Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

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

by bendmorris • 15 years ago

173 131 15 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

ramanujan• 15 years ago

The first public victory of inclusionism over deletionism. Perhaps it is not too late for Wikipedia. If only similar mobs could mete out rough internet justice to the top ten most notorious deletionists, casual contributors may once again walk the hallways of Wikipedia.

[only partially tongue-in-cheek here...]

EGreg• 15 years ago

This victory will only last until the page is updated :)

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

Deletionism is the reason Wikipedia has only a moderate shortage of editors curating content, rather than an utterly insoluble maintenance nightmare. If this farce means the inclusionists are winning, it's the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They will get what they seem to want—a mirror of the entire web hosted at wikipedia.org, with just as much outdated, useless, and actively misleading crap.

Smerity• 15 years ago

If the issue is with maintenance and proper curation of content then that is what should be discussed.

I'd far prefer in the case that an article is not well maintained that it be flagged for deletion in X months due to absence of proper care. If there is a strong community presence the article can be resurrected and recovered and Wikipedia ultimately improved and only otherwise the article deleted.

I've seen deletionism creep into articles that were very well written, very well cited and overall a great source of information. I hope you are either generalizing or I'm misunderstanding your point as otherwise this does anything but justify deletionism.

steveklabnik6• 15 years ago

Deletionism is also one of the major reasons that I only contribute to the Hackety Hack and Shoes articles on Wikipedia, and nothing else. (oh, and I fear the day when I have to try to prove Hackety Hack 'notable.' I'm pretty sure that it isn't by the letter of the law.)

They'd have more help if they didn't go around deleting things.

tokenadult3• 15 years ago

Rather than a "moderate shortage of editors curating content," the Wikimedia Foundation says that the decline in the number of active administrators is "continuing in an unsustainable fashion."

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...

It would be interesting to look at administrators' self-reported reasons for burning out, and it is definitely interesting to look at competing models for building online encyclopedias, but you may be right that an explicitly more inclusionist policy (which allows even more content that cannot be reliably sourced and that may be simply made up by fanboys) would hasten the decline of active Wikipedia administrators and editors in general. On the whole, I have an inclusionist orientation, and still do, but after seeing many more Wikipedia articles from the inside (as a wikipedian) than I once had, I can't say that I disagree with the majority of article deletion decisions that are actually made by current Wikipedia community processes.

shekmalhen3• 15 years ago

Even after this "reversal", I'm not sure he understands why people were angry about his AfDs.

pestaa• 15 years ago

If he'll remember this situation next time he starts clicking buttons, I don't care about his understanding.

T-R2• 15 years ago

Judging from his comments, I'd wager this wouldn't have blown up if it weren't for his attitude toward the whole situation. His use of smileys coupled with his tone leaves the impression of condescension, obliviousness, or apathy toward the people he'd upset.

chris_j• 15 years ago

"Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages?"

Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true: Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the letter of the law but yet seemed so wrong. There is no way that the likes of Factor or Clean should be deleted from Wikipedia so the question becomes how can the guidelines be changed so that they don't allow it to happen.

bendmorris3• 15 years ago

The most important rule of all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

i.e., if something seems to fit in with the "letter of the law" but has no real benefit and lots of reasons not to do it, don't do it!

ErrantX• 15 years ago

Sadly the mostly widely mis-used rule :) IAR is for daily usage, no real application in this case (because unfortunately the wider community will probably agree with deletions)

_delirium5• 15 years ago

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.

philwelch• 15 years ago

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.

mfukar• 15 years ago

  If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue.

I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place saying "Christopher, we are upset".

chrismonsanto4• 15 years ago

No, my understanding was that a small, but vocal, special interest group was upset for nominating their favorite programming language. The vast majority of angry people seemed unable to come up with a rational reason for saving the article. The vast majority of calm people seemed to agree with the deletions, and agreed with me for labeling the others as a small-but-vocal-minority. If you felt you were doing something right and no one who thought you were wrong had a convincing case (as convincing as "nazi dickwad deletionist we're gonna e-mail your professor" is), wouldn't you try to push through the intimidation? It wasn't until the wider reddit and HN communities caught on that I understood that it wasn't an annoyed minority, yet I would have caught on earlier if someone had actually tried to reason with me (and maybe brought up the citation argument).

I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.

steveklabnik6• 15 years ago

> I regret that I am unable to reply to each comment individually, HN's software stops me from making too many posts.

At least you're getting voted up, which should help. It's an anti-spam measure... also, try clicking on the 'link' of something you want to reply to. If there's too much back and forth in a thread, it'll hide the 'reply' button in an attempt to slow down conversation, but obviously this is a bit of a special case.

copper2• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.

srean• 15 years ago

Your understanding is wrong. It is this attitude of yours, that of ascribing fictional motives to those who criticized you, and the failure to comprehend the impact of your actions, that had a role to play in precipitating the outrage in the first place. I am no fan or user of any of the language that you helped delete. But that does not mean I would be ok with those deletions. See my other comments for an elaboration. I know enough that important knowledge also exists as folklore and it is important to preserve them on Wikipedia, precisely because they are not represented adequately elsewhere.

You are clearly disingenuous. You complained about: if only people had told you that you were doing wrong. People did, and you came up with snarks and smileys and gratuitously appointed yourself the position of a judge that decides which citations had impact and which did not. And when it went out of hand, you played the victim and you changed your excuse to 'if only _more_ people did, more reasonably etc. etc'.

``I only recommended a deletion, did not delete it myself``, is another exhibition of dis ingenuousness and irresponsibility. Same for the shuttling between, "I am sorry" and, ``I was right in every case``. (Things between `` `` aren't actual quotes)

I believe you are an adult, everybody expects adults to possess some degree of understanding of what is being told to them and act and apply rules with ownership and responsibility. What is specifically galling is that when push came to a shove you took up the excuse that notably rules are broken. But, earlier, had no problems argumentatively enforcing them blindly. No one had a gun to your head to do whatever you went about doing, you went about doing it anyway and then hid behind a straw-man.

Nobody has the time an energy to, as you indicate, to reason with someone at length. Especially when the other person is being unreasonably pedantic and obnoxious. Most people have a real job and more important things to do.

Edit: @runjake your point well taken and upped.

Zak2• 15 years ago

I'm honestly curious as to your motivation; what made you think that nominating Alice ML and Nemerle for deletion would make the world a better place? Do you think those articles existing made it harder to find other more useful content? Do you think they were unreasonable attempts by fans of the languages to use Wikipedia for self-promotion? Regardless of the letter of the policy, what made you think this was a good thing to do?

yzhengyu• 15 years ago

Notability is broken, since it is usually subjective and wielded mercilessly as an axe by the Wikipedia mafia to cull material which they deem as not notable. Inclusive? Haha, don't make me laugh.

pbhjpbhj7• 15 years ago

There is, however, nothing stopping articles deemed as not notable by consensus at Wikipedia from being included in other references.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

The damage is already done. "I'm sorry (but I was still right!)" is the kind of apology I would expect to hear from a child. If you're sorry, then make it right and undo the harm that you did. Otherwise, just shut-up, you're not sincere.

nicelios• 15 years ago

He didn't say he was sorry. He just said he will stop.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

Exactly my point. He's sorry that he got called out, nothing more.

j_baker6• 15 years ago

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.

thechangelog• 15 years ago

I couldn't see the change on the mobile edition of Wikipedia. It's there on the full version.

natep• 15 years ago

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...

teyc2• 15 years ago

Right... notability guidelines are broken, but he doesn't mind following it to the letter.

latch• 15 years ago

Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

afterburner2• 15 years ago

Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.

_delirium5• 15 years ago

In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc.

When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!

And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.

Osmose• 15 years ago

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.

shekmalhen3• 15 years ago

The AfD process is problematic, but Christopher was also problematic. He was strictly following the rules, even when it didn't make sense, and continued to do so even after other users were telling him, politely, that he was wrong.

This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia (at least, according to everyone who comments on ridiculous AfD stories). As for teaching him a lesson: he was caught live. The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce.

by3• 15 years ago

"The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce."

Let's consider the logic of that statement by taking a different example. A young child is in a shop and is told by its parent it cannot have some candy. Young child "I want candy! I want candy!". The child becomes enraged, more and more enraged, by the behavior of the parent. Should the child now teach the parent a harsh lesson? Since the parent's behavior has induced a great deal of rage a very harsh lesson seems entirely appropriate.

chrismonsanto4• 15 years ago

Hey, come on. I thought in many cases my nominations DID make sense -- most of the languages I nominated had neighborhood-of-zero information available about them on the web, and some of them were blatant advertising. Alice ML and Nemerle were more borderline than I thought, but a lot of people (less so on this site than on reddit) seem to think that I singlehandedly deleted the articles in question, when I instead just nominated them for deletion. If these languages were as important as one would be lead to believe from this whole fiasco, you'd think that the discussion on the AfDs would be more than strawmans and personal attacks. It appears to me that the biggest (constructive) complaint was of my personal threshold for citations. This is precisely the kind of defense I would have expected to receive in the AfD, but unfortunately, the root of the issue was only brought out after the deletions.

Regardless, I misunderstood Wikipedia policy and I apologize to those I have offended. I honestly didn't think a couple of deletion discussions was so grave, and I ask that those who abhor me so try to imagine what it's like to make a mistake and have it go viral.

bane11• 15 years ago

This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia

I disagree, that sort of behavior is absolutely par-for-the-course in almost every dealing I've seen with WP's self-selected editor class.

j_baker6• 15 years ago

The thing that does annoy me is that he seems to agree that the policies need to be changed, but he followed them anyway. Sure, the policies are what ultimately need to be changed, but we also need to discourage blindly following the rules without thinking critically about them.

diN0bot• 15 years ago

only after there was a backlash: he did was felt right, people failed to counter, an admin deleted stuff, people bitched and moaned --> therefore, fine if the system is not yielding the right results let's change it.

Chris seems to be really decent. even if he had a lapse in judgement, he embraces pleasant discussion. i'm embarrassed by the juvenille response: the meanness most of all, but also the unwillingness to see someone else's perspective or view efforts as a collaboration rather than a fight.

if a teammate messes up, you help them, you don't shoot them down.

scrrr• 15 years ago

That's why he's actually a good candidate for being an editor. He is probably the personality type I like to call "football referee". Sticks to the rules even if he thinks they are unfair.

I think such people are indeed very necessary for the world to function (or we'd only have corruption and worse) and there's no reason to be annoyed about them.

Or to put it another way: Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

(But: Exceptions do apply.)

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

He missed this rule: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

mc32• 15 years ago

I think you mis-interpreted him. He actually said he believed that all the articles he submitted for deletion were deserving. He did however, say that if people really felt that he was being mis-guided, by following protocol, then, instead of leaving messages on his talk page, he would suggest people work on fixing WP notability guidelines.

When he said "fixing" I don't get the feeling _he_ thinks it's broken but rather is acknowledging other people's take (as evidence) and lead him to believe that there could be room for improvement.

To me this shows that he believes things are ok, but he would agree to any changes if the community thought changes were necessary. That's quite reasonable to me.

That's quite different from the allegation. (That he thought they were wrong but just followed the guidelines anyway. Or have I missed another quote where the allegation is true?

T-R2• 15 years ago

I got the impression that there were two issues at hand:

1) Those who have the power to delete the articles perhaps weren't knowledgeable enough to make a judgement, or for some other reason gave too much weight to his decisions, and the AfD process didn't provide (enough time, a good environment) for reasonable discussion, and so he had more control over the process than he should have. Many seem to believe he was willfully taking advantage of that position.

2) His tone gave the impression that he wasn't taking the situation seriously. I really get the impression that people were upset about his attitude, maybe even more than his actions, but completely failed to articulate that, at least in a civilized and constructive way.

I'm not at all surprised that he was treated as if he was trolling, but I do agree that we should be better than that, and I have that much more respect for those who tried to mediate.

Jun8• 15 years ago

Excuse me, but the thing that proved him to be an idiot in my eyes is not his blind adherence to the rules (which can be discussed), but that, even after all this discussion he is soo sure of himself, i.e. "I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline."

"The best way to know you have a mind is to change it"!

bendmorris3• 15 years ago

Sorry if the title seems sensationalist, but by nominating articles for AfD, he was, effectively, trying to get them deleted. He clearly stated his view that they didn't meet the notability guidelines and should be deleted.

bane11• 15 years ago

He nominated them for an open discussion to be decided by an admin.

And the open discussion clearly showed a consensus not to delete the articles.

The process, even if followed, is broken. This debacle is a joke.

Chris should have edited the articles, or ignored them, instead he flagged them for deletion. He positively asserted that they did not belong in wikipedia. None of the respondents to the AfD agreed with him. Yet they were deleted. Semantically, flagging them as AfD was the same as deleting them since that was the outcome in every case.

I agree that he doesn't deserve the entirety of the blame, the horrendously broken editorial process of Wikipedia does. It's so bad that it's virtually impossible to become a new contributor to wikipedia in any meaningful way without become immediately embroiled in WP's editorial shenanigans.

Charuru• 15 years ago

This problem is hardy unique to this instance alone, or even to wikipedia alone. This is a question faced by All publications, that of target audience and market. Obviously on a tech forum like HN we're more likely to be interested in langs like factor. But imagine a journalist looking through langs to report on computer sci or a teenager looking for something new to study... It would be a waste of time.

Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites, except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page?

We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything, as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.

yaix• 15 years ago

He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. In an open system, once you start ignoring the rules, everybody will want their exceptions and you end up in chaos. Anyone remember the Wikipedia from ten years ago? Today, it aims to have a good standard regarding its content, that is only possible with rules. So just update the rules and everything is fine. More importantly, it will still be fine ten years from now, when nobody remembers this incident anymore.

loewenskind• 15 years ago

>He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then.

Everyone is responsible for their own action. You should not follow rules that are bad, you should ignore them or try to change them yourself. "Just doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse and if I had the power I would punish that defense more severely than any other because it's the most dangerous.

chmike• 15 years ago

Pruning knowledge is a dangerous process.

justincormack• 15 years ago

Regarding this as pruning knowledge is rather exaggerated. First wikipedia deletions are not deletions, they are just hidden from most users but can be viewed or restored. Second this is not primary knowledge it is a very short and incomplete summary of the primary sources.

teyc2• 15 years ago

I didn't realize that deletion is not permanent.

In what manner is the content hidden? Will it show up in search engine results? Will an anonymous user like myself see the content?

davidhollander• 15 years ago

>Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop.

That's how these things work Chris.

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore 1993

slouch• 15 years ago

chris blanked his talk page on wikipedia. here's the content he removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Christop...

Flenser• 15 years ago

Stack Exchange process for deleting content > Wikipedia process for deleting content.

Having nominations be anonymous until a consensus is reached stops this kind of issue arising. Sometimes complete transparency isn't the best policy.

silverlake• 15 years ago

As a fan and user(!) of Factor, I agree that it fails the notability test on Wikipedia. I can't find any mention of the language, beyond that by the author, which might convince a 3rd person that it is more notable than my own pet PL projects. But this might be true of many implementations of well-defined languages like Smalltalk, Scheme, or C. Take a look at the big list of Scheme implementations[1]. How many of them are "notable"? Is Ikarus or Chicken notable? Many PL papers describe some minor tweak in a homegrown toy language. Are all those languages notable?

I think Factor deserves to have a Wikipedia page (it still does), but I don't know by what general criteria I'm including it. It has a complete, robust implementation and is still actively developed, which is more than could be said of 90% of PLs out there. But how do we codify that into a notability test?

[1] http://community.schemewiki.org/?scheme-faq-standards#implem...

daxelrod• 15 years ago

The permalink for this is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Christopher_M...

jackfoxy• 15 years ago

Thank you, Chris. You did the right thing.

Programma• 15 years ago

What I think is funny: this guy seems to point to a problem with the internet and Wikipedia. But the actual problem is that he is not a programmer (obviously) so he has a skewed view of what is notable when it comes to programming language. In other words, he has no clue what he is talking about.

He then blames 'the internet' for calling him out. That is the problem with the internet: this newbie comes into the scene and has no idea why his actions are annoying and detrimental. He says he's looking for 'policies' but he's just a newbie.

Hopefully in 5-10 years these dramas will end when we all collectively grow up a bit and stop with the ignorant drama queen games.

Good to see that some aren't letting him rest until he acknowledges that he was deleting articles he had no business deleting. Ignorant editor is no excuse.

rkalla• 15 years ago

I wonder how many people got up in arms when they saw the "Monsanto" and thought a patent-hoarding Satan was running around Wikipedia erasing programming language articles.

This wasn't really a valuable comment, but I couldn't help it.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

that is the outermost danger of tomorrow - the youngs today are made believe in the rule of rule. They will be cutting each other's fingers (of course after due process presided over by the millenium judge) for pressing a button on their own hardware they aren't licensed to press by the EULA or for not using real name on Facebook/Quora.

Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

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