Goanna article in EN Wikipedia has been nominated for deletion

[Gemmaugr]

I've known about Wikipedias sad state for a some time, and it is regrettable indeed. I've looked for and used various alternatives to it, but none can quite compare sadly.
It's also a recurring theme among various social gatherings that Paragraph-riding Karens tend to take over leading roles and abuse their position for their own biases unfortunately.

While Larry Sanger went the "Meta-Pedia" way of the Encyclosphere, I think wiki's (excepting niche wikis like Anime and Gaming fandom wiki's) are on the decline.
I see the future being split into some using Big Tech LLM's like ChatGPT and others using https://grokipedia.com/page/Pale_Moon

[walmar]

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

… or without a confusing build-in advertising Xperience.

Moreover, the initiator appears to be “promoting” Pale Moon while simultaneously advertising his own Firefox fork on Reddit. It’s interesting that Goanna and Basilisk don’t have this “promotion” on Reddit (I forgot to add this sentence). So, some social media Xperts might therefore believe there is only Pale Moon instead of XUL. This user is also working on other interesting projects, such as Skymu for Windows Vista+.

As a side note, you might also think which „big friend" of Pale Moon is also promoting climate news and Wikipedia on its website about a NATO AI-styled Netscape Navigator replica.

If that is not enough, one more has following the al-go-rithm on the same day (12th).

I cannot say for certain why someone might think the Goanna engine does not deserve its own article. However, before the Goanna engine becomes irrelevant – following the discontinuation of the last familar Gecko-based browser, Waterfox 56 – it is entirely possible, given user statistics, that the Gecko engine will lose significance first. This is therefore hardly the right time to dismiss the Goanna engine as something of little interest.

And to everyone who thinks there has to be an ongoing browser war:
Did Mozilla keep waging a browser war to become popular? I wouldn't describe it that way. Instead, they built a community. What did they do later? They may well have left the existing community through their decisions. It was not the other way around. Because I know that I'm basically still using the same PC hardware, operating system, bookmark description field, extensions and browser settings as I did back in the days of Firefox 56 (yes, including all the current downsides regarding security and web compatibility), whereas latest Firefox no longer supports this. While some users on Reddit are writing excitedly about their Google Firefox/Chrome browser hopping.

If users of open-source browsers want to come together again as a stronger community, what needs to be done? How can the community be placed at the center and made great again?

Perhaps they could introduce an extension system that is compatible with WebExtensions but less restrictive. Wait a minute – something similar already existed, at least until 2017; back then, developers could create all kinds of extensions, even hybrid ones.

And as for existing integrated basic features, these must be retained to ensure full functionality. For example, if some users of Gecko/Goanna-based browsers use bookmark descriptions, while the majority of users do not. So why remove the field instead of letting people decide for themselves whether they want to use it? If it is only needed occasionally by 1% of users, it should be left in its current location, and the empty field could optionally be hidden for those who do not wish to use it.

Given the amount of targeted website optimization Mozilla has undertaken, the following might well fall into a similar category. If we want a larger open-source browser community, we cannot ignore users who are looking for a fast browser for mainstream web services like YouTube or GitHub. Simply introducing e10s as the default for the well-known services that need it most would already be a huge step forward. At the same time, a broader user base would become more aware of how resource-intensive certain web services are and how vulnerable e10s is in terms of security. Introducing e10s in this way would allow users who are currently forced to use it all the time to opt for less frequent use (in hybrid mode with content processes per opt-in document domain).

Perhaps something like this could be a little bit of a way out of the browsing disaster of the 2010s. It is incredible how quickly other software projects were overtaken by forks when they worked against the community – while Mozilla, backed by millions of dollars from Google, continues to dominate the Gecko browser space, which is shrinking year by year.

[athenian200]

Moreover, the initiator appears to be “promoting” Pale Moon while simultaneously advertising his own Firefox fork on Reddit. So, some social media Xperts might therefore believe there is only Pale Moon instead of XUL. This user is also working on other interesting projects, such as Skymu for Windows Vista+.

https://github.com/OmegaAOL/Skyfox/releases/tag/beta-3

And... this was the guy saying we weren't neutral enough and had a conflict of interest?

[back2themoon]

Yup. This was fishy from day one.

[Moonchild]

I'd say that this alone would be enough grounds to dismiss the AfD status and have the attempt be subject to sanctions. Wikipedia is not a place to initiate turf wars or manipulate a competing browser's technological presence on the Internet.
Someone more well-spoken in terms of dealing with these kinds of people than I can probably raise this user's conflict of interest with Wikipedia staff. Thanks for the sleuthing; it does make more sense now why this was initiated by that user in particular.

[Gemmaugr]

Moreover, the initiator appears to be “promoting” Pale Moon while simultaneously advertising his own Firefox fork on Reddit.

Very interesting information. I've had unpleasant conversations with him about his spread of FUD and disinfo regarding Pale Moon on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comme ... d/osjeamg/).

If he's that biased against Goanna, and Pale Moon, that would surely be a dismissal of his Wikipedia actions. Or so one would hope.

[walmar]

It’s interesting that Goanna and Basilisk don’t have this “promotion” on Reddit (I forgot to add this sentence).

[athenian200]

Yeah, though this info we've unearthed here should likely not be repeated on the Wikipedia AfD talk page. If it does spill over, it will likely be seen as us mirroring an escalation and turning this into turf war/battleground behavior. I do wonder if there is some legitimate mechanism for us to point this out without it just becoming some kind of weird argument/edit war situation, though?

We really don't want to let this degenerate into us accusing him of stuff and him accusing us of stuff... we need to be the adults here. As hard as it is.

[Moonchild]

should likely not be repeated on the Wikipedia AfD talk page

Agreed, which is why I said "take it to staff". We don't need mudflinging but the decisionmakers on the deletion should be well-informed. I took it more like a "reason why" but ultimately what should only matter for the article is facts.
I'm however not sure if there is a way other than the talk page to bring this up.

[honorific]

should likely not be repeated on the Wikipedia AfD talk page

I'm however not sure if there is a way other than the talk page to bring this up.

I'm not too familiar with Wikipedia policy, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is the Administrator's Noticeboard which I believe would be the best bet for issues requiring staff attention -- that, or contacting an administrator in private. There's also several other noticeboards, but again, I'm not familiar with Wikipedia so not sure if one's more applicable.

Edit: Just noticed there's a conflict of interest noticeboard as well, though with limitations as to what can be mentioned there.

[back2themoon]

The nerve of some people. I hope someone WP-knowledgeable deals with this properly and decisively.

[UCyborg]

… or without a confusing build-in advertising Xperience.

Moreover, the initiator appears to be “promoting” Pale Moon while simultaneously advertising his own Firefox fork on Reddit. It’s interesting that Goanna and Basilisk don’t have this “promotion” on Reddit (I forgot to add this sentence). So, some social media Xperts might therefore believe there is only Pale Moon instead of XUL. This user is also working on other interesting projects, such as Skymu for Windows Vista+.

A fork of a fork of r3dfox, interesting. So Firefox 140 was when DownThemAll! still worked? The bootstrapped extension loader has been known for quite a while, you know Tab Mix Plus author still actively maintains his extension for current Firefoxes and this loader is needed to be able to install the extension.

I haven't tried r3dfox in a while, but when I did, the thing with removing Windows 10 GUID from the manifest for the native controls' appearance strucked me like an ugly hack.

About Skymu, interesting how you can target old .NET Framework and new .NET in single project like that.

[walmar]

A fork of a fork of r3dfox, interesting. So Firefox 140 was when DownThemAll! still worked? The bootstrapped extension loader has been known for quite a while, you know Tab Mix Plus author still actively maintains his extension for current Firefoxes and this loader is needed to be able to install the extension. [...]

To be honest, I don't follow the latest developments regarding Firefox and its customization options all that closely anymore. I tend to read more about its forks, the forks of those forks, and so on. As far as I know, customization options are very limited, even in Mypal68. And none of them have reintroduced bookmark descriptions so far.

[UCyborg]

Same, but I keep at least one Firefox-based instance around (and another Chromium-based) and many months pass before I get around to updating them. The firefox-scripts repo and the one by Aris-t2 with his CSS magic were the must go-to to get most out of Firefox.

[athenian200]

Hello everyone! I am the editor who nominated the article for deletion and one of the (YES) votes. I just want to clear it up to you all that I don't have anything against Pale Moon and in fact I used K-Meleon (a Goanna based browser) as my primary long ago. I would be open to improving the base Pale Moon article and would be happy to hear your suggestions for how to do so.

About Skyfox, it was just a fun expirement that lasted a few days and was discontinued (my Skyfox changes were merged into Nocturne, another fork of Redfox) before I made the AfD, so no conflict of interest here. I just did so because as an editor I am interested in keeping the encyclopedia up to the standards the community has decided to maintain.

I enjoy the fact that this project exists and wish PM long-term success with the hope it becomes once again viable as a browser choice for me. There may be some nitpicks I have about the browser but overall I'm happy someone is working on something like UXP.

I can only speak for myself here, but I don't really have any hard feelings about the way the deletion process played out. At first we were mostly trying to see if we could improve the source quality and save the article after Job told us it was up for deletion, but then the whole canvassing concern thing threw us for a loop and made me feel like we had to stay completely out of it and let Wikipedia make their own decision without another word on our part or else Job (who I believe is a Wikipedia editor for subjects not related to us and happens to be a forum member) might get punished for bringing it to our attention in a public manner. Like, to be fair, I did not vote to keep or delete myself (only commented), but since this was posted on the open forum, some members might have voted keep since we didn't know we needed to explicitly tell them not to vote due to a conflict of interest or whatever. So it's like... it may have technically counted under their rules, but I don't think it was Job's intent for people to just vote keep rather than have us work to improve the article and see if we could avoid the whole deletion thing, and I admittedly didn't think that was very fair since it felt like a "gotcha" sort of rule that was pulled out to limit discussion to people who were already pretty much guaranteed to vote delete. At this point, I'm just glad he gets to keep his Wikipedia account and didn't end up like Wikipedia's co-founder over a technicality.

I mean, I'm sure a lot of people here aren't happy with the outcome, especially since Goanna is used outside of Pale Moon in other UXP-based applications, but I do see that the article was pretty much a stub and wasn't really written with a lot of reliable outside references... I do hope one day Goanna/UXP is considered distinctive enough from the old Mozilla code it got forked from that people outside our project start talking about its architecture and how it solved problems with the version of Gecko that Mozilla abandoned for Servo/Rust-based solutions in its own way, but until people outside of us start to think of it as real engineering/programming rather than just "old Mozilla code kept on life support not worthy of discussion," then we're kind of stuck with it essentially being considered not notable.

Probably it was more of a blow to morale to get the reminder that the perspective on our project we dislike the most is the only one that's considered relevant or acceptable to people outside our project, than anything else. People around here really don't like the implication that UXP is just for Pale Moon's own use and can't be used for anything else, which is I think part of the reason why this decision went badly with a lot of people here. I think most of us understand it to a degree, but find it exasperating and are also a bit wary and exhausted because we have a lot of enemies and people who dismiss the project. This just felt like more of the same.

[Gemmaugr]

Some can talk the talk, but actions always speak louder than words.

[Moonchild]

If you don't think Goanna is different than Gecko, do a diff or look at the feature support we have compared to our fork point or check the commit history.
The facts are there.

As stated before, if Goanna doesn't deserve a Wikipedia page of its own, then Gecko doesn't either if you want to apply the rules evenly and it could be folded into the Firefox article.

But you do you.

[ron_1]

Goanna is not, so it doesn't stay.

When it was deleted did it give you a feeling of power?

[athenian200]

Gecko is large enough and old enough to have been referenced in multiple WP:Reliable sources spanning years, so it stays, Goanna is not, so it doesn't stay. Any Wikipedian will generally tell you the same.

That was my initial impression, I just admittedly started having doubts after the Skyfox thing was uncovered. But yeah, I'm probably more of what Wikipedia would call an "Inclusionist" particularly when it comes to computer-related subjects, and don't really love it when articles are removed for notability reasons to start with... there have been times when I was looking up random, less popular things on Wikipedia and was annoyed when I couldn't find them, only saw red links in other articles, but did manage to find deleted articles on the subject that I had to hunt for through the history.

Anyway, I will just say I appreciate you coming here to clarify your position, and wouldn't object to any assistance you might want to offer in the future. I have to admit, I looked at your talk page at one point and have seen that you had to be mentored a lot over the years to understand Wikipedia rules, and have gotten into your fair share of disagreements and misunderstandings with others. Some here might think I'm a bit naive, but I'd be willing to give you another chance and not judge you based on this one incident if you're saying you didn't have any negative intentions and we've misunderstood. Regardless of how often I've been burned in the past, I know that jumping to conclusions and not trusting anyone is just going to turn me into a bitter, paranoid person and I've seen others go down that road... I'd rather not, if I can help it.

Perhaps at some point a Goanna or UXP article could become relevant enough if other pieces of software that use it gain enough notability to have their own Wikipedia page, and we get more outside people talking about the codebase. The problem is that, yes, the code is here and anyone can look at it... but the only people documenting it and talking about what it does right now are the same programmers who wrote the code. And for a project like Wikipedia, I'd assume that's not what they're looking for and they want people who aren't close to the project and are respected/reliable sources analyzing the project and discussing it before they're willing to include it. That kind of sucks for us, but I get it if that's how it is.

Slightly off-topic, one of the frustrations I have in developing Epyrus is that I think in order to get a proper OAuth2 key, I'd need to have a third-party security audit done which costs thousands of dollars, and my project is too small to be able to raise that kind of money. So it can't use most e-mail services and thus can't really grow. It feels like this follows a similar dynamic... only projects big enough to have a lot of third-parties talking about them are notable enough to get their own pages. Webmasters don't want to support Pale Moon because it's too niche and just tell people to use Chrome or get lost a lot of the time. I get that to an extent all these players, including Wikipedia, are just playing to the incentives and resource limitations that exist perhaps. But for the people here, it does always feel like doors are always being slammed in our faces that would require significant resources to reopen.

[BenFenner]

Perhaps at some point a Goanna or UXP article could become relevant enough if other pieces of software that use it gain enough notability to have their own Wikipedia page

We are already there. Don't be fooled otherwise.

The problem is that, yes, the code is here and anyone can look at it... but the only people documenting it and talking about what it does right now are the same programmers who wrote the code.

This is not true. Don't be fooled otherwise.

I'm saying that it's regretful that it had to be done in the first place. I am also an "inclusionist" like you and would prefer it if Wikipedia did not have such strict notability guidelines.

You have to see how that reads extremely disingenuous. Was there some proverbial gun to your head making you nominate the article for deletion? You'd think an "inclusionist" would never nominate articles for deletion, and certainly not argue for it in the talk page. I can see one way that this somehow makes any logical sense. But how do you square these two things in your mind?

my loyalty lies with Wikipedia and I'm doing what is required of me.

So there is a proverbial gun to your head? I'd love an explanation if you have one. What would have happened to you had you not nominated this article for deletion? What would have happened to you had you not strongly argued for deletion in the talk page? What would have happened to you had you argued against deletion in the talk page?

I think the same reasons that prevent Goanna from having a Wikipedia article are also preventing Pale Moon from being used. People don't talk about it.

This is simply not true. And if you'd read this thread, that would have been made painfully clear. Instead of noting the many sources of 3rd-party discussion linked in this thread and countless others found with easy research, you've decided they don't exist. Instead of improving the article by adding citations to these sources, you've gone for deletion. Instead of giving members of this community and others a reasonable amount of time to add those ourselves, you and/or Wikipedia at large have bulldozed us and anyone else trying to improve the article.



But we can get that time back I guess. To move forward, I believe the easiest thing to do is to grab the last good copy of the article, improve it ourselves until it unquestionably* meets the inclusion standards of Wikipedia, and then drop it back off to see what happens then.



*You know, like a beleaguered minority professional in an unjust society having to be the absolute pinnacle of undeniable usefulness before they get a shred of respect or recognition.