This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Aaron Swartz article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.
Aaron Swartz was a Engineering and technology good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
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Latest comment: 1 month ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This article was the subject of persistent political controversy, the embers of which may be seen in the two edit requests above and its continuing semi-protected status. Citations are often scars of past arguments and defenses against drive-by removal of uncontroversial information. MarkBernstein (talk) 19:36, 27 August 2026 (UTC)Reply
According to Gruber, Gruber created markdown, not Swartz
We have used sources which state "Markdown was originally developed by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Swartz, with the goal to simplify the writing of HTML documents". Therefore, the current text seems fine. Until two years ago the Markdown page stated "John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is intended to be easy to read in its source code form". On 20 March 2024 an editor removed Aaron's name from the lead and reduced his role to a "sounding board" in the article body. This happened after a talk page discussion. It does not necessarily affect what happens at this page. Burrobert (talk) 16:25, 11 September 2026 (UTC)Reply
The discussion is not totally convincing. @Newslinger: provided some sources which gave dual credit. Other sources said Gruber was the developer. Gruber himself says he was the creator. Aaron describes some of his contributions at . On the markdown page itself, Swartz is described as a "sounding board". The source for this is a tweet from Gruber, which is not very persuasive. Gruber gives a fuller acknowledgement at where he writes, "Aaron Swartz deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his feedback on the design of Markdown’s formatting syntax. Markdown is much better thanks to Aaron’s ideas, feedback, and testing. Also, Aaron’s html2text is a very handy (and free) utility for turning HTML into Markdown-formatted plain text". The history page at states "Aaron Swartz contributed meaningfully to early Markdown implementations, particularly to Markdown.pl, and helped spread the idea through the developer communities he was active in". Further information about Aaron's role is given at .
In summary, describing Gruber as the sole creator is too strong. If giving Aaron credit as co-creator is also too strong, we could compromise by saying Markdown was created by Gruber with contributions from Aaron. Burrobert (talk) 10:22, 12 September 2026 (UTC)Reply
level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
Not done: The sources cited there say it was MIT police and FBI. Do you have sources that say otherwise? -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 11:30, 26 August 2026 (UTC)