2026-04-20
Recently, Brodie Robertson produced a video on the Bizarre World of Wikipedia Deleting Programming Pages. I highly recommend watching the video.
I thank Brodie for covering the Wikipedia fiasco for Odin. We don’t particularly care if Odin is on Wikipedia or not; especially when Wikipedia itself is rarely reliable, but we’ve been dealing with Wikipedia mods for years. Our best hypothesis Which could very well be wrong too, and I’d love to be proven wrong. is quite simple: some of the mods just don’t like Odin as a language and don’t want it on Wikipedia as any form of “advertisement”.
How Time Flies
I started Odin nearly 10 years ago now I started Odin in July 2016… I feel old now., and it was never meant to be as big as it was today. Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists. We are really grateful for everyone who enjoys and uses Odin, and we will continue to improve it. A lot of people do not understand how much work goes into making a production-grade programming language—something that can be used in production by companies as their main programming language.
The Wikipedia comments regarding deletion saying that anyone can make a language is true, but those are usually mere toys, and cannot be used for anything useful If they honestly believe making a production-grade programming language is that easy, I cannot wait for them to make one. And see how long it takes them.. I am grateful that these Wikipedia mods state everything in public, so that we can actually see what their opinions are for everyone to see.
Ideological Playground
Wikipedia in general is an ideological By ideological, I do not necessarily “political”, rather they follow an ideology, a set of doctrines/beliefs, for better or for worse. playground, and the inclusion of articles are gatekept by activists. Some Wikipedia Mods Just like Reddit mods, or even Digg mods back in the day view themselves as “journalists” and trying to do the “morally ideological” thing by only allowing certain posts on there; programming languages are just one example of that. For many people programming languages are a religion to them I do not know, nor do I care what their preferred language of choice is., rather than just a mere tool. They will try and defend their favourite language at any cost, even if that means not allowing other languages to “advertise”. The entire “whataboutism” defence that is brought up is fundamentally just a legal loophole that they can use to prevent any article they deem not adhering to their position.
The Ill-Fitted Criteria for Programming
This section was originally part of a Twitter/X conversation with Jimmy Wales (the co-founder of Wikipedia):
I’m not concerned about the deletion itself, even as the creator of the programming language, but rather I am concerned about the criteria used, and how they are a poor fit for the programming domain.
“Reliable sources” in programming are scarce. The examples cited in the comments of that deletion discussion are either sparsely read or not even general-programming-related. The field simply lacks well-respected journals or forums for serious discussion: it’s the Wild Wild West. Peer-reviewed papers on programming topics specifically are not necessarily reputable or reliable I am not talking about peer reviewed papers in general in other fields which do not act the same as programming. But “Peer Review”, something that didn’t exist until the 1960s, isn’t the be all and end all of reputability or fountain of wisdom. However, I’ll leave that discussion for another day.. Most of the old “reputable sources” are exactly that: old. Few people read them anymore, and many have devolved into product advertising or chasing the latest hype-cycle. Who decides which websites are more authoritative than others, especially when no one is regularly reading them?
A lot that exists today just has tenured inertia of being there, uncontested for so long that that the uncontestation is the only thing notable about them to begin with. Applied consistently, these criteria would warrant removing over 90% of programming-related articles from Wikipedia. I don’t want that, but it would be the logical outcome.
This isn’t a plea to reinstate the article. It’s a request to reconsider how these rules apply to the programming domain.
Specifically, on the sourcing issue here, the programming language community is quite fragmented. There is not a strong ecosystem of widely recognized primary nor secondary sources covering many of the technologies people actually use. The few reputable outlets tend to be outdated or narrowly focused, whilst most meaningful discussion happens elsewhere.
A lot of current knowledge lives in personal blogs, small communities, or closed channels like Discord, which do not fit well with Wikipedia’s sourcing standards. This creates a gap where the information is real and relevant, and even notable, but not captured in a way that meets traditional reliability or notability requirements.
That leaves us in a difficult position. If we apply the rules strictly, we exclude much of the contemporary landscape. If we loosen them, we risk promotion and noise. This seems less like an issue with individual articles and more like a mismatch between the rules and how knowledge in this field is actually shared.
Personal Vendettas
It’s reasonable to pose the question, that Odin might be more of a vanity project and self-promotion. The language is very strongly tied and centers around the outspoken persona of “Ginger Bill”, as if a cult leader. Jai and Jonathan Blow can be put into this category too, but are way more sucessful with that strategy and have a much wider following. In either case, Wikipedia and other languages are not to blame for lack of WP:GNG for Odin as a language versus that of a person or leader.
To use the “whataboutism” WAX (What About X?) is a common way Wikipedia moderators dismiss valid complaints when their rules are not consistently applied, as I talk about previously., other programming languages have sources which I would never class as reputable in the slightest, but they probably belong to a list of sites/sources made years ago when those sites/sources might have been viewed as “reputable”. My hypothesis that some mods just do not like Odin (or myself) is kind of shown in one of the comments even referring to me as “cult leader”. I’d love to be shown some reputable article documenting this accusation—or any evidence for that matter.
A Decade in the Making
Many people think Odin is “just for games” at the moment, but that tells you more about the people who say that than Odin itself. This is especially true when gamedev is pretty much the most wide domain possible where you will do virtually every area of programming possible. Odin is a general purpose language; is capable of being used in numerous different areas from application development, servers, graphics, games, kernels, CLI/TUIs, etc.
We believe in the coming months with the introduction of things like the native http package and a few other things, that those packages alone will make people think Odin is a “proper language”. We hope that because of all the tremendous effort that everyone who has put work into the language that:
Odin will be an overnight success—a decade in the making.