leejo

OP could have made this point in a better way without expressing it in a way that isn't true or implying that nationality is by birth. Let's do that having looked at https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

  * 41% of the permanent resident population aged 15 and over has a migration background
  * 27% of the permanent resident population is not Swiss
  * 22% of the permanent resident population was born outside of Switzerland

Notice the subtle distinction in the phrasing of the second point above and OP's phrasing? OP chose to phrase in a way that was a) wrong, and b) misleading. This has been classic tactics around this vote and others over the years.

Here's some more countries by immigrant background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im... # Switzerland is on a par with Austria, Australia, and New Zealand, and way below many other countries that have > 50%.

> That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to.

I was addressing the implication in the "fact", which is incorrect anyway. One in five of that 27% were born in Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

> 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country.

Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.

@cylo (I think the author) - get in touch, I'd like to use this essay as part of a photo book project. With your permission of course.

> I've read the issue is that some countries require you to renounce your previous nationality to get citizenship, and people have taken advantage of not needing a British passport by lying about renouncing their British citizenship.

Oh that's an interesting little loophole that might be a[nother] reason. A handful of EU member states disallow dual citizenship, so those taking advantage of "EU and British" might be impacted by this.

There it is, right? Seven days and twenty years, gone. To quote, it is "the slow decline, the emptying out, and the long, long process of forgetting".

Wikipedia's deletion proposals are the online equivalent of putting a small poster on a village noticeboard and being surprised that the entire world doesn't see it.

It's disgraceful.

You're basically reinforcing my arguments - these are the policies, deal with it.

I believe the 7 day deadline to avoid the deletion of 20+ years of history is destructive because most of the people that would be notified of this have long since moved on, no longer care, or are off Wikipedia.

The cursory Googling by those who have the power to delete is also concerning. As stated elsewhere in this discussion, Google hasn't been great for search for a long time.

I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that. As stated below in several other comments, none of this makes sense and the Wikipedia editors hiding behind "this is the policy, you do not get to question it" stinks.

The original user withdrew their deletion suggestion and added the "This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources." banner, sure. Why didn't they just do that in the first place?

Instead they looked at an article that had existed for twenty years, with a comprehensive history of changes, had lots of information, links, and [albeit primary] sources; they did some cursory Googling, then suggested it for deletion - with a deadline of 7 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CPAN&diff=1327587...

Wikipedia literally has its own page to suggest that you don't do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence...

Wikipedia's own policies around deletion mean it's easy to delete articles you don't particularly like - if they are old enough they probably lack secondary sources. You can't inform users who would be able to contribute off-Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing#Stealth_c... which means it's unlikely they will be updated before the deadline passes. Many of these articles were contributed by people who have long moved on, and few of us are paying attention to every possible thing on Wikipedia. Twenty years of history deleted in a week. That's wrong.

This feels like the actions of a newly promoted editor, inexperienced, and eager to start "cleaning up" Wikipedia, which it is damaging. It also feels like the actions of an editor who, when editing another article, saw that the thing they were adding didn't point to what they expected on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=White_Camel_award... # instead of adding a page to disambiguate, they decided to go on a crusade to purge articles that had existed for twenty years. And because these were mostly articles that predate Wikipedia's sourcing policies, they knew it was likely they would succeed.

As I've stated in one of the talk threads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Left_guide#c-Leejeba... # I'm not particularly concerned about the restoration of some of the articles, instead I'm more concerned about the blunt application of policies that means important reference, history, and culture are being deleted.

> The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

The system works if the sources remain available, and in an environment predisposed to link rot that can be a problem. Imagine the hypothetical situation of archive.org disappearing overnight? Should we then delete all pages with it as their sole source if they're not updated within a week?

And the system works if intentions are pure - it seems here the user that suggested the deletion of several Perl related pages is a fan of film festivals[1] and clearly wasn't happy that the "White Camel Award" is a Perl award, since the late 90s, and not a film festival award (since the early 00s). At least according to Google. So they went on a bit of a rampage against Perl articles on Wikipedia.

You could argue "editor doing their job", but I would argue "conflict of interest".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahara_Internatio... # amongst many in their edit history

> Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

FWIW I don't see this as an attack (with, perhaps, the exception of a couple of comments in the linked thread) and posted the link to the reddit thread as I see it more as an interesting observation around the myriad issues facing "legacy" languages and communities. To wit:

* Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

* What's the future of this policy given the fractured nature of the web these days, walled gardens, and now LLMs?

* An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

* Link rot is pervasive, we all knew this, but just how much of Wikipedia is being held up by the waybackmachine?

* Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.

The CPAN page on Wikipedia has existed for 24 years, has dozens of references, yet an editor nominated it for deletion - I can't help but feel that as hostile. Fortunately this one has been voted "keep", but still...

I sell photographic prints. A breakdown of income and costs for this year can be found here: https://leejo.github.io/2025/11/01/print_costs/

TL;DR? It's a grind, an absolute grind.

My Xpan is now over 25 years old, and I've been doing stuff like this with it for over a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIy2_IpEw8c # electronics are still holding strong... for now. They tend to have more mechanical problems than electrical problems in my experience. But yes, I certainly wouldn't spend anything like what they are going for these days.

Albert (the subject of the original article here) is a former colleague and I recently visited him at home where he showed me his studio and the cameras he'd been creating. All very cool stuff.

I may blog about this next year, again[^1], as I'm working on a project that sort of covers it - not in a way that will answer the question but more observational.

Anyway, I feel Perl's popularity was hugely exaggerated in the mid to late 90s and early 00s. The alternatives were either not there in terms of language and toolchain features, ease of use, "whipuptitude" or whatever, or library support (CPAN was a killer app), or they were too old school or enterprisey. Sysadmins were using it everywhere so it got into all sorts of systems that other languages couldn't without much more faff.

Its back compatibility meant it stayed in those places for a long time. It's still in a lot of those places.

The fall in popularity the last decade or two was more of a regression to the mean, or perhaps below the mean. Many other languages have come along, which have contributed even more to the fall in share.

Yes, yes, Raku (né Perl 6) but I'd argue that also contributed to a lot of really good stuff on CPAN. The Perl 5 core did get neglected for a number of years, as @autarch says, which may have been a factor.

[^1] previously: https://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_langua...

> Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner

Both.

> personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...

It's not - the issue that still remains is keeping the film flat, and this is especially problematic with smaller formats. With current solutions you can get the resolution but not the flatness, or you sacrifice something to get the flatness (e.g. ANR glass holders). It's the old glass vs glassless carrier debate, applied to a modern workflow.

I repeat myself: focus, DPI / resolution, dynamic range - these are the solved problems. In fact, modern medium format digital cameras are superior on all these factor. Keeping the film flat, however? Only drum scans and the Imacon "Flextight" solution do this well.

Of course, it depends on what you plan to do with the scans and for 99% of people the solution in the link above is more than good enough.

I've written about this previously https://leejo.github.io/tags/scanning/ # I'm going to add the fourth, and hopefully final, part in a couple of months time.

For those who missed it: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

Which is more believable or surprising:

a) there is probably several orders of magnitude more Perl code running out there in the wild than Rust?

b) the TIOBE index was ever meaningful?