Steve Yegge is a "non-notable programmer"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Steve_Yegge

by helium • 16 years ago

43 79 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

illumin8• 16 years ago

Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.

sgt• 16 years ago

I think it makes perfect sense. If one allows articles that have little interest, you'll pretty soon end up with a massive amount of articles that very few people are interested in reading, and even worse: articles that nobody is interested in maintaining.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.

_delirium4• 16 years ago

Yeah, I think like many Wikipedia policies it's a useful pragmatic policy. How it's applied to specific cases is always worth looking at, but in principle, a ton of articles with no real interest or citeable sources lead to low-quality stuff. If a Coca-Cola PR person were to insert a bunch of advertising fluff in their article, people would notice almost immediately and fix it. But if your corner barber shop writes an article about themselves with a bunch of advertising fluff, without a notability policy it might stay there for a long time, because nobody cares enough or has any information they can use to improve the article. I mean what would it even mean to have a good article about your corner barber shop? Would you base it on personal observation, or do independent interviews with the owner or something? Unless it's gotten some degree of attention for something, and gotten written up somewhere, it seems like a good idea to just decide there's not enough there to write a Wikipedia article on it.

(There really are a bunch of really small businesses trying to insert ad blurbs into Wikipedia, so it's not a purely hypothetical problem. Minor academics pasting their CVs and bio blurbs into Wikipedia is another issue.)

nadam• 16 years ago

They could automate this: if an article would not be read for a given amount of time by a given number of users, it could be automatically deleted. This would be much more objective than what they are doing now.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

But that is exactly the error - Wikipedia is no more an encyclopedia than nytimes.com is a newspaper. You cannot ship a 200 page newspaper or a 2000 volume encyclopedia, for entirely practical reasons having to do with physics.

It is therefore sensible to assume limit what you put into the encyclopedia, but since the same limit does not apply to the online edition of wikipedia, it does not make sense to apply it there.

sabat3• 16 years ago

It's more complex than you're making it. One man's notable figure is another man's regular Joe.

If one allows articles that have little interest

To whom? The "general public"? I'm not sure anything has interest to the general public anymore. The world has become massively fragmented.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

I think the theory is that without notability, there won't be enough interested editors to maintain a consensus on the article's "NPOV."

For varying definitions of consensus and neutral point of view, of course.

DanielStraight2• 16 years ago

It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.

Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.

I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.

SomeCallMeTim• 16 years ago

I've said this before, but if Wikipedia ever fails, it will be because of their tendency to delete articles that other people find relevant; a competitor that doesn't insult its users by deleting their articles capriciously (and that includes a decent search function) would actually have a chance at the throne.

DanielStraight2• 16 years ago

It's not just the immediate impact of deletion either. I don't bother trying to add to Wikipedia anymore, because I know if I can't meet some ill-defined criteria of notability within about 5 minutes, the article will be gone. Wikipedia really does not seem to do very much to encourage involvement, especially when it comes to adding to the site.

mukyu2• 16 years ago

Isn't this just the internet in general?

stonemetal• 16 years ago

I am tempted to delete the article on my home town and in the discussion page put non-notable city doesn't meet inclusion criteria as the reason.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Go ahead. You can't "delete" an article (you're not an admin), but if you want to see a speedy-close in action, nominate your home town for Articles for Deletion (AfD). Nobody's going to humor your argument about consistency between Yegge and an actual town; they'll just kill the AfD and get on with their lives.

TotlolRon• 16 years ago

Well said.

Gatekeepers focus on the gate. The garden it keeps? Not so interesting.

reynolds• 16 years ago

Isn't there a syndrome that describes people who try to exert as much control/authority over a small but unimportant aspect of life?

sabat3• 16 years ago

I don't know what it's called, but many Wikipedia editors clearly have it. Here's a great example - apparently there are schools of thought amongst these guys, the most popular being "Deletionist". That's right: people who believe Wikipedia is too big and needs to be pared down. Makes zero sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Orangemike

dasil0034• 16 years ago

I once saw a guy go into a juice bar that sells 12 and 16 ounce smoothies and ask for a 14 ounce smoothie.

fliph• 16 years ago

Wikipedia has the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentive

hugh37• 16 years ago

The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.

Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.

pierrefar• 16 years ago

The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high

If they're not high quality, said famous people are likely to sue or otherwise cause hassle for Wikipedia. That's something a rare flower is not likely to do.

avar2• 16 years ago

The difference is that it's easy to look primary source material for obscure cities, animals and flowers. But not for some random guy who blogs.

While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.

People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.

It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.

barrkel• 16 years ago

> "unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia"

This is the problem. Wikipedia takes its lead from encyclopedias, but it's not an encyclopedia, because it's fundamentally different. It doesn't have the same space constraints, it isn't written in the same way, it isn't referenced in the same way, etc.

"Does this article feel like it belongs in an 18th century concept of an encyclopedia" kind of test for inclusion or deletion in Wikipedia just seems wrong-headed to me.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

There's no shortage of source material on lots of topics deemed "non-notable", especially when the people deeming those topics "non-notable" are people who know next to nothing about the subject itself, or are too bound by process and policy to think about doing the right thing for the project.

whyenot• 16 years ago

It's a question of whether you want a well manicured arboretum or a wild forest filled with it's share of beautiful trees but also lots of brambles and poison oak. Wikipedia is a garden. If you want the forest, there is Google. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia might not increase its value. Someone has to maintain those new pages, keep them updated, and remove the dated and biased crap that can accumulate in Wikipedia's less visited corners.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

It appears to amaze you that Wikipedia doesn't understand how you understand Wikipedia. There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, which you'll never bother to read, but which fairly convincingly refute the notion that WP is just making a casual mistake here.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, and at least half of them are about everything that's wrong about WP notability criteria. It's not a casual mistake in the slightest--it's a mistake, but it's not casual. It's a perniciously systemic mistake rooted in a dysfunctional culture more interested in process than product.

simplegeek• 16 years ago

Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their standards for inclusion, any ideas?

wmf• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people) I guess programmers are counted under "creative professionals". (There may be a meta-lesson here that there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars but not for programmers.)

hugh37• 16 years ago

The only reason there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars was because somebody was at some point writing thousands of articles about porn stars. I know this, because I used to press the "random article" button a lot.

protomyth3• 16 years ago

I wonder how many hack poets or writers are on Wikipedia that have less of an influence or body of work than programmers they have rejected.

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Or slavishly detailed write-ups of Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.

hugh37• 16 years ago

While individual Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes would seem to be only of borderline notability, any Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode in existence has been seen by many millions of people. Do a comparable number of people know about Steve Yegge?

ax0n• 16 years ago

Steve Who?

phrotoma• 16 years ago

He seems to be notable enough to be considered a "reliable source" for several other articles ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...

shod• 16 years ago

Well spotted, do references have to meet the same notability requirements as articles themselves?

kenjackson• 16 years ago

Almost certainly not. You will often find reference to papers by authors not listed in Wikipedia and not notable enough to be listed.

astine• 16 years ago

Actually, the quote is "None-notable programmer" :)

helium• 16 years ago

Yea, but I thought I would be forgiving....

kqr2• 16 years ago

I think the real debate is what it means to be a notable programmer. The criteria for inclusion in the list is debatable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers

Discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers

growt2• 16 years ago

I agree. Is Bill Gates really a notable programmer? A notable business man and a notable altruist, yes. But a programmer?

wglb• 16 years ago

Yes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC.

gaius2• 16 years ago

Yes. He wrote MS Basic for example. He was a hands-on coder throughout Microsoft's early days.

protomyth3• 16 years ago

Well, the featured article today is "Degrassi: The Next Generation", so I guess I know where their priorities are.

_delirium4• 16 years ago

I think if you were to order topics by importance for inclusion in an encyclopedia, Degrassi: The Next Generation is much higher than Steve Yegge, though there's certainly an argument for including both. Certainly it's had more cultural impact on a much larger scale than Yegge. Encyclopedia coverage isn't a judgment of quality; it's not like the criteria for covering a novel or a film is the reviews they get from literary critics or film critics.

protomyth3• 16 years ago

I think you hit what I believe with the phrase "cultural impact". Wikipedia doesn't deal well with a people/concepts/projects that have a technical impact on the lives of people. Look at how many video bloggers have pages then look at the technical people that influence the way we work.

hugh37• 16 years ago

Honestly, who is Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.

Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.

SMrF• 16 years ago

He wrote js2 mode, which I love: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Js2Mode

Other than that, I've heard he writes great blog posts on programming and works at Google.

JBiserkov• 16 years ago

-Wrote Rhino on Rails, a port of Ruby on Rails inside the Google Language fence (JS, C++, Java, Python) -Used to work at Amazon?

btmorex• 16 years ago

As far as I can tell, he isn't notable outside of blogging (I had no idea who he was either). I can understand why his wikipedia page got deleted.

On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Wikipedia thinks it's an encyclopedia, not a search-engine aid or a "who's who"-style directory.

dusklight• 16 years ago

Hey I can't speak for anyone else, but Yegge made me a MUCH better programmer.

His article on "Java is the kingdom of nouns" and various writings explaining why lisp matters and the virtues and pitfalls of static typing/dynamic typing really made me question a lot of implicit assumptions I did not realize I had.

code_duck2• 16 years ago

Oddly, I was just thinking this morning about how people here on this site think Steve Yegge is extremely famous, while I don't really know who he is. His own description is that he was programmer at Amazon who wrote a blog in the evenings while drinking, and the blog became popular.

patio11• 16 years ago

You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.

If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.

bena• 16 years ago

Both Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have Wikipedia pages and consider Steve Yegge to be important enough to have as a guest on their podcast.

dasil0034• 16 years ago

They consider him smart and insightful enough. Notable (or "important") does not necessarily follow.

motters• 16 years ago

Non-notable programmers of the world unite! (and take over)

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

I used to love editing Wikipedia to the point of obsession, but after going through a grueling process of defending an article from deletion I decided I had better things to do with my life. The subject of the article in question was the author of at least half a dozen highly influential books in his field, the subject of a biography published by a mainstream publisher, cited in publications by his peers probably hundreds if not thousands of times over the past thirty years, interviewed and quoted in mainstream media around the world etc etc etc. Unfortunately there was a clique of editors who didn't like his ideas. Essentially they thought he was a quack and therefore couldn't stand the idea that he'd be given exposure in Wikipedia. I have no opinion on whether he's a quack and it really has nothing whatsoever to do with his notability. Eventually I was able to establish that the guy is influential and the article is still there, but the stupidity of having to endlessly argue the point made me say to hell with it and I haven't edited anything since.

mindcrime3• 16 years ago

F#@ng Deletionists. Grrrr....

Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC, Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."

mindcrime3• 16 years ago

My big problem with Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that they're too general. I don't accept that "notability" has to mean "known worldwide" or "known by a large number of people regardless of their domain." I believe that notability within a given domain (say, programming) should be enough. And I don't think there's much - if any - question that Steve is "notable" within programming circles.

Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time" versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."

Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and everybodY is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people expect and want to use Wikipedia.

mindcrime3• 16 years ago

And he's back. Right after I re-created the page, somebody tagged it - again - for "speedy delete" but the admin rejected the speedy delete request. Thankfully. With the citations and references I included, I hope that particular article will be safe from deletion now. But if anybody else feels like working on it a bit, have at it.

Steve Yegge is a "non-notable programmer"

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