GoKawiilprogramming public-discourse politics Written on 27 Apr 2026 9238 words 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 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, 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:
Articles for Deletion votes -- original with comments 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.
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