Item — HN Reader

I find it strange that they deleted the article. The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. I think there is a deeper bureaucratic pattern behind it. In every once-useful organization, there comes a point where the rules stop being instruments and become relics: nobody asks whether they still serve the original purpose, because the bureaucracy now exists mainly to defend its own procedures. That is basically Parkinson territory, and also the classic drift into cargo cult administration.

The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.

That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.

1 comments

> The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest.

According to what authority?

I'm not an Odin user, but interested in programming languages. Concerning Odin, we have these figures:

GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016.

I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.

I'm curious where you draw the line? Is 9,999 github stars (or any other metric) too few, but then one more magically makes it worthy of inclusion? Or maybe it should be done by degrees: at 1,000 stars, maybe a sentence or two; a paragraph at 5,000, several sections at 10,000, and so on?

The problem, of course, is that such measures are arbitrary and probably gameable. Not that the current criteria aren't, of course, but it's the best we've got.

The whole point of wikipedia was that no such silly rules were in place; a topic is worth publishing as long as there is someone willing to publish it and there are no good reasons (e.g. laws) to not to do so.

According to whom? As far as I can tell, the purpose of Wikipedia, since inception, has been to make an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. That doesn't necessitate there being limits on what articles can persist without being deleted, but neither does it preclude it.

If you're looking for a wiki site that doesn't limit the articles that appear on it, you can have a look at EvedybodyWiki.

> According to whom?

It's very founder (Wales).

Citation needed. But I don't suggest putting too much stock in what he says. For instance, he calls himself, as you call him, founder, yet by any reasonable measure he co-founded it with Larry Sanger. But neither holds much more than a historical role in Wikipedia now; Wales lost the elevated rights he had in the backlash to him mass-deleting images, and Sanger was banned quite recently after canvassing on twitter.

Wikipedia doesn't care about Github stars, forks or discord members, but "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".

As far as I'm aware, there are no articles in the press about Odin, no academic papers, no non-self-published books, no conference talks, not anything that rises to the standard required by Wikipedia for inclusion of a topic.

As I said, at some point the bueraucracy took over. In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved. Here in Switzerland, we have a fitting expression for the present behavior in face of obsolescence: "schön sterben" (to die beautifully).

In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved.

Such approaches rarely scale: When the Eternal September rolls in, you tighten the reins or get swept away...

> you tighten the reins or fold...

But don't tell me they will fold because they have an article about the Odin programming language. I rather think people will vote with their feet once more when they hear for what silly reasons it was deleted.

But don't tell me they will fold because they have an article about the Odin programming language.

Who should decide when to enforce the notability rules, and when to skirt them?

I rather think people will vote with their feet once more

Maybe, maybe not - they've stuck around for a quarter century already...

Apologies for not catching this in my last reply.

> I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.

Then by all means, flag them for deletion. Although I would understand if you don't want to make that effort (I mean this genuinely, not as a rebuke).

> Then by all means, flag them for deletion

Why should I? Who am I to decide for other people what's interesting for them? Having those articles in place doesn't bother anyone (as long as they don't violate laws) and essentially don't cost a dime.

In broad strokes, the reason is because the line has to be drawn somewhere.

If you want, you can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Existence_%E2%89%A0_... and the links there to gain some idea of the reasoning behind it.

Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation.