The fact is GingerBill or someone else could have kept the article up with enough money spent on the right PR firm that knows how to turn the Wikipedia knobs.

Not if the perception of Wikipedia is „truthful“ and „reliable“.

I’m saying neither, but in that case the article on Wikipedia puts weight behind the statements on the webpage.

I do see your argument: „But it would be adjusted to reflect the truth about it“. Honestly I don’t know enough about Wikipedia to agree or deny it. But given the amount of articles on it, i would lean in the direction that the motivation of a single few would win over the curators. Which means applying a vector that cannot be influenced by those few.

Agreed. I also noticed this myself.

I understand that Wikipedia does not want corporate propaganda or other forms of propaganda, but whether a company exists or not at the time is an objective yes/no answer. It is probably more work to correct propaganda though, so articles are deleted. Would be better to simplify an article down to the bare bone instead, though, so I agree with you here.

> "It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"

Very few people do, which actually makes it worse: of course the spammers and the hustlers are still motivated, so the needle moves more firmly into the territory of "most newcomer contributions are made in bad faith". Editors and admins feel increasingly under siege, so they respond more aggressively to everything.

It's basically the same problem as with real-world policing: because the cops overwhelmingly have deal with "problem" cases (you call them about burglars or drug dealers, not to tell them you baked some cookies), they develop a skewed perception of the average citizen and... well.

They even roll back corrections to grammar. Power tripping overrides common sense.

Two comments about the submission:

First:

The author, katamari64.se, is clearly an incompetent, dishonest, manipulative wretch, deeply similar to some of the wretches he criticizes. And there is absolutely no good reason for the article being as long as it is. The article also is full of completely obvious errors, like footnotes being broken, indicating that it might have been partially or fully generated without review.

Second:

For whatever reason, the article fails to question this claim:

> Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists

Specifically, the "million hobbyists". That number is not sourced and is likely utterly false. The claim about thousands of public projects might be true, judging by https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language:Odin , but many of those repositories are for tiny projects that have not been updated for a long time, or have even been archived. Redmonk does not even seem to list Odin: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-2... . I don't care too much about Odin having a Wikipedia entry or not, but some of the more important claims in favor of Odin's notability are potentially utterly false, yet this article doesn't even address them despite its utterly and unnecessarily bloated length.

To summarize:

The article, its author, and Wikipedia, are, at best, trash.

It is fine that the Wikipedia article was removed, it would also have been fine if it was kept, Wikipedia is trash or worse. If the Odin community wants to be available on Wikipedia, then give credible sources about a million users, and source noteworthy projects written in Odin, not only a few companies using Odin. Odin could also play the shill game, somehow, maybe by paying journalists to write about it or pay shills to promote and upvote it here on Hacker News and other social media, that is common these days for some programming languages, but I generally dislike that, and I don't know what the journalists would even write about. Odin's author could also pay for hitpieces on competing languages, that also seems to be common these days. Was the submission a wretched, low-quality, cultish/ethnic-warfare hitpiece on Odin; paid for by a competing language community; or both? It is reminiscent of the kind of hitpieces and threats of violence and attempted murders that the Rust community is infamous for committing.

Same, I understand the editors/admins can't be experts on every topic but just because THEY don't think something is notable doesn't mean most people don't either.