said so on the talk page" doesn't cut it. If the CEO really wants to get this info into Wikipedia, they can go give an interview to a reputable newspaper, news website, magazine, etc., and then Wikipedia can cite that.

Which brings me to the second policy: notability. If JangaFX is really notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, then surely there will be plenty of coverage of it in secondary sources, so Wikipedia won't have to rely on talk-page statements by random editors claiming to be the CEO.

> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.

I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.

Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.

> 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.

If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".

There is a fair question here (though presented with questionable integrity) about what notability means in programming languages. Especially for more recent and perhaps not widely used programming languages.

I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).

Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.

On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.

Odin isn't exactly obscure to be fair

I've heard of Odin for years now. Maybe because I like knowing about new/nascent languages. For example, have you heard of roc-lang? You've likely heard of Zig.

It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.

Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.

Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug

Well, you're one of today's lucky 10000.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

> 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.

Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it". Consider AI spam, or a company (or government!) paying, or forcing!, people to write articles with whatever focus/leaning/slant they desire. It seems like a hard problem!

Maybe people forget how things were before wikipedia existed? Like many things run primarily by volunteers, it is messy and imperfect. It's arguably still pretty great, and I'm glad it is around.

Have you ever considered that the high cost of contribution and low cost of moderation is why Wikipedia is successful?

Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.

"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"

Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.

If you don't care about the notability filter and independent confirmation provided by secondary sources, you don't need Wikipedia. Just be your own primary source publishing whatever you want! You can even make it a wiki and let anyone else add to it too!

I guess the reason people aren't content with that approach and still want a Wikipedia article is because Wikipedia has much higher visibility. Great for SEO! Except if you can't get reputable third parties to publish about you, maybe you're not important enough to deserve that visibility.

I was researching a public company the other day and I open their Wikipedia page: deleted.

I get it, probably it had been massaged by their PR department. But deleting the article punishes the readers by removing the very space for critical discussion of a topic with good SEO. Now if you want information on this company you will likely end up on their website, it seems like a reward to me.

> once whatever discussion happens

Yes, it seems like a very fast process when you neglect the part that takes time.

This happened to me back in college. I authored a couple pages for some bands that I was in to, probably spent weeks pulling together history, lineup, albums, eps, etc. only to have them deleted unceremoniously with no recourse. That was my first and last attempt to contribute to wikipedia.

>an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time

this isn't a meaningful criticism. An encyclopedia is a reference for established and public knowledge. It's by definition archaic, not an archive for whatever trends on social media, which seems to be the article's criterion for the relevance of Odin.

An encyclopedia shouldn't prioritize article creation, it should be restrictive about what it adds and make sure the content is long term relevant, accurate and sourced. If anything Wikipedia has already been way too lax with what it lets stand on the site. They should honestly do a big cleaning and remove more articles that barely cite any meaningful source or seem like they're self-promotion, because there's already too much of it.

> 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.

I really don't think that's true, though. Or it is in the specious sense by leaning heavily on "might". I mean, sure, in a handful of areas it is.

But in the real world, on the topics that make up the overwhelming majority of our discourse, the sources we trust most are human beings with names we know, and organizations run by human beings with names we know. Period.

And that remains true even in the spots where we admit to the presence of some anonymity. BTC was famously defined and documented by an anonymous developer. But even so, where do you go for your Crypto and BTC news? If, tomorrow, Satoshi were to return from the grave and start posting again, would you trust it? Probably not, right? At this point it would be more likely that someone found a crack on an old laptop and got access to his keys.

We trust people first, up and down the scale.

I would consider it extremely obscure overall. A large majority of programmers would not be aware of its existence. At the same time there are clearly much less popular languages with articles so it is kindof weird to push to delete. (eg: random scheme implementation w/ no releases in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SISC) I would say that wikipedia broadly favors programming languages as far as notability. Like most nerd/geek things their footprint skews toward the internet, and people who enjoy geek stuff are more likely to be wikipedia admins than the general population.

You never hearing about Odin, is an example of why its article was rejected by Wikipedia, because they failed at providing reputable references. The languages that you likely know of, often are corporate backed, with large marketing budgets and backdoor deals to help saturate traditional and social media.

Newer languages, not of corporate origins, usually struggle to achieve public awareness or are purposefully choked out by negative propaganda and negative marketing tactics being unleashed against them. To achieve enough public awareness and momentum, they often need a certain level of luck, where a number of factors fall their way.

> I've never heard of it before [...] but I've definitely heard plenty about Rust and c++ topics.

Programming is a very broad and deep discipline. If you're a programmer for some time, chances are you know of very niche projects (10 stars on GH) in your domain/stack/platform. It says nothing about your familiarity with much less niche (10k stars on GH) projects outside your domain/stack/etc.

The only ways for you to learn about Odin are to be interested in programming languages in general or to be working in the specific niche Odin tries to conquer (+ some luck).

In other words, a "normal programmer" not knowing about one of literally hundreds of languages out there is expected, but says little about the notability of said language.

> maybe I just happened to miss it?

You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970800 But that's normal - it's impossible to keep track of domains you're not interested in. Programming language development (for languages that don't pay your bills) is not something programmers need to follow. It's a conscious choice to become interested in this very specific, deep, and niche domain. If you were interested in PLs, you'd almost certainly know about Odin - you probably still wouldn't know Odin itself, unless you're specifically interested in "ergonomic, low-level C replacement" languages and, for some reason, concluded that Zig is not for you.

The author protested the framing, but it's very much a game-dev oriented language. In fact, it's the most pleasant language for game development I have ever used. It comes with all sorts of "batteries included" in that direction, possibly more than any other existing language. (Well, I still didn't get my Jai invite, so who knows ;) Odin was a major influence on Jai.)

I am interested in programming language topics and I certainly have heard of Odin and have seen a couple of interviews with Ginger Bill. Same with Zig, Rust, Jai, C++ etc. I haven't used much of these (only C++ and Rust out of these), though. But I find that stuff interesting.

I think you just happened to miss it. It's very commonly mentioned in the new systems space, alongside Jonathan Blow's jai.

It's relatively well known? Certainly not mainstream.

It's kind of niche but is getting bigger. The Discord server has 10k members, the biggest(?) Twitch programming streamer has been using it recently, JangaFX is big enough to be used by AAA game companies and a few large film studios, and I'm sure there's plenty of users who aren't on the Discord server.

If you're comparing it to Rust/C++ you must live in a cave or something. So yes. It's not that big. But it's probably in the top 10 of hyped languages of the current year. There's a bunch of languages from the 60's to 90's on Wikipedia that have probably never had as many users or software shipped as Odin.

It's been here a few times, maybe 4-6 times in the past year?

I have only heard about it because of HN.

I feel like if you’re into programming languages as a hobby, the chances you know of Odin are pretty high. Not everyone can know everything, of course, but my impression is that it punches above average on notability within the niche.

Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.

What kind of happens is that there are some people who invest their lives in Wikipedia, their opinions is what ends up mattering.

This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.

The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.

Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.

So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)

Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.

Encyclopedias are not designed to report on pop culture. The entire nature of an encyclopedia is to be downstream of good secondary sources, ideally academic, and summarise what those good secondary sources have said about specific topics.

Side note, it is very funny that the same people lamenting the state of Wikipedia seem to be desperate to have their topic included on it. If the site sucks, why care about it so much?

The author of this article seems quite politically driven like the mods on Wikipedia, and created it disingenuously. I feel it's an attempt to overwhelm the readers through massive amounts of text so that they are too tired to see what's being said at the beginning and end are completely unrelated.

+1 I remember joining the discord server and I think that Bill even responded to me and the community was helpful!

> one of

Seems reasonably accurate? Odin is not particularly popular. Zig is much much more popular. As-is Go, although that’s not a straight C competitor.

But other than that?

Odin is a real language being used by real professionals to ship real software products for money. That alone makes it a rare and notable programming language!

Zig is more popular. Name a second modern "C competitor" language that's more popular?

can only speak from my personal experience, I have made a scratchpad app within Odin and it was the first language that I picked for because I wanted C-esque speed and gui libraries being built in and I even used LLM's to write the whole thing to see LLM's capabilities.

After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!

I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.

I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least

You've almost got it, except:

> Wikipedia has a bunch of languages that were used by like one person, because there is published material on them

No. It's more like, there are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that don't meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines AT ALL, but when you write an article on Wikipedia and enough time passes without anyone noticing that the article is poorly sourced, then eventually the tendency of Wikipedia community is to just keep it.

This is what has led to the what-about-ism regarding Odin's deletion - there are lots of other programming languages that also don't meet the notability guidelines, yet, to this day, still have Wikipedia articles.

Could someone come along and propose deletion for such articles? Yes, of course. You yourself could go do that right now, if you want. But nobody's getting paid for such work, so someone has to want to. The tendency of Wikipedia editors is that, when an article is many years old, they would rather flag it for improvement rather than simply throw away years of fellow editors' work. Whereas an article that's brand new is likely to not have much work put into it, and also more likely to be self-promotion and/or spam.

This is very frustrating for people who create Wikipedia articles and have them deleted. "You mean, whether or not my non-notable article gets deleted or not is just the luck of whether someone comes along and notices that it's not notable?" Yep. Like I said, nobody's getting paid for deletion work.

In wikipedia-land, I read "primary source" as "motivated source", given their need to prune biased edits.

Suppose you wanted to make a Wikipedia article on a certain brand CNC milling machine, would that be useful? Not really. The only thing ever written about it is its own manual, and it doesn't feature notably with the exception of being used by some companies for manufacturing. Programming languages are the same thing. It seems rather entitled to demand Wikipedia articles for random brands of tools that don't have anything particularly significant about them.

And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.

I genuinely don't think Malbolge, for example, warrants a Wikipedia page if Odin doesn't

Generally speaking, encyclopedias are tertiary sources, so that makes sense (though the line between secondary and tertiary sources is sometimes blurry)... but as you say, there are plenty of topics (a niche programming language under active development primarily by one guy is a good example) where the topic might be notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article but not widely discussed enough to have a good source other than the primary developer. I understand that "well the guy who made it said it" sounds like an obvious argument, but I also understand that Wikipedia is trying to maintain their role as an encyclopedia first and foremost. I'm not sure what the optimal path is.

Well we now know the author's true intentions. It was never about any real criticism, and simply an attack on a person they politically dislike.

If you read the whole article, you'll understand the context and how its relates to Wikipedia. The fact GingerBill accuses Wikipedia of having a political bias against Odin when (spoilers) it was actually a "constitutional conservative" who triggered the deletion is amusing.

Yeah, that reference section (odin-lang.org, jangafx.com, learnodin.org, c3-lang.org, odinbook.com, gingerbill.org) is probably not up to Wikipedia's standards...

The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.

> it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arguments_to_avoid_i...

fwiw, I think a lot of people just clone odin and build it via `./build_odin.sh release` on MacOS (at least, I do). The compiler builds in ~20s

Bill is that exact kind of person who is desperate to tell you that they don't care the mean girls are saying something nasty about them and, lest you mistake this for them actually not caring, will then spend an hour detailing all these accusations they don't care about and why exactly they're all wrong.

Here on the orange site, where he can't edit what he wrote hours after finding out that he was wrong, there are a few interactions between me and Bill where I know a topic, Bill blusters but is clueless and so he makes a bit of a fool of himself.

On Reddit, where Bill can go back and "edit" embarrassing mistakes the dynamic is very weird, with it appearing (if you go look now) that I keep restating things Bill has explicitly said he knows. Of course if you saw it when it happened it's the same as on HN, I stick to areas of expertise, Bill offers pronouncements on topics he doesn't understand, he looks like an idiot. But the power of the edit button allows Bill to rewrite history so that he knew all that with only the small price that now the conversation looks weird (and there's a tiny asterisk on his comments in some Reddit UIs to hint that they're edited)

Now, I don't like what I call "Auteur languages". Programming Languages where a single individual or maybe a couple of people have absolute control. So Odin was never going to be a language I like, same for Jai, Hare, Cpp2† and indeed more relevantly Zig. In that sense it doesn't matter whether I like Odin, but it does seem like feedback on "Ginger" Bill Hall.

† I'm sure Herb Sutter would tell you that his "new syntax" for C++ would be overseen by the same committee as the current language. The language as it exists today, largely abandoned, does not have such oversight.

Nothing here is about "truth" or "objectivity", it's about Wikipedia's subjective view of what counts as "notable" or not. Seems like a really strange confusion here, as you're giving some meta-perspective on the discussion while seeming to miss the entire point of the discussion you're trying to provide a new perspective to?

Its a good reminder that all wikipedia software is GPL, and the article content is CC-BY-SA. Anyone who thinks they can do better has the right to fork.

Most of Wikipedia's rules are there for a reason, and i suspect people who fork would find out why the hard way, but hey, only one way to find out.

I guess Elon Musk is doing something like that: https://grokipedia.com/page/Odin_programming_language

At least there, the Odin article still lives on.

I actually enjoyed the layout, even though I had to use landscape mode on my phone to comfortably read it. It's nice to see new formats

But the Gleam Wikipedia page is littered with references? Including to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey page, which has gleam very high on "want to learn" but doesn't have Odin at all...

If you look on the Gleam's article talk and GearsDatapacks userpage, it gives information on that person's conflict of interest. Wikipedia has various complex rules surrounding this, though this person is very clearly a core gleam team member, and should know better. Looks like competition elimination.

Well, Casey Muratori argued github stars should be considered a metric of notability, and the Gleam repository has almost twice the number (21.6k vs Odin's 11k)!

Jokes aside, I'm not sure Gleam belongs on Wikipedia if Odin does not...

Even more incredible that someone who represents an organisation is allowed to edit the English Wikipedia under that username! Anyone else would have their account banned.

But hey, don't expect consistency or fairness from the ones on the English Wikipedia.

I looked and the cultural marxism tweet has zero likes, zero comments, and only 35 views. Although it has caused much consternation for you and the author. So it seems strange that you don't understand why people might be concerned about what Wikipedia has to say about things, and how it works, given its prominence.

I think part of being well-reasoned is being honest, and they're certainly being honest. I don't agree with their means, though. Bill is a complex person, and you don't have to stalk him to learn about him. He interacts with newbies plenty in the Discord server. I find him to be pretty nice in those interactions.

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

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.

> Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur

In other words, just Reddit mods

> 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.

Honestly, both of these would probably meet Wikipedia's notability requirements.

> Wikipedia editors are just Reddit mods with delusions of grandeur

Reddit mods act on their own discretion most of the time, unless they attract the attention of Reddit admins or staff. Anyone can edit Wikipedia and the editing/moderation decisions are transparent. Certainly the editing guidelines are much more rigorous than Reddit, but that's the point of Wikipedia.

Are you sincerely advocating that Wikipedia should never delete anything, regardless of notability or verifiability? Do you think that would make it better or worse?

> edits others don't like, no matter what the veracity is.

Wikipedia bans people for their behaviour, not for being right or wrong. So you are correct that veracity is irrelavent.

I'd say it provides a lot of information about whole situation, including context on how wikipedia operates and history of behavior from the creator of the language.

Furthermore, if you do treat this blog post (blog is generally tracked as someone's opinion) as ad hominem, you'd agree that the author of the language participates in ad hominem attacks as well as notes by the blog post?

Being fraudulent doesn't make something less notable. It might even make something more notable, provided enough sources report on it.

This type of odd vitriol against vlang, when the language has nothing to do with Wikipedia's processes, is both misplaced and demonstrates succumbing to excessive fanaticism from competitor propaganda. The origins of this strange sentiment, appears to partially come from Odin's creator, making the situation a bit of poetic justice. We are here to witness vlang's creator having a Wikipedia page, while Odin's creator still doesn't, and despite his language being older.

Odin being rejected or found unworthy to have an article, is about its supporters or helpers (which includes C3's creator and the author of the self published Odin eBook) not providing proper references. The jealousy or shooting strays at other languages should instead have that energy redirected elsewhere.

Wikipedia has a standard, that when challenged (under AfD or Articles for Deletion)[1], all articles must pass it or be subject to deletion. Those are Wikipedia rules, not vlang's or those of other languages. Meet the requirements that Wikipedia is asking for, instead of unleashing anger at other languages.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

Agreed, plus they're weirdly political/politically biased in how a lot of topics are covered.

Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data. Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.

Wikipedia is very explicitly not a indiscriminate database of everything,[1] and dismissing anyone in the editing community who attempts curate it as CensorshipBros is the same type of twitter bullshitting called out by the blog post in the OP.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_Wi...

He’s not saying that’s why the article was deleted.

He’s saying that to say that’s why Bill is acting like he is. Saying he doesn’t care while making a lot of noise like he cares. Complaining about rules he hasn’t looked up. Then accusing the mods of bias simply due to their deletion of the article, despite the mod nominating being more ideologically aligned than not.

But the goal isn't to catalogue all human knowledge. Having an article for every living person would be "cataloguing all human knowledge" but it would also be a meaningless endeavour. Some knowledge is worth preserving in an encyclopedia, other knowledge isn't. That is why they have their notability guidelines.