Goanna article in EN Wikipedia has been nominated for deletion

[andyprough]

It's entirely WinForms.

I guess that explains why there's only Windows versions of the software.

[Basilisk-Dev]

Semi-related, the Basilisk article has been already been deleted and recreated once. It was nominated for deletion again in March of this year but the person who did the nomination did it wrong so it didn't go through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... on=history

[Moonchild]

Clearly, some people just can't stand the community existing collectively without being backed by millions of dollars.

[frostknight]

Clearly, some people just can't stand the community existing collectively without being backed by millions of dollars.

That is what I refer to ass "asshats"

[Mæstro]

This whole theme reminds me why I dislike Wikipedia in general. Encyclopædia Britannica offers some contrast. Its articles about Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome are just a few paragraphs long. Netscape Navigator and Safari are discussed when relevant to other topics. Konqueror never comes up. There are two articles on mosaics, but they are of interest to the botanist and historian of art; the browser is also mentioned in other articles, as relevant. I do not think any of us feel bad that serious encyclopaedias have not noticed us. Wikipedia’s contents reflect its editors’ interests, which ends up making it a dustbin collecting sports biographies and television episodes. It helps to keep the site in proper perspective.

[Moonchild]

I don't really think you can compare the two. The Brittanica is created and curated by a select few. Wikipedia should be and is much broader by its very nature of being a crowd-authored resource. The problem is that the mods want it to be more classical of an encyclopedia but they can't treat it that way. They must focus primarily on the accuracy and neutrality of content, much less on how popular or personally desirable something is in their view.

[Mæstro]

For obvious historical reasons, Wikipedia pretends to be an encyclopaedia while having been, in fact, the first of a family of wikis, a concept which belongs only to this millennium. Most wikis seem to be about popular culture, and it is not at all surprising the daughters have inherited this from their mother. For fiction, where questions of truth or falsehood are not important, this is well and good. MediaWiki itself offers a superb transition to HTML for users familiar with WYSIWYG formatting or even Markdown. (Of course, we all know here BBCode offers the same. ) I expect neither accuracy nor neutrality from Wikipedia articles, but treat it more like a web portal from the good, old days than anything else, checking its homepage in this spirit, and individual articles like search directories, with links and bibliographies about topics of interest. It can bring my attention to things which exist, whereupon, if it is of any interest at all, I turn at once to proper sources of information about them. I am not above researching a topic of interest online and depositing my results in a paragraph or two for Wikipedia, so I can quietly share others what I found.

[andyprough]

Has anyone attempted the edits on the Wikipedia page? I'm not seeing any changes yet, but I don't know much about how editing works - maybe something has been submitted and is in the approval process?

Update - Never mind, I see that the discussion about keeping the article on Wikipedia is ongoing, and it appears several people from this discussion thread are weighing in over there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... (software)

[BenFenner]

Has anyone attempted the edits on the Wikipedia page?

I have not had the time. Please anyone else jump in. Even though I have said I might, I may never get to it...

[Moonchild]

Wikipedia going to wikipedia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVpg8XOUoc8

Larry Sanger, the Co-Founder of Wikipedia, has been "blocked indefinitely" after he proposed that Wikipedia include "Intellectual Diversity".

[Basilisk-Dev]

Just saw this on there

Please note that this AfD has been linked to and posted about in the official Pale Moon forums with a heavy suggestion direct appeal to make sure the article is kept; nearly all "keep" votes here are from members of the Pale Moon community who probably saw this AfD post on the forums (pandakeko9, Athenian200 (a Pale Moon developer), Genoskill, and I think Job Bautista). I wonder if this behavior violates WP:CANVASSING? It would be nice to have some other Wikipedians weigh in on my proposal to merge this article into Pale Moon. OmegaAOLtalk? 07:24, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

[RealityRipple]

"not taking a position on controversial issues" is not genuine neutrality, it's supporting the status-quo.

[athenian200]

Yeah, I'm afraid based on my understanding, posting about this on the open forum has pretty much guaranteed our article WILL get deleted. I don't think the OP knew about the rule, I didn't either... but based on that standard, there's basically no way anything could be done to save the article by anyone who cares, and it has to be people already inside the Wikipedia community who decide? And people who probably don't know about anything more obscure as far as browsers go than Edge or Brave? They are definitely going to decide it's not notable...

I just hope Job and pandakekok9 don't lose their accounts because of this, I think they were Wikipedia editors to some extent outside our project. This rule is one of those "don't cause drama anywhere or complain, you will be punished and held accountable here for anything you do off-site" modern rules that I don't appreciate.

I feel almost like we were baited into responding and now will be punished. We probably should have just not talked about it...

[Moonchild]

I feel almost like we were baited into responding and now will be punished. We probably should have just not talked about it...

It's nonsense. Not talking about it would have it justifiably deleted for not having any active interest in it warranting removal or merging.
Conveniently, the person starting this and now complaining that it's been discussed here ignored the work people put into looking up references and posting them here to improve the article, as well! And it's not like I asked people to go vote -- I just asked people to improve the references if they could. So there was no "direct appeal to make sure the article is kept"; that's twisting the narrative.

Conversely, if the attitude is that a browser engine doesn't deserve an article of its own if only used in one main application, then the Gecko article should be deleted also, since Gecko is purely a Firefox thing now (since Mozilla clearly distanced itself from SeaMonkey and Thunderbird in their development).

[athenian200]

At this point, I don't even care if the Pale Moon article or the Goanna article are kept. I'm frankly more worried about Job losing his Wikipedia account, because I think he's actually active as a Wikipedian in other areas and I think him being accused of canvassing on behalf of this project could get him banned (since he's the OP). That is just not something I want happening to him because of the simple fact that most of the people with expertise about Goanna are here, and he knows it... which will likely be seen as proof that it's non-notable, and that people outside the Pale Moon community don't care about it, therefore deleted.

It kind of seems like a catch-22 that's hard to break out of unless you are already huge. You're not allowed to inform the project that's being discussed, so the decision will inevitably be made by people who know little or nothing about the subject with no input from those who do. Which means there won't be enough expertise to go around, and it conveniently gets dropped. I do understand that canvassing rule with big, notable things where the discussion could get flooded by a ton of people if it's mentioned off-site... but this kind of thing, it's maybe getting talked about by five or six people who have knowledge because it was posted here?

I do wish people from the forums hadn't voted keep or delete (if that happened, hard to tell?), that makes us look bad. Note that I myself did not vote to keep or delete but rather mentioned Goanna's use in K-Meleon as a point of information people should look into.

[Moonchild]

It's not canvassing!
Canvassing is the practice of going around to many unrelated people to try and motivate them to be active in a way they otherwise would not be nor even aware of the subvject matter at hand. This thread isn't doing that. It's openly discussing how to satisfy Wikipedia's requirements for notable external sources. That is not canvassing.

[athenian200]

Well, I would agree that it's not canvassing in the normal English definition, what I'm worried about is their policy here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

This would likely be the definition they use rather than the plain English meaning. Like, posting this on the Pale Moon forums would presumably draw people who would be in favor of keeping the article... but those people are also the ones that would have the information needed to expand the article, cite sources that meet Wikipedia's standards, or make the best arguments for notability. Also, since Job did post it here before you or I had a chance to see the AfD on our own as a result of checking Wikipedia, others can now argue we wouldn't have seen it and were brought into the discussion when we otherwise would not have been or should not have been involved. The policy seems to imply it's one thing if we are looking at Wikipedia and notice ourselves to contribute to a discussion, but if anyone else is then told using an off-Wikipedia mechanism, it's a problem. They seem to be disallowing the spread of information about an article's status using off-Wikipedia mechanisms as a matter of policy.

And if they do choose to see it that way, the OP will be the one declared guilty and lose his Wikipedia account over this.

But yeah, that's how much of a set back this seems to be. We just went from worrying that the article might be deleted due to lack of information, to now worrying that the guy in our community who told us about the article being proposed for deletion will lose his head over there because he told us about it, and then not be able to contribute to Wikipedia on non-Goanna related things he's knowledgeable about because of it.

It's unfortunately not uncommon for a lot of websites nowadays to have these kind of "no drama please, snitches get stiches and you will be held accountable for what you say on other sites as it relates to us" sort of rules.

Let's face it, Wikipedia is too much of a litigious project for people like us to get involved... I think only people who can read and keep up with all of their policies can meaningfully contribute, because there are so many "gotchas" that are inconsistently enforced. Probably best to steer clear of them, I don't get the feeling they will ever see things our way.

[Moonchild]

I'm not sure in what way this would be handled otherwise.
We don't do closed door backroom secret negotiations to determine PR strategy or presentations on other sites out of our control. That's a level of corporate BS I don't want to touch with a 20 ft pole. If that's what Wikipedia expects because they are so afraid of being called out on their biases, then I can only disappoint.
As for Job losing Wiki editor status? If they are going to, then they are going to anyway -- there's a reason I linked the video above showing they even do it to their co-founder. I don't think us discussing how to improve the article after being mentioned on the forum would make a difference there, and even if it would, that ship has now already sailed, anyway.

So, those with the time and skill to improve the article with more than the minimum amount of flair (props if you get the reference), please do so. If you have independent arguments reading this and are not considered "close" to the project, feel free to poke the "talk" page about the AfD status. If it's going to be deleted or merged, then so be it. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be an accurate-as-feasible resource with factual material in a well-organised manner, but I guess I may have been in error with that assumption. If it gets merged then the next application to build on Goanna that isn't directly related to Pale Moon can make a point to split it back out, I guess. Just more busywork to create churn where none has to be, but so be it.

[back2themoon]

Let me get this straight please:

• Article becomes nominated for deletion by some person because it's deemed "niche", unpopular and does not meet the -extremely vague- guidelines for notability. Sounds quite arbitrary, since "niche" and "unpopular" are highly subjective.
• A group of people interested in the issue get notified. Sounds pretty normal for an "unpopular, niche subject", right?
• Nope. This is "not playing fair".

So, what's the problem here? Interested people voting against this deletion? Isn't that alone proof of popularity, since no malice is involved? What do they want, proof of excellence or something?

Am I missing something here? Because this does look like censorship more than anything else.

[athenian200]

I do have to admit I wonder who this OmegaAOL guy is, though... is he just a normal Wikipedia editor, or someone with an axe to grind against our project who also contributes to Wikipedia? He kind of has us at a disadvantage here, because he knows exactly who we are and where we stand, but we have no idea who he is or why he's so motivated to push for this outcome and raise a fuss using every rule in Wikipedia's policy book if we say anything back.

I get the feeling at this point more people will get involved from higher-up and make a call, and I just hope they see that he's pushing a little too hard and start wondering why he's trying to invoke every policy he can think of to get his way. In other words, I hope that they see it as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikilawyering (their version of rules lawyering) rather than a legitimate interpretation of their policies. At this point, I'd consider them deleting the article but leaving Job's account intact because they see the canvassing thing as BS as a good enough outcome. They think it's not notable? Fair, that's their website and their call. Just don't like the feeling that Job is getting intimidated by this guy citing policy to get people to "hold him accountable" or something as if he made some huge mistake.