I think the reason this is discussed now is because yesterday I tried to re-submit the Apache Arrow article. Here's what I wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Apache_Arro... It was rejected / reverted 10 minutes later by a Wikipedia editor. The blog post from Justin was in July 2019 (https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/)

There's many interesting and good points in the discussion here, thank you!

To add my 2 cents:

- Apache Arrow is notable, deserves a Wikipedia page. It might not have been when someone first tried to create a Wikipedia page for it in 2017 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Apache_Arro...), but in the three years since it has become a major project, see e.g. https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... Notability is clearly subjective, depends on what the author and reviewer find interesting. In the variant I submitted yesterday I tried to make it clear why it's notable - Apache arrow is a standard format that connects different languages, runtimes, data systems, communities, e.g. the Python and Java data communities. See e.g. https://wesmckinney.com/blog/apache-arrow-pandas-internals/ - Apache Arrow is to my knowledge partly the brainchild of Wes McKinney, creator of pandas, it's his attempt (looking strongly like success) to resolve a major issue in data science. - I think it's a good point Justin made at https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/ that it's bad that Wikipedia editors reject articles on stuff they know nothing about - if you look at their profiles, they don't seem to have any knowledge or interest about technology or software. That's not a good system. - I haven't contributed to Wikipedia really before, and I don't understand the rules, I admit that. Probably what I did yesterday was just not following their process, and that's the reason my edit was reverted. I guess it's also true that Justin at first didn't do a great job at submitting an impartial, non-PR article. However, my understanding from looking at some drafts and the talk page is that he then took the editor comments into account, and the last variant of the page he tried to submit in July 2019 was OK. - So overall I think the answer to the question "Why isn't there a Wikipedia page on Apache arrow?" is that it's an unfortunate case of authors and editors not doing a great job. At least I'm pretty sure I didn't do a good job yesterday, I wanted to help, but only had an hour, not a day to learn how Wikipedia ticks and to do more research to find better references. I hope someone with more experience in Wikipedia and Arrow will try to re-write and re-submit the Wikipedia article in the future. - The rule to discourage (or forbid?) people involved with Apache Arrow from contributing to its Wikipedia page is unfortunate. I recently started to use it and learn about it, but I don't know much about it at this point. E.g. Wes McKinney has written at this point 8 high-quality blog posts about it (https://wesmckinney.com/archives.html) - those don't count as references? Even if he or the Apache Arrow team wrote a paper about it, it wouldn't count because it's a primary source, and Wikipedia only wants secondary sources to establish notability? There are ~ 100 videos on YouTube, and many blog posts and a few podcasts (e.g. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/07/17/apache-arrow...) that mention Apache Arrow. Naturally almost all of them are from Apache Arrow contributors, or from companies using Apache Arrow. - Apache Arrow has an interesting story, and it has evolved over the past years and will keep evolving, so I think exactly for that reason a Wikipedia page would be good to have, since the current project page and old blog posts don't capture that well.

user:	cdeil
created:	December 19, 2019
karma:	1
about:	This is me: https://christophdeil.com/