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.
> 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.
How could such a biased thing be a valid WikiPedia criteria?
Neat. Not.
"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:
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.
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 find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.
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.
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.
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.
If Google index becomes a criterion of notability, we are in a deep deep shit.
I wonder if there are any privileged Wikipedia accounts who have defected and are doing a sci-hub thing.
"Those who control the past, control the future"
HN https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=perlmonks.org
HN-Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=perlmonks
Why is that still relevant?
Or to put it another way when does the contemporary move into interesting history?
Apples and oranges.
