Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foswiki (3rd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. A lot of debate here, but it doesn't appear to me that a guideline-based consensus has developed. No prejudice towards the opening of a merge discussion. Mark Arsten (talk) 15:59, 15 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Foswiki

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No secondary reliable independent sources discuss this software. In fact all the sources in the article boil down to primary sources and the papers focusing on particular use of generic wiki software using Foswiki as an example. The article was deleted previously multiple times (though it accidentally survived last AfD). — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 15:31, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 15:32, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 15:32, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete None of the non-primary sources even seem to mention Foswiki. Also, there seems to have been some canvassing going on in the previous AfDs. —Ruud 17:33, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- What a mess... after reading up on the background of this article this looks like an ugly fork of an open source project that spilled over onto Wikipedia, with developers of both TWiki and Foswiki being (too) involved with their and each other's articles. While it's easy too find press coverage on the forking itself, Foswiki seems to have received little attention afterwards. —Ruud 19:41, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Weak keep Sources (2) and (1) Nuddlegg pointed out below seem to establish some measure of independent notability. Source (3) only mentions in the context of "a fork of TWiki", but I guess not having two separate articles is not really an option either. —Ruud 20:14, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Are you sure that the fact the authors of paper used Foswiki as an example for implementation of a particular special purpose system really says anything about Foswiki itself? If so, are you sure that developers of Foswiki-based project are independent of Foswiki? The only source of another type of coverage among these — #2 — is 3 lines long on Foswiki... — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 22:15, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, we're dealing with a bit of a complex situation here. It is quite clear that the pre-fork TWiki was notable. Clearly, this notability doesn't automatically carry over to the Foswiki fork, but to some extent this would apply the post-fork TWiki as well. Why favour them just because they happened to have control of the trademark (in practice this of course of is an important factor in determining who will end up being the dominant fork)? I think in this situation it is interesting to note that 1) the forking itself received some press coverage and 2) sources start to refer to "TWiki and Foswiki" after the fork. Again, this wouldn't automatically be sufficient to start having two articles on TWiki and Foswiki, instead of one with some detailed coverage of the fork, but as the two forks diverge that will probably just end up in an awkward solution.

"Non-trivial coverage" is a bit of a subjective term and if these sources are sufficient, they are barely so, ergo the "weak keep". I think it's safe to assume that those source are indeed independent sources, unless you have some evidence to the contrary. —Ruud 22:28, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, the situation you depict is trivially dealt by dropping all TWiki-related information to the article TWiki, including both forks. And it doesn't seem likely to diverge anywhere unless there will emerge any significant coverage of Foswiki, which is naturally in a weaker situation here, as it lost it's predecessor's brand. If such coverage emerges, the articles can be split.

Next, the authors of extensions to Foswiki are not independent of topic, as, well, they develop something for Foswiki. I'm not sure whether I understand what you mean by saying "unless you have some evidence to the contrary": the evidence is the articles themselves. This is exactly the same as establishing notability of browser X by citing the home pages of its extensions: notable is browser X or not, its extensions' authors can't help with it. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 22:47, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

But then we should be having an merge discussion and not an AfD. Merging the articles clearly is an option, I'm just not sure if that would (editorially, for various reasons) be the wisest thing to do.

Extension developers are sometimes independent of the main project, sometimes not, it depends on the exact situation. E.g. if an academic develops an extension for MediaWiki as part of his research, he would usually be considered independent. I think we're dealing with a similar situation here. —Ruud 22:59, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We should have been having a merge discussion if there was something to merge: merging would mean writing out differences between original and fork, but this article is a clone of TWiki with minimal changes; thus covering Foswiki in TWiki means searching for sources and writing everything from scratch. It's not the merge.

Furthermore, as Foswiki lacks evidence of notability, I don't really see any reason to merge anything. I see no way the fact that several people described building some wiki-based system using TWiki contributes to TWiki's notability, as none of this works explicitly states (or at least implies) that choice of wiki software was of any importance to their projects. These works are only proof of Foswiki usage, which is in turn a proof of existence, but not notability.

Look at it from another angle: do they provide significant coverage? Do they imply subject's notability? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 00:16, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wait, did you really mean this? If an academic writes an extension for MediaWiki, his paper on this extension, containing the sole mention of MediaWiki ("I chose to use MediaWiki as a starting point."), will prove notability of MediaWiki? Could you please explain in more detail? Eg., if project X is forked, does the fork's authors' paper contributes to the parent's notability? If not, what is the difference? If yes, what is the difference between authors' paper and forks' home page? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 00:24, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Merging totally different discussion, which I don't think we should be having here at the same time. A merge is not going to be trivial due to

WP:NPOV issues. (How would we even name the article? TWiki and Foswiki

?)

Searching Google Scholar [1], I see—between a lot of false positives—several articles on wikis and enterprise wikis discussing Foswiki. I think this passes—just barely—the threshold for notability.

Regarding the MediaWiki example, yes that would supply some evidence of notabilty. In this case the academic chose Fosdem as a starting point, so I don't see the relevance of your question about the transfer of notability from the parent to the fork. —Ruud 00:30, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So you claim that the difference is in academical status? Academic extension developers add to parent's notability, but non-academic don't? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 00:48, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW the difference between extension and patch to the code base is that extension can be enabled on the already built product. Does this difference warrant special treatment? If the authors of these papers submitted code to the Foswiki repository, would you regard their papers as independent of topic? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 00:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No I said it depended on the situation. This is one example of where someone could be considered independent of the project. An important aspect here is the he could freely choose on which of several existing projects to base is work. If, for example the extension developer, had the expectation of financial gain of increase in social status from additional popularity of the parent project, then he clearly wouldn't be independent. —Ruud 01:05, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please, if these papers' authors' code made its way back to the Foswiki's code base, would you still consider them independent? This question is rather vital to discussion. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 01:12, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Again, I can't answer that with a yes or no in general. If primary motivation of the authors was publishing a paper and in the process ended up contributing code to an open source project, without an expectation of later gain from that contribution (other than their research results), I'd say then can be considered to be independent from that project. I believe this to be the case here. —Ruud 01:25, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nice. Needless to say I completely disagree with this point. Next, does the fact that neither of [available] sources claims any significance in choice of this particular wiki over any other? That is: we have no evidence that the choice of software contributed to their research and the "used in scientific research" rationale is valid at all. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 01:39, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, are these sources

secondary at all? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 01:53, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply

]

I don't think completely understand you first question. Whether a source if primary or secondary also depends on the context. Without some further qualification I don't think this question is even well-defined (primary or secondary with respect to what?) or relevant (the source is clearly suitable for establishing notability, i.e. that some besides the developers actually know about the existence of this project.) —Ruud 15:57, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Primary or secondary to the subject, of course.

WP:SECONDARY
, emphasis added

As these sources only cover their experience and say nothing on topic otherwise, they are primary. Consequently, they don't count for the purpose of
WP:GNG. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 16:26, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
I disagree. The best I could do in this situation would be to say that the Foswiki codebase is a primary source and that the article is "making analytic or evaluative claims about [the codebase]". Thus a secondary source. —Ruud 16:43, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But they didn't make comments about the codebase, they commented on their work. And Foswiki happened to be the part of their work; as well as it happened to be a part of Nuddlegg's work. There is no real difference between Nuddlegg's and their commenting on Foswiki, as all of them are primary sources with the only difference in the strength of connection.

And
WP:SECONDARY specifically stresses, that the secondary sources "rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them". In contrast to this definition, the sources Nuddlegg proposes don't make analytic claims on other sources, they make trivial claims on the subject itself. Quite a huge deviation. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:21, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

Please note that branding and development are two different things. Just a FYI as to context: TWiki.net the company has apparently burned through its venture capital and the TWiki founder is out of a job. Foswiki still has the bulk of the development ([comparison]). There has been very little coverage in journalistic sources of *either* tool in the last two years, though most large FOS-based wikis requiring plugin or enterprise functionality are running one or the other of these tools, though the trend has been towards Foswiki among visible internet-exposed wikis. I am mentioning this not as something for inclusion in the article (it would be original research) but to help those unfamiliar with the situation better understand the history and current state of this codebase. The codebases have diverged quite substantially (in the last three years, though Foswiki seeks to maintain compatibility with TWiki. A merge, in my opinion, would not be wise given the increasing distance between the projects. —Donaldjbarry (talk) 22:56, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
How does anything of this relate to Foswiki's notability? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 00:16, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You know, the thing that puzzles me in this discussion is: why is there Foswiki article at all? Why did you not amend the TWiki article with history and details of Foswiki? You could simply note the dismissal of the TWiki.net in the article and move it to Foswiki then. Though arguable, such move at least have some sense: TWiki received some notice in the period of common history, and now your project is the only surviving branch. Once this move occurs, the Foswiki article becomes immune to AfDs. Nonetheless, the TWiki article gets copypasted to Foswiki name every now and then, and naturely gets deleted. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:50, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep All arguments of the 2nd nomination for deletion are still valid 4 months later. The decision was not "accidental" nor based on "canvassing". The decision to keep the article was based on factual arguments provided by reasonable people. Now, external references mentioning Foswiki have been deleted from the main article again and moved to the talk page for no obvious reason. We had a very good and productive discussion on April between interested wikipedians coming to the conclusion that both projects are notable each. I'd really like to see these nominations for deletion to end now and make peace. Thanks. Nuddlegg (talk) 19:02, 8 August 2012 (UTC) — Nuddlegg (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
I did not see the (large) list of references on talk page yet, thank you for mentioning them. I fear that they have been removed because they contain little substantial coverage of Foswiki, however. As I suspect you are familiar with these references, could you point out 3 or 4 that contain the most substantial coverage of Foswiki. —Ruud 19:18, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(1) DIPSBC - Data Integration Platform for Systems Biology Collaborations by Dreher, Felix.; Kreitler, Thomas.; Hardt, Christopher et al. (2012) is very interesting. This is a research paper presenting a wiki collaboration environment based on Foswiki, Solr and some custom helper applications. (2) In e-Research Collaboration - Theory, Techniques and Challenges by Prof. Anandarajan, Murugan & Prof. Ananarajan, Asokan. Eds. (2010). Springer. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-12257-6. p. 215. Foswiki is listed as one of two recommendations for wiki implementations to be used for research projects. Then have a look at (3) Hybrid Wikis: Empowering Users to Collaboratively Structure Information by Matthes F.; Neubert C.; Steinhoff A. (2011). In: 6th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies (ICSOFT), Seville, 2011. pp. 250-259. Foswiki is mentioned as one of two structured wikis. This paper was awarded as best paper at the International Conference on Software and Data Management 2011 (ICSOFT 2011), Sevilla, Spain. Nuddlegg (talk) 20:05, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What arguments? The sources that don't actually cover Foswiki beyond two-three lines? And most of these are not even independent of topic! — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 22:15, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Please have a look at all of the references parked on the Foswiki talk page and make your own choice which of these serve as a good source for notability. I just picked a few I personally like best and copied them over here. Maybe that choice wasn't the best one. Still I think that this list provides sufficient evidence. I am not sure what you mean by "independent of topic". I'll keep searching for more material in the meantime. It is sort of hard to spot good candidate references using google between all of these public Foswiki sites popping up ;) Nuddlegg (talk) 17:01, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the thing - having a list of references on the talk page that aren't used in the article means absolutely nothing. That list has been there for MONTHS and nobody has used them to add anything to the article. Quite honestly, if this is closed as Keep, I'm tempted to archive that list after a few months. I'm hoping to spend some time this weekend at least reviewing some of them to see if there's anything that I feel helps with notability. That's something that the Foswiki advocates should have been doing ever since the last AFD but couldn't be bothered. You want to totally prevent any future AFD's? Use that list to prove the notability. Want to keep having AFD's because the topic is marginal? Keep the list in the talk page and do nothing with it.
Ravensfire (talk) 17:06, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

This was what I did before completing nomination. My findings are still present in the opening statement. And I did research on this topic prior to this AfD. The fact is that there is no single source that would be in line with
WP:GNG, while multiple are needed. And no amount of research will cope with this. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 17:10, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Well, there's not much I personally can do to prove notability other than running around collecting other's material covering Foswiki to some sufficient degree. That's what the people involved in the previous AfD have been doing, and I was quite happy with the result. True, there's no better data than more data. Then I've been reading up a bit about the AfD process and the opinions others have expressed when it comes to deciding on the notability of software, i.e. open source software. I see that some of you are involved in open source software too so you probably know the situation all too well. For Foswiki though the situation is even worse: we have some ugly history behind us that technical writers and journalists tend to stumble upon writing about Foswiki. This always brings in a negative tone to the story, and that's the reason, as far as I see, the (press) coverage has been so low the recent 4 years other than reporting on the fork itself. Today, people are simply tired of this old story. They don't want to read a negative story, they want to read a success story about some shiny web2.0 product. In particular the Foswiki community itself is tired of these old stories. This community is active and working hard to improve the product. As a result, it has been picked up by a large user base in the open as well as by corporate organizations behind the firewall. A lot of them either migrated from an old TWiki or are newcomers. TWiki no doubt earns a place in the wikipedia as it is an essential part of the story of wikis in general. Many other wikis have borrowed ideas from TWiki (take
Xwiki for one, btw the Xwiki article is more or less on the same level of details as the Foswiki one currently). And TWiki is a substantial part of Foswiki's own history, even more when it is perceived as the only remaining active branch of the fork 4 years ago. With regards to the landscape of other competitors in the wiki market, open and close source, there are not much that are on the same level of sophistication able to deal with so many different requirements when using these kind of platforms for varying purposes. I am just telling you this so that you get the full picture of the situation. This is also due to a decade of developing TWiki, and now is being continued on the Foswiki branch by the same people that contributed heavily to TWiki the years before the fork. Lots of excellent very talented people have joined the Foswiki project meanwhile that weren't involved in the fork those days. Now, I almost can hear you again saying, none of this is relevant to the AfD discussion. Yea maybe. Yet still I find this AfD contradicting a certain Common Sense. I also know that you guys driving the AfD process do an important job on wikipedia to assure a certain level of quality, and if you still think Foswiki is not worth mentioning then so be it. My steam to keep on fighting this thru as a non-regular contributor to wikipedia runs out of steam much earlier and I don't have the same background about the rules as you have. So my situation is particularly week from that pov too. I appreciate your advises on how to prevent the next AfD rolling over Foswiki, how to improve the article and why particularly this nomination happened again. I see the point why the list of references have been removed from the main article and moved over to the talk page: when these references aren't used in the content, why are they there? Good point. These are very helpful hints on the article as seen from a totally different angle. Yet I am not sure I would have concluded that the article was so poor that it must be removed. I would have started with a thread on the article on the Talk page first before. And when there are no reactions, well then let there be an AfD. This did not happen. Maybe next time on another article. Thanks. Nuddlegg (talk) 07:21, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
You are absolutely right: I agree with your sentiment over FLOSS projects' problems with missing coverage, but indeed I see no relevance of these problems to this deletion discussion. The thing you can do is to actually cover the Foswiki at
WP:PLEASEDONT argument, which itself indicates that no separate article on Foswiki may happen now. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 07:39, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
We tried to cover Foswiki on the TWiki article to some sufficient degree, but then got in conflicts with other wikipedians working on the article that did not agree for certain (historical) reasons. One of these edit wars. Nuddlegg (talk) 07:44, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but this argument is too weak: you (sorry for this collective "you", I know that that wasn't you personally who created this article, but you speak on behalf of Foswiki supporters, so...) faced the choice of either convincing everybody busy on
WP:GNG. In my opinion you chose the easier solution over the right one. This doesn't contribute to the separate notability of Foswiki, like it or not. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 07:54, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
And now see, why there is so few coverage of Foswiki, even on wikipedia? We always have to jump thru a burning TWiki loop. That's boring. ;) Nuddlegg (talk) 08:03, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I see no evidence that Panyd made an "accidental" decision. In fact revisiting this issue so soon unintentionally implies bad faith. I think we're all agreed that's not the case. I've reviewed the references (including the ones on the Talk page) and I beg to reach a different conclusion from our kind colleague who has made this renomination. Donaldjbarry (talk) 19:19, 8 August 2012 (UTC) — Donaldjbarry (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

Honestly, the references in the talk page really need to be reviewed and the information, if relevant, added to the article. That list was originally in the main article page but wasn't used for anything. It was simply a dump during the last AFD. That's great and all, but references need to be used and those aren't. The casual mention of "this uses Foswiki" or "Foswiki is an example" really doesn't do much for notability.
Ravensfire (talk) 22:10, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
That was my point when I said "accidentally". A bunch of editors with no edits outside Foswiki article drop a long list of "sources" and the AfD is closed as "keep" with no regard to the fact that these sources barely mention the Foswiki (if at all). Even worse, the sources by people who develop extension for Foswiki (all but one of these, actually) are not independent, and they don't count at all for the purpose of establishing notability. If we do AfDs this way, we may as well drop the whole process together with
WP:N and just write whatever we want. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 22:19, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Agreed.
Ravensfire (talk) 22:33, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

keep Foswiki is now the main strand of Twiki development. For commercial intranet wikis, especially those hosting
wiki applications (another article that the blinkered WP community deleted), this is now the second most important platform behind MediaWiki. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Reference for that? Or just
WP:VALINFO? May be you could express yourself using policy-based rationale? — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 21:12, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

Delete The sources offered to prove notability for a subject which has been long disputed are monumentally weak. The only truly reliable source provided, from CBS, is actually about TWiki instead. If it is so important, then better sources are needed to show general notability. Steven Walling • talk 04:48, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.