<story><title>Why there isn’t an Apache Arrow article in Wikipedia</title><url>https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Open source projects are particularly tricky for Wikipedia. There are tens of thousands of them. Their owners are often passionate. They compete with each other, so there&amp;#x27;s incentive to write hard-to-adjudicate competing claims. Many have commercial backing, which further warps incentives. The projects themselves are highly technical; many, like Arrow, are software development tools and components. There are few authoritative sources that reliably track open source projects. Keeping up involves directly following bug trackers and message boards and then synthesizing a narrative, which is the definition of &amp;quot;original research&amp;quot;, forbidden in the encyclopedia.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s likely that Arrow does deserve a WP article. But Arrow&amp;#x27;s sponsors misunderstand more about Wikipedia than Wikipedia does about Arrow. Writing a defensible article about their project will require work; in particular, they&amp;#x27;re going to need to spend the time tracking down authoritative sources for why Arrow is notable, and those claims will probably need to be something more persuasive than &amp;quot;hundreds of companies use it&amp;quot;; hundreds of companies use all sorts of things that don&amp;#x27;t, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t, be featured in their own encyclopedia articles.&lt;p&gt;I understand the impulse behind &amp;quot;this project is important; it should have a Wikipedia article&amp;quot;. But when you take a step back and accept what Wikipedia actually is, rather than what you think it should be, you&amp;#x27;re left with the question: do we really need to feature this particular piece of software in its own encyclopedia article? 20 years from now, will people still be getting value from it? Whatever value that might be, will it outweigh the 20 years of other people&amp;#x27;s volunteer efforts to maintain the article, keeping it free of vandalism and ensuring that it doesn&amp;#x27;t surreptitiously turn into a promotion piece for some company or another?&lt;p&gt;The answers might be &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. But I don&amp;#x27;t see much evidence in this piece considered the questions.&lt;p&gt;Lots of things that don&amp;#x27;t seem deserving have in-depth Wikipedia coverage. Many of those things probably really don&amp;#x27;t belong in an encyclopedia! But there are two sides to this problem: the merit of the topic, and the cost, in volunteer time, of including them. A marginal topic can be defensible if it&amp;#x27;s easy to reliably cover it. A seemingly important technical topic might not be if the only way to say anything interesting about it is to write original research directly into its article.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Late edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A useful tip for getting your open source project covered in its own Wikipedia article: don&amp;#x27;t have the Chief Marketing Officer of the company that owns the project write the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Analemma_</author><text>This is a great comment; I&amp;#x27;ll just add one other thing, which is something I&amp;#x27;ve mentioned before in arguments about Wikipedia: Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s goal is verifiability, NOT truth. &amp;quot;Truth&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;explicitly&lt;/i&gt; a non-goal of the Wikipedia project. For any given subject, Wikipedia is not meant to provide the truth about that subject, it&amp;#x27;s meant to be a summary and distillation of the existing reliable sources about it. If there are none, that&amp;#x27;s neither Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s fault nor its problem.&lt;p&gt;You can take issue with this goal, but that&amp;#x27;s how it works, and it&amp;#x27;s also how encyclopedias have always worked.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why there isn’t an Apache Arrow article in Wikipedia</title><url>https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Open source projects are particularly tricky for Wikipedia. There are tens of thousands of them. Their owners are often passionate. They compete with each other, so there&amp;#x27;s incentive to write hard-to-adjudicate competing claims. Many have commercial backing, which further warps incentives. The projects themselves are highly technical; many, like Arrow, are software development tools and components. There are few authoritative sources that reliably track open source projects. Keeping up involves directly following bug trackers and message boards and then synthesizing a narrative, which is the definition of &amp;quot;original research&amp;quot;, forbidden in the encyclopedia.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s likely that Arrow does deserve a WP article. But Arrow&amp;#x27;s sponsors misunderstand more about Wikipedia than Wikipedia does about Arrow. Writing a defensible article about their project will require work; in particular, they&amp;#x27;re going to need to spend the time tracking down authoritative sources for why Arrow is notable, and those claims will probably need to be something more persuasive than &amp;quot;hundreds of companies use it&amp;quot;; hundreds of companies use all sorts of things that don&amp;#x27;t, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t, be featured in their own encyclopedia articles.&lt;p&gt;I understand the impulse behind &amp;quot;this project is important; it should have a Wikipedia article&amp;quot;. But when you take a step back and accept what Wikipedia actually is, rather than what you think it should be, you&amp;#x27;re left with the question: do we really need to feature this particular piece of software in its own encyclopedia article? 20 years from now, will people still be getting value from it? Whatever value that might be, will it outweigh the 20 years of other people&amp;#x27;s volunteer efforts to maintain the article, keeping it free of vandalism and ensuring that it doesn&amp;#x27;t surreptitiously turn into a promotion piece for some company or another?&lt;p&gt;The answers might be &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. But I don&amp;#x27;t see much evidence in this piece considered the questions.&lt;p&gt;Lots of things that don&amp;#x27;t seem deserving have in-depth Wikipedia coverage. Many of those things probably really don&amp;#x27;t belong in an encyclopedia! But there are two sides to this problem: the merit of the topic, and the cost, in volunteer time, of including them. A marginal topic can be defensible if it&amp;#x27;s easy to reliably cover it. A seemingly important technical topic might not be if the only way to say anything interesting about it is to write original research directly into its article.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Late edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A useful tip for getting your open source project covered in its own Wikipedia article: don&amp;#x27;t have the Chief Marketing Officer of the company that owns the project write the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re basically into the deletionist vs. inclusionist debate that is at least somewhat orthogonal to what laypeople think of as notability. Is a Pokemon character notable. Not really?? But because of the enthusiastic fan base tons have been written about them.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, whether you&amp;#x27;re talking open source projects beyond the big names, corporate executives, or just people who are reasonably well known within fairly large communities, there just isn&amp;#x27;t a lot of independently sourced published material about them, especially in mainstream pubs--which (somewhat both understandably and ironically) Wikipedia tends to prefer. You even have people with tons of hits on Google but there isn&amp;#x27;t a ton of info &lt;i&gt;about&lt;/i&gt; them online.</text></comment>