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. -Docg 01:08, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agonised over this. And changed my mind twice. But there is no consensus to delete. It seems that the existence of the thing is verifiable. Thus the barebones of WP:V are satisfied. What isn't satisfied, is reliable sources that indicate notability. But ultimately WP:N and WP:WEB are guidelines. They indicate what wikipedia tends to keep or delete. They are descriptive not prescriptive. Unlike WP:V and WP:NPOV they do not trump consensus. It may well be, that this is the type of thing wikipedia tends to delete. It may well be that keeping it is inconsistent. But, that consideration is not enough to force a deletion in the absence of consensus. Brenneman made a good case, and frustratingly, many of the keepers focused on the re-nomination rather than refuting its reasoning (bad!). But, on the other hand, I take Pschemp's point (and she did give reasons) that many of the keepers have previously given reasons. Brenneman's case for deletion is very strong, but the article does not appear to breach WP:V, and so it comes down to consensus. Brenneman has been unable to persuade a consensus of Wikipedians that the article should be deleted--Docg 01:56, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Group-Office (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

This has been nominated and deleted, deletion reviewed and restored, renominated, opened and closed a few times by non-admins, and closed as keep:

To recap (e.g. cut-and-paste) the arguments from the various venues:
Keep
  • Over 1000 forum members[citation needed] & over <1000|120,000> downloads [1]
  • First office suite to be run entirely off the web[citation needed]
  • Don't see the harm in keeping it
  • Subject to independent review of software: [2]
  • Notable[citation needed] and verifiable
Delete / refutation of keep arguments
  • {notabaility}
  • Review consist at least in part of user submitted reviews etc. [3]
  • Where are the PC Week/Computer Shopper/Datamation/<respectablish ITzine of your choice here> references ?
  • Nothing in Google news, 166 vanilla Goggle hits [no] non-trivial coverage from a third party.
  • 146,791 downloads, the 968th most downloaded item at SourceForge, 150 above the Scrolling Game Development Kit but 150 behind Reaper, a "An OpenGL based 3D-game, emphasizing stunning graphics and interesting algorithms. Similiar to Rogue Squadron."

The listing on freshmeat was also mentioned, but looking at the Freshmeat Popularity: 11.29% (Rank 163) this places it pretty far down the list, noting that Ghost for Linux and bash programmable completion are numbers 50 and 49 and are both red links. (Caveat of course that that a poor metric.) Running at near the same levels of popularity on Freshmeat are xscreensaver at 162 and GQview at 158. Damned with faint praise indeed.

While this article has been vocally defended on several occasions, the baseline for bothWikipedia:Notability (software) and Wikipedia:Notability is the identical phrase "multiple non-trivial published works" which have yet to be provided. The relevant questions appear to be:

I feel very strongly that the answers are no, no, and no, and this should be deleted despite the howls of protest unless firm, reliable information can be provided to demonstrate otherwise. Ring the bell, take the gloves off, let the flaming begin.

I've also pinged Redvers and Pschemp as the two most outspoken members of the previous nomination.

brenneman 05:46, 11 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think I see what you're saying, but in general I try to keep in mind that wikipedia's idea of "consensus" is often the comments of less than a dozen editors. Lots of stuff gets nominated and the discussion gets flooded by people from a message board, or policy gets blatantly ignored, or an admin closes too early, etc. etc. I have nominated several tenacious articles for deletion that had survived multiple previous attempts and I'll probably do it again.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 06:48, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I know exactly what you mean, many times I've been rather stunned by the weight given to WP:ILIKEIT votes when determining 'consensus'. And as a further comment, I hope you don't interpret my comment above as overly critical of the nomination, I can definately see where you're coming from. Wintermut3 07:09, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • "I promised to quit"
  • "product people obviously use"
  • "this nomination is questionable"
  • "number of the users"
  • "abuse of Afd"
  • "keep"s without rational X 2
Simply having a lot of inline citations doesn't solve the problem that this "little piece of software" appears from the evidence presented to be less article-worthy that "Reaper, a An OpenGL based 3D-game, emphasizing stunning graphics and interesting algorithms." or "GQview, an image viewer for X windows." If there were serious arguments presented that this satisfied our well-established guidelines, than this could concieveable come down to "consensus" via counting noses. But there are not, just a lot of shrieking. There has been very little effort to even rebut the deletion arguments, mostly just they are ignored. There may be some people involved here who should be ashamed, but it bloody well isn't me.
brenneman 23:48, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You almost had me considering whether you might be right about the article itself, until you signally failed to WP:AGF with this last addition (not to mention that it amounts to an ad hominem attack, something you accused someone else of above). I, in turn, can no longer WP:AGF about this renomination. It's just ridiculous. --Tkynerd 01:19, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Are you bloody kidding me? I'm the one who's failed to assume good faith? Yeah, it's my "commercially motivated interests" that are coming to the fore here, nothing at all to do with sources, citations, or the bloody writing on the wall: It's not failing to assume good faith when someone throws a hissy fit and then a couple of blow-in voters just happen to use the talk page of the person who throws the hissy fit. - brenneman 01:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't believe that requires comment. --Tkynerd 01:40, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Over the AGF line, brenneman. Glad you asked for a review of this at AN/I, because it's warranted.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:49, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The accusations against the nominator are patently absurd. Given that virtually ever keep comment has accused him of bad faith without even offering a defense of the article, accusing him of bad faith for pointing out vote canvasing is quite an insult. --Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 17:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I'm the person who added those non-english sources last night, and I agree that more english sources are needed. However this software is predominantly used in Japan and Europe. Also, "group office" isnt a useful search term in english. So I specifically investigated its notability in the non-english world when I realised that most of the public installations (roughly identified using google) were in other countries. IMO a Japanese zdnet article should be considered as reliable as the English equivalent, and the fact that the page is in Japanese makes it only slighly less verifiable, as machine translation ensures you are seeing a pretty honest interpretation of the article. These source prove that the features listed in the English documentation from group-office.com is reliable. John Vandenberg 21:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Personally I find foreign language links excluding and if I can't read something I can't take its contents into account. Maybe the links are good arguments for inclusion in the JP wiki but I don't believe that every article on every wiki is equally notable everywhere. Spartaz 17:32, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: when I read WP:SOFTWARE, I dont see Gentoo listed, and I havent found evidence that it is distributed by the other distro's. Im not sure what directory.fsf.org/group-office.html means; I dont think it means it is included in a distro. Do you have evidence that it is packaged by another distro? Also, do you have a link to demonstrate the Alexa ranking? John Vandenberg 21:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I tried Debian here, Red Hat here, and Slackware here. It's always possible that I'm being incredibly stupid, but clearly my results don't match so far. I could carry on, but laziness is one of the three cardinal virtues (L. Wall, attr.). Angus McLellan (Talk) 23:20, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've archived the over-long software inclusion guideline talk page and pulled back out the relevent sections on distribution. The existing talk seems to indicate that this section neither has consensus support nor is a particularly good idea. If anyone wants to join in at Talk:Notability software:Distributions that would be great. - brenneman 00:02, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


  • Comment That sounds like a beef either with the AfD process itself or with the way it was handled in the second nomination for this article. Your apparent assumption is that the second AfD was closed by the numbers rather than by following policy and consensus ("don't meet policy but have vocal fan bases"). Besides failing to WP:AGF on the part of the closing admin, I think this assumption is factually incorrect as well. --Tkynerd 17:22, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't want to get into it, but I couldn't even count the times I have seen AfDs closed based entirely on vote counts, especially when there is excessive verbiage as there arguably is here. Note that I am not the only one who felt the need to make a comment to the effect of "admins, PLEASE read all the discussion." This is not assuming bad faith on their parts, and I wish you wouldn't keep jumping to that citation, as accusing someone of making a mistake or misusing policy is not the same as accusing them of bad faith. --Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 17:38, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I wish you wouldn't keep assuming that an AfD was mishandled just because it didn't go the way you think it should have. Obviously saying someone made a mistake isn't assuming bad faith, but saying someone misused policy is. And closing an AfD based on numbers can't really be a simple mistake; you're accusing the admin of not doing his or her job. --Tkynerd 18:35, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
brenneman 21:46, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What a waste. WP:Notability is a guideline, not a be all end all policy that requires endless wonkism about the nuances of its interpretation. WP:N-Software is still only a proposed guideline and one that not everyone agrees with. This article has mutiple non-trivial sources period. The broader view is that this article contributes to Wikipedia's purpose by providing useful, notable, verifiable knowledge. Is it the most earth shatteringly important knowledge that human kind needs? No, but neither are the feeding habits of Pokemon. Many of the plain keep votes here were given with reason and explanation on the previous discussions and knowing the history, it is rather obvious that asking people to comment yet again on a topic already hashed out multiple times is going to cause some hard feelings. Good faith nomination or not, this is a typical and understandable human response. Wikipedia is written by people, not robots without feeling. The bottom line is that this is improving Wikipedia and I have seen no evidence that it isn't or that it is harming the project in any way. Wikilawyer all you want about it, but if this project can't see the forest for the trees it has some serious issues. pschemp | talk 22:47, 16 January 2007 (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.