The reasons for deletion don't seem that outlandish to me. I'd rather not see them deleted, but I also don't think this outcome is that surprising, nor would I describe it as a "memory wipe."
The CPAN page on Wikipedia has existed for 24 years, has dozens of references, yet an editor nominated it for deletion - I can't help but feel that as hostile. Fortunately this one has been voted "keep", but still...
"Self-Organizing Social Learning Through the Monastery Gates" ( Rose M. Baker & David L. Passmore : The Pennsylvania State University ; 2005 )
"Abstract
An example of an emergent, self-organizing on-line social
learning system is available at the PerlMonks site at
http://perlmonks.org/. Perl is a scripting language
commonly used to as an interface between databases and
web pages. Provided in this paper is a review of principles
of emergent, self-organizing systems from a perspective
of learning systems as well as case study of PerlMonks as
self-organizing eLearning."
That article wouldn't be deleted, because I can find 20 or so references in paper publications saying things like "The Stack Exchange family of websites is a Q&A service for developers and other technical roles. If you’re stuck on a problem, the chances are someone else was too and turned to Stack Exchange for help", or in some cases doing a quick bio of Jeff Atwood or mentioning codinghorror.
Hmm, OTOH I can also find multiple paper references to perlmonks, such as "Perlmonks is a web bulletin board dedicated to Perl. It’s not specifically a help desk, but if you’ve done your homework and ask a good question, you’re likely to get top-notch help very quickly" - that's from the O'Reilly Perl book. Sometimes I'm overoptimistic about these things, because I want to keep every obscure article.
Well, Perlmonks is still mentioned on the articles for Perl, Outline of the Perl programming language, Perl language structure, and Perl Foundation. (This is because deletionists are lazy and don't actually like doing a thorough job.) So I could see Perlmonks becoming a redirect to one of those pages, which could describe it in a section. Similarly, if Stack Exchange faded into obscurity, it might be rolled into a section of Jeff Atwood's page (or vice versa).
I'll never understand the amount of vitriol Wikipedia volunteers must receive. Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?
I find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.
> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?
FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:
* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.
* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?
* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.
* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?
* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.
> Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.
Nobody is forcing you to use Google. If you can provide an acceptable source without the help of Google, go ahead. But the burden of proof is on the one who claims sources exist.
> An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.
Such is life when anyone can nominate anything at any moment... and when many articles that should have never been submitted in the first place slip through cracks of haphazard volunteer quality control. (Stack Overflow also suffers from the latter.)
The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.
> Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.
It was wrong to submit the article without sourcing in the first place. Circular sourcing is not allowed.
> The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.
The system works if the sources remain available, and in an environment predisposed to link rot that can be a problem. Imagine the hypothetical situation of archive.org disappearing overnight? Should we then delete all pages with it as their sole source if they're not updated within a week?
And the system works if intentions are pure - it seems here the user that suggested the deletion of several Perl related pages is a fan of film festivals[1] and clearly wasn't happy that the "White Camel Award" is a Perl award, since the late 90s, and not a film festival award (since the early 00s). At least according to Google. So they went on a bit of a rampage against Perl articles on Wikipedia.
You could argue "editor doing their job", but I would argue "conflict of interest".
These are all bad-faith takes. What are you doing?
24 years ago, some people wrote on Wikipedia instead of elsewhere. So the wiki page itself became a primary source.
"The page shouldn't have been submitted..." This was a Wiki! If you're unfamiliar with the origin of the term, it was a site mechanism designed to lean in to quick capture and interweaving of documents. Volunteers wrote; the organization of the text arose through thousands of hands shaping it. Most of them were software developers at the time. At a minimum, the software-oriented pages should get special treatment for that alone.
You're acting as though this is producing the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, held to a pale imitation of its standards circa the 1980s. The thing is, Britannica employed people to go do research for its articles.
Wikipedia is not Britannica, and this retroactive "shame on them" is unbelievable nonsense.
People get extremely frustrated and upset about arbitrary rules, especially when they are imposed inconsistently.
From the talk page it seems like exactly three people were involved in deciding if this was worth deleting and they indicated they could not find evidence of notability. Meanwhile I found a Register article about PerlMonks in minutes and there are pointers here to Google Scholar references as well.
When the bar for deletion is “a couple of people who didn’t try very hard didn’t find notability” is it any wonder that there’s pushback? This feels entirely arbitrary.
Consider the other perspective: how should Perl programmers feel when Google's index becomes the main criterion for what is considered important or not? This creates a circular dependency that can erase genuine technical contributions from the historical record.
A building that wasn't a pyramid, but had simple step sided walls is only significant in retrospect!
ie it only became of historic interest after the fact as people retrospectively thought it might have influenced later more significant buildings.
While I agree a page about Perl Monks isn't likely to be that significant - I was making a general philosophical point.
Eg how do you know that PerlMonks doesn't end up being one of the earliest examples for self-organising elearning - a movement that ends up replacing Universities in the future?
In terms of the details of this page leejo posts are more substantive.
The new rule of notability: if it’s no longer in Google’s index, it basically doesn't meet Wikipedia's notability criteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion...
"From a Google search, I wasn’t able to find" appears multiple times on that page alone.
The relevant part is before that:
> This article is exclusively sourced on primary sources.
The Google search is the nominator looking for an alternative source that could make it notable, something earlier editors failed to establish.
In short, Google decides what stays in Wikipedia.
Neat. Not.
Not really,if that thing is cited on notable papers or books, it stays too.
Except if Google decides otherwise.
And then Wikipedia follows suit.
No.
The Google search wouldn't even have happened had the article had sources listed for the claim.
Thus Google gets the final word on whether an article is deleted.
No. The author gets the final word, by including citations as they should.
The reasons for deletion don't seem that outlandish to me. I'd rather not see them deleted, but I also don't think this outcome is that surprising, nor would I describe it as a "memory wipe."
The CPAN page on Wikipedia has existed for 24 years, has dozens of references, yet an editor nominated it for deletion - I can't help but feel that as hostile. Fortunately this one has been voted "keep", but still...
Deleted pages are no longer accessible, meaning the history of changes is gone. “Memory wipe” seems reasonable.
"Self-Organizing Social Learning Through the Monastery Gates" ( Rose M. Baker & David L. Passmore : The Pennsylvania State University ; 2005 )
"Abstract
An example of an emergent, self-organizing on-line social learning system is available at the PerlMonks site at http://perlmonks.org/. Perl is a scripting language commonly used to as an interface between databases and web pages. Provided in this paper is a review of principles of emergent, self-organizing systems from a perspective of learning systems as well as case study of PerlMonks as self-organizing eLearning."
PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rose-Baker/publication/...
via google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22perlmonks.org%22
So this is about PerlMonks, which I knew nothing about until today.
I searched it, the site is down The Wikipedia article is deleted
This is pure loss of information somehow.
I and a lot of other people in the future will never know what "perlmonks" is/are, how important it was?, etc. etc.
The logic seems to be: if tomorrow Stack Exchange disappears, the Wikipedia article will be deleted? If yes, then that makes zero sense.
That article wouldn't be deleted, because I can find 20 or so references in paper publications saying things like "The Stack Exchange family of websites is a Q&A service for developers and other technical roles. If you’re stuck on a problem, the chances are someone else was too and turned to Stack Exchange for help", or in some cases doing a quick bio of Jeff Atwood or mentioning codinghorror.
Hmm, OTOH I can also find multiple paper references to perlmonks, such as "Perlmonks is a web bulletin board dedicated to Perl. It’s not specifically a help desk, but if you’ve done your homework and ask a good question, you’re likely to get top-notch help very quickly" - that's from the O'Reilly Perl book. Sometimes I'm overoptimistic about these things, because I want to keep every obscure article.
Well, Perlmonks is still mentioned on the articles for Perl, Outline of the Perl programming language, Perl language structure, and Perl Foundation. (This is because deletionists are lazy and don't actually like doing a thorough job.) So I could see Perlmonks becoming a redirect to one of those pages, which could describe it in a section. Similarly, if Stack Exchange faded into obscurity, it might be rolled into a section of Jeff Atwood's page (or vice versa).
I'll never understand the amount of vitriol Wikipedia volunteers must receive. Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?
I find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.
> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?
FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:
* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.
* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?
* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.
* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?
* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.
> Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.
Nobody is forcing you to use Google. If you can provide an acceptable source without the help of Google, go ahead. But the burden of proof is on the one who claims sources exist.
> An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.
Such is life when anyone can nominate anything at any moment... and when many articles that should have never been submitted in the first place slip through cracks of haphazard volunteer quality control. (Stack Overflow also suffers from the latter.)
The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.
> Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.
It was wrong to submit the article without sourcing in the first place. Circular sourcing is not allowed.
> The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.
The system works if the sources remain available, and in an environment predisposed to link rot that can be a problem. Imagine the hypothetical situation of archive.org disappearing overnight? Should we then delete all pages with it as their sole source if they're not updated within a week?
And the system works if intentions are pure - it seems here the user that suggested the deletion of several Perl related pages is a fan of film festivals[1] and clearly wasn't happy that the "White Camel Award" is a Perl award, since the late 90s, and not a film festival award (since the early 00s). At least according to Google. So they went on a bit of a rampage against Perl articles on Wikipedia.
You could argue "editor doing their job", but I would argue "conflict of interest".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahara_Internatio... # amongst many in their edit history
These are all bad-faith takes. What are you doing?
24 years ago, some people wrote on Wikipedia instead of elsewhere. So the wiki page itself became a primary source.
"The page shouldn't have been submitted..." This was a Wiki! If you're unfamiliar with the origin of the term, it was a site mechanism designed to lean in to quick capture and interweaving of documents. Volunteers wrote; the organization of the text arose through thousands of hands shaping it. Most of them were software developers at the time. At a minimum, the software-oriented pages should get special treatment for that alone.
You're acting as though this is producing the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, held to a pale imitation of its standards circa the 1980s. The thing is, Britannica employed people to go do research for its articles.
Wikipedia is not Britannica, and this retroactive "shame on them" is unbelievable nonsense.
> And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.
This is such an absurd take. “It this one example the system worked so clearly it’s fine.”
People get extremely frustrated and upset about arbitrary rules, especially when they are imposed inconsistently.
From the talk page it seems like exactly three people were involved in deciding if this was worth deleting and they indicated they could not find evidence of notability. Meanwhile I found a Register article about PerlMonks in minutes and there are pointers here to Google Scholar references as well.
When the bar for deletion is “a couple of people who didn’t try very hard didn’t find notability” is it any wonder that there’s pushback? This feels entirely arbitrary.
Consider the other perspective: how should Perl programmers feel when Google's index becomes the main criterion for what is considered important or not? This creates a circular dependency that can erase genuine technical contributions from the historical record.
Because it puts the history of the article behind a lock
I wonder if there are any privileged Wikipedia accounts who have defected and are doing a sci-hub thing.
> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act
"Those who control the past, control the future"
perlmonks
HN https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=perlmonks.org
HN-Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=perlmonks
Wikipedia has a page for an Egyptian King that ruled for perhaps only 10 years 5000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anedjib
Why is that still relevant?
Or to put it another way when does the contemporary move into interesting history?
When did the Perl Monks run a kingdom?
Apples and oranges.
Or more importantly, when did the Perl Monks build a pyramid? Plenty of rulers are long forgotten.
A building that wasn't a pyramid, but had simple step sided walls is only significant in retrospect!
ie it only became of historic interest after the fact as people retrospectively thought it might have influenced later more significant buildings.
While I agree a page about Perl Monks isn't likely to be that significant - I was making a general philosophical point.
Eg how do you know that PerlMonks doesn't end up being one of the earliest examples for self-organising elearning - a movement that ends up replacing Universities in the future?
In terms of the details of this page leejo posts are more substantive.
The deletion proposals do not mention "interesting" anywhere.
Correct, the cited factor is lack of significant coverage.
The PerlMonks page was in death as it was in life: completely unreadable.