Re: [edbrowse-dev] wikipedia

[Kevin Carhart <kevin@carhart.net>]

There's a new remark on the deletion discussion page which makes me think 
that they are going to delete the page.  They aren't accepting that distro 
presence demonstrates that the project extends far outside of the biases 
of edbrowse-dev aka us, whose perceptions are clouded by 
loooove for edbrowse.  I'm not sure why usage itself can't be thought of as something 
that applies "show, don't tell" to a FOSS project.  Articles document that 
something is valuable, while stepping outside of the thing's own medium to 
talk about it in prose, and then you have to step back in to use it. 
Retrieving something and trying it out because it's FOSS and you can do 
this immediately, is a tough, disinterested inline test of whether the 
thing has merit which takes place without stepping outside to prose and 
then stepping back in.  If the library or application isn't good, you're 
going to delete it quickly and it will be considered for deletion from the 
distro.  But I guess this point of view is not going to 
get past the Wikipedia consensus process and the arguments that the 
members of the deciding committee have been posting for "DELETE", which 
they then back up with references to Wikipedia's ground rules.  I think if 
we have examples of endless inconsistency and other articles that remain 
published even though they don't pass a ground rule either, the committee 
just says "too bad."

So the second half of this for me at least is that we tried.  I'm sorry I 
couldn't make it happen through trying to write them something methodical 
and clear.  If we lose, I don't think it's an important proxy for the 
value of the work.  It's not an omen.  I'm sorry that it has that 
discouraging quality to it but don't let it get you down. As KD noticed 
while we were working on drafts, hell, duktape doesn't have its own page 
and they are thriving.  So maybe there are plenty of other venues we can 
use instead, such as all of those Stack Overflow answers where someone 
says "what are my options for a CLI browser with pretty decent 
javascript?"  And people say edbrowse since that happens to be true.