Comment by lvoudour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lvoudour | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

And notability isn't just for spam, the core difficulty with Wikipedia is that people disagree about what should be written in articles. The site only functions because of a masterful Jiu-jitsu move where we redirect heated arguments about what Wikipedia should say into heated arguments about which Reliable Source to cite.

That's the fundamental underlying reason behind all the rules and all the deletion discussions. It's not that the article isn't important, it's not that the content is wrong or not useful or that we don't want it. It's that Wikipedia would be pure chaos if it let people just write without sources, and the fights over content would never end.

Notability just boils down to "can we find enough reliable sources to write an article we can verify and stand behind?". Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.

Except for the citogensis problem. https://xkcd.com/978/

what's the gate being kept and by whom?

The gate is reliable secondary sources. These sources, for the most part, don't check their facts using Wikipedia. These sources also tend to have feedback mechanisms, so if they have make a mistake, their response is to correct it in a timely fashion.

This is what makes them reliable in Wikipedians' judgement. A publication that regularly made errors, or published claims regardless of veracity, or left errors in place even after being notified of them, would quickly lose its "reliable" badge. Wikipedians even track the downfall of a reliable source becoming an unreliable one, and say you can only cite articles from the time period the source was reliable.

And Wikipedia itself is ready and waiting to remove citogenesis and prevent it coming back, the moment it's no longer in a reliable source. So while citogenesis can happen, it's detected and resolved over time, it's not some "gotcha".

Kevin was real proud of the fact that he managed to do that before he passed.

>Just quoting what authors of the topic say about their own work would of course fall a little short of what people expect from an encyclopedia.

Yes, for the encyclopedia project. But they are many use cases where saving who said what, when, within which contextual summarizable frame can also prove very useful.

Luckily we still have things like archive.org still covering a large part of such a need. Because otherwise, anyone can say anything and its contrary just before denying reality never happened, and then the web becomes saturated of every assertion and its contrary being all covered in some farmed nonsense without any way to weight them in the hand of general public.

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.

How do you YCombinator is a real company unless you met pg? Look at it being well known with real useable products, might be something to try to look for...

Because plenty of secondary sources have covered it.

Wikipedia's philosophy is that it summarizes reliable secondary sources. You're asking for Wikipedia to change its fundamental philosophy so that editors go out and gather primary evidence themselves, debate it, and then deduce what's true by themselves. That would work if Wikipedia were edited by a select group of highly qualified people you can trust, but it's not. It's edited by literally anyone who signs up. So the rules are strict: find a secondary source, or else don't include the info.

I'm 95% sure the account you're replying to is a karma-farming bot (15k karma in just 8 month is a lot), which makes its comment spectacularly ironic.

Lol, thanks if nothing else, I suppose, I do have quite some freetime at my hands. Mind pointing out comments by me seems non-humanly written? 95% is high confidence so assuming you have some examples at hand here.

I'm just wondering - what is the benefit of a karma-farming bot? I mean I get the benefits of bots on bluesky and twitter and Instagram etc. because you can turn high engagement into money!!

I figured bots here were because people maybe were trying out AI tools, scripts, or because keeping their business visible to people who might be interested.

But what benefit can you derive from the Karma.I have pretty good Karma and it hasn't done anything for me that I'm aware of?

You can influence the general sentiment in the thread, have the last word everywhere when terms/companies and so on are mentioned. Manipulation goes way beyond just "score goes up", sometimes introducing a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt is enough to derail entire submissions.

OK, but does the Karma help those goals?

Yes, apparently some people (like stymaar) do look at user's profile and look at those numbers to decide how they feel about things. Sometimes high karma can be a sign of trust or a established profile, sometimes (like in this case coupled with relatively recent registration date) it comes of as a signal of suspicion.

After reading through several pages of their comments, I'm roughly 100% certain that the user you're referring to is not a bot and is not karma farming. They just post a lot.

Thanks for independently confirming I actually seem human, I had my own doubts about it at times too so helps a lot :)

Wikipedia’s strategy is to offload the risk of wrong information to sources which can absorb the hit rather than have it reflected back. It’s “safer” for Wikipedia even to knowingly publish inaccuracies or misinformation from a reputable source than the truth from an unknown source. A lie from a reputable source is unavoidable, a lie from an unknown source is unforgivable.

It's also that letting editors argue based on their own original research would be a recipe for chaos.

"Use reliable secondary sources" is a simple rule that limits the scope for possible conflict and chaos. For an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's very important.

They do have products you can buy, download and use... And plenty of people on YouTube have made videos reviewing or showing how to use their products.

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

From the page: https://jangafx.com/legal/end-user-license-agreement

     JangaFX, LLC, a North Carolina Limited Liability Company located at PO BOX 27...

What does that prove exactly?

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.

except for hundreds of early actors who put themselves and their pet projects in, early days. Some grifters like Bernt Wahl in Berkeley for example..

source: contributed documentation to a City of Berkeley disciplinary hearing

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.

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.

Rules are only “good” or “bad” in the context of the alternatives. What’s the alternative?

Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?"

This is the Odin article as it existed when it was deleted by that AfD: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Odin_(progr...

The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.

I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.

>Apparently [Brainfuck] is "notable" but Odin is not

Brainfuck has been extensively discussed in the following journal papers:

https://doi.org/10.1080%2F07350198.2020.1727096

https://doi.org/10.7559%2Fcitarj.v9i3.432

If you can find two journal papers which extensively discuss the Odin programming language, I assure you that it will survive any Wikipedia deletion discussion.

I’m saying this as someone who, 13 years ago, had a very stressful week when my tiny little open source project (MaraDNS) was on the Wikipedia deletion block.[1] I added references to the deletion discussion, and as a result, it survived the discussion without a single vote to delete it.

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

Just to be clear Brainfuck was built popularized and has been part of the nerd programming zeitgeist for longer than JangaFX has been around as a company and before the internet culture was less noteworthy.

The fact that you are pointing that language out specifically is reason enough.

Rules should be treated as such, strict guidelines that exist because the easier options failed and they will punish or hurt the innocent but that's the price we pay for living in a rules based system.

I think they could surely be more forgiving to programming domain but then everyone will ask for similar benefits.

If your best sources for a project are that you and people you work with use it that isn't very conveniencing and the fact that supposedly you have a lot of fans on twitter shouldn't make it any different.

Brainfuck is probably the most famous esoteric programming language. It's mentioned (and used) in published papers e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-019-05821-2. Probably not a good comparison point.

I think a more comparable language would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

if people want there to be an article on Odin they can contribute to the current draft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...

If you conduct a poll of all software engineers, I bet at least a third have heard of brainfuck. It is very widely used as an example of a minimal but Turing complete language and the name itself gathers interest.

Now do Odin. I bet not even one in ten knows what Odin is.

i have never used odin.

I did write a compiler that targeted brainfuck

Brainfuck is quite famous though? It even started the wave of 'joke languages', I vividly remember few years when every few month somebody makes a new language

Learning brainfuck was a wildly known challenge back in my uni days (and not only for IT studunts, but in mathematician circles as well). I have yet to know any students that would get competitive over writing in Odin.

694 public odin repositories on gh vs 2064 public brainfuck repositories. And most of the brainfuck fame was before using github so wildly popular.

Brainfuck is the definition of not widely used, but notable

But is trusting the CEO worse than trusting newspapers?

Argument of Casey was that it is not.

Trusting a rando who claims to be the CEO of a company nobody heard of is worse, yes.

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