Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

Imagine one day you wake up, you drink your morning glass of milk, brush your teeth, sit on your computer, stare your own diffuse image on the display, while reflecting on your own gingerness. You turn on the nerd machine while doing the daily "no updates" Windows pray. The computer is finally on, and what is that... Wikipedia link? What is this "Articles for Deletion Odin (Programming Language)", oh no, that doesn't sound good.

Fortunately we are mere readers of these events. I don't know if that's an accurate reconstruction of GingerBill's steps (creator of the Odin Programming language, and officially recognized ginger) as I'm not him nor Palantir, but I'm fairly confident about the ginger part, and that at some point he read the following statement about the article on the Odin Programming Language:

Helpful Raccoon@Helpful Raccoon

Non-notable programming language that has received no in-depth coverage from reliable sources. The article's current sources consist of the developer's personal sites, random blogs that happen to use the language, and a self-published e-book. Coverage in academic research consists of trivial mentions.

Last week, the Odin article on Wikipedia was deleted through a typical Articles for Deletion (AfD) process:

| Action | User | Time (UTC) | |---|---|---| | Delete (started AfD) | Helpful Raccoon | 23 Mar 20:53 | | Delete | Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction | 23 Mar 21:05 | | Delete | GearsDatapacks | 23 Mar 21:11 | | Keep | ~2026-18350-69 | 23 Mar 23:00 | | Keep | ~2026-84628-5 | 23 Mar 23:57 | | Delete | Stationsation | 24 Mar 00:58 | | Comment | Oaktree | 24 Mar 13:25 | | Delete | Oaktree | 25 Mar 13:11 | | Keep | Alec Gargett | 26 Mar 09:17 | | Keep | ~2026-84628-5 | 28 Mar 00:06 | | Delete | ~2026-19267-04 | 28 Mar 03:38 | | Delete | ~2026-20021-65 | 31 Mar 01:03 |

Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts. Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article. Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin isn't notable, and the article had no reliable sources.

If you are familiar with Odin, one of the most popular "C competitor" languages, this might sound a little bit insane to say out loud. How can Odin not be notable? If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin, it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX, that's pretty notable to me.

I will be one of the first to say that Wikipedia's processes are far from perfect, and that comes from a place of someone who loves Wikipedia. I love information building, organizing and categorizing, it's a whole challenge in itself. While I would love to talk about indices, references and all of that, for the sake of narrative sense I want us to go back to on our main victim here: GingerBill. How did he feel about this?

Luckily for us GingerBill has made some version of his thoughts public. It starts with him thanking a YouTuber called BrodieRobertson for his video Bizarre World Of Wikipedia Deleting Programming Pages, which covers specifically the Odin deletion.

I will show GingerBill's posts as-is except for minor highlights. Ideally I would like if you as a reader were to read as much context as you can before reading my interpretation, but for brevity purposes this first sequence is the only sequence I'm presenting without intertwining my commentary, so if you wish to do so, I recommend trailing away GingerBill's twitter thread.

Not because this will make it easier my point to be made, but because the entire point of this article is to counter the social media persona where dunking by performative disinterest and uncuriosity are a virtue and rewarded by engagement and short-term reward structures. Nonetheless, the thread:

gingerBill@TheGingerBill

Thank you @BrodieOnLinux for covering the Wikipedia fiasco for Odin. We don't particularly care if Odin is on Wikipedia or not; especially when

The Wikipedia Mods (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, 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

I started Odin nearly 10 years ago 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.

The comments saying that anyone can make a language is true, but those are usually mere toys, and cannot be used for anything useful.

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.

This first thread clearly has two topics in its throught stream: Wikipedia is unreliable, gatekept by activists, ideological playground where rules are mere procedural tools to achieve their ideological goals — and Odin will persevere.

I like how GingerBill has highlighted that Wikipedia mods state everything in public since that enables us to find two of my favorite things: paper trail and evidence.

If you paid careful attention, I've mostly highlighted statements directed at Wikipedia. Most non-highlights sound like a rallying cry for the Odin community, I take no issue with that, virtue signaling is part of forming a community.

On the other hand, the highlights are serious accusations about a culturally significant institution, and these statements are rhetorically contradicted by the discourse's evolution in the following day. The tone shifted when a minor twitterino (260 followers) tagged big twitterino Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder, 214.5k followers) 1 — thus he replied about the alleged persecution to delete Odin's article:

jimmy_wales@jimmy_wales

Thank you.

I say this as someone who leans somewhat "inclusionist" - it seems like a good deletion to me.

Well I guess that's it, Jimmy has spoken and he agrees with the AfD's consensus and the admin's deletion. Surely that's end of story? Says the writer halfway through an article with a confronting title.

That was not it, on the contrary, a new foe has appeared and I'm about to make a lot of enemies.

Casey Muratori, performance-aware warrior, star programmer, slayer of oops, mother of dragons, has appeared. Short introduction, he is a famous videogame programmer who used to work at RAD Game Tools, but has made a significant following due his Handmade Hero livestream series where he codes a game from scratch.

The series is great and I recommend watching some episodes if you have a lot of spare time, his educational content is — in my personal observation — very positively influential. Not necessarily due direct influence, but because his streams facilitated an online and physical community around carefully crafted software. [2]

Let me be clear from the