Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming

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

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

Helpful Raccoon<br>@Helpful Raccoon

March 23, 2026

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,<br>random blogs that happen to use the language, and a self-published e-book. Coverage<br>in academic research consists of trivial mentions.

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

Articles for Deletion votes --<br>original with comments

Action<br>User<br>Time (UTC)

Delete (started AfD)<br>Helpful Raccoon<br>23 Mar 20:53

Delete<br>Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction<br>23 Mar 21:05

Delete<br>GearsDatapacks<br>23 Mar 21:11

Keep<br>~2026-18350-69<br>23 Mar 23:00

Keep<br>~2026-84628-5<br>23 Mar 23:57

Delete<br>Stationsation<br>24 Mar 00:58

Comment<br>Oaktree<br>24 Mar 13:25

Delete<br>Oaktree<br>25 Mar 13:11

Keep<br>Alec Gargett<br>26 Mar 09:17

Keep<br>~2026-84628-5<br>28 Mar 00:06

Delete<br>~2026-19267-04<br>28 Mar 03:38

Delete<br>~2026-20021-65<br>31 Mar 01:03

Summarizing it, 5/7 for delete have accounts, and 1/4 for keep have accounts.<br>Not along after the final vote, a Wikipedia admin deleted the article.<br>Being a little bit lax with my language, the majority's consensus agreed that Odin<br>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<br>might sound a little bit insane to say out loud. How can Odin not be notable?<br>If you are terminally online on programming circles, you most likely have heard of Odin,<br>it's so obvious that I don't feel like I have to make a case at all. It has<br>been covered by the streamer Primeagen and it's used commercially by JangaFX,<br>that's pretty notable to me.

I will be one of the first to say that Wikipedia's processes are far from perfect, and<br>that comes from a place of someone who loves Wikipedia. I love information building,<br>organizing and categorizing, it's a whole challenge in itself. While I would love to<br>talk about indices, references and all of that, for the sake of narrative sense I<br>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<br>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.<br>Ideally I would like if you as a reader were to read as much context as you can before<br>reading my interpretation, but for brevity purposes this first sequence is the only sequence I'm presenting<br>without intertwining my commentary, so if you wish to do so, I recommend trailing away GingerBill's twitter<br>thread.

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

gingerBill<br>@TheGingerBill

April 20, 2026

Thank you @BrodieOnLinux for covering the Wikipedia fiasco for Odin.<br>We don't particularly care if Odin is on Wikipedia or not; especially<br>when Wikipedia itself is rarely reliable, but we've been dealing with<br>Wikipedia mods for years.

Our best hypothesis 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".<br>Wikipedia in general is an ideological playground, and the inclusion of articles are gatekept by activists.

The Wikipedia Mods (like Reddit mods, or even Digg mods back in the day), view<br>themselves as "journalists" and trying to do the "morally ideological" thing<br>by only allowing certain posts on there; programming languages are just<br>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 whataboutism defence that is brought up is fundamentally...