General Discussion • Re: Goanna article in EN Wikipedia has been nominated for deletion

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.