Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Awesome (window manager)

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 delete. No reliable third-party sources, no indication of notability. Keep arguments are primarily WP:ILIKEIT, WP:WELLKNOWN, and WP:USEFUL. Jayjg ^(talk) 01:09, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Awesome (window manager)

Awesome (window manager) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)

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Notability tag removed without adding third-party sources. Pcap ping 21:50, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. -- Pcap ping 21:50, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
• Comment: http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=awesome
  • So, 1,000 people installed it in three years, and over 300 of those do not use it regularly. Hardly impressive. Pcap ping 23:54, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delete: I can't find significant coverage for this software. Joe Chill (talk) 22:38, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
• Strong keep. This is a well-known WM, and already includes several 3rd party references in the article. I agree a little bit of extra sourcing would be nice, but this isn't even close to a deletion candidate. LotLE×talk 22:43, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

What third-party references are there? I see a few blog posts by the developer of Awesome, a few Awesome wiki links (not 3rd party), some mailing lists, various project sites & hosts - nothing, in fact, that I would call more than a 2nd-party reference. --Gwern (contribs) 23:45 30 January 2010 (GMT)

This article has seen significant improvement since I've first seen it. In other words, its getting where you want it is a process. Most of us are not researchers or writers or anything like that. We are just people who happen to know some things about a topic. The idea here is that an article can only be complete once most people who happen to know stuff come here and add their stuff. I'm sure that if you look at article histories on Wikipedia, you'd learn most articles started out as one or two sentences without any references, let alone credible or notable ones. If you'd delete all such articles, you'd be left with nothing. No expansion, no nothing. Wikipedia would just stop and freeze, there and then. Just by marking this article AfD, you are sending a seriously unfriendly message to both current and future contributors. FWIW, I think all the time that went into developing your procedures and things like that could have been better spent on making Wikipedia easier to edit. --Foxbunny (talk) 21:58, 31 January 2010 (UTC) — Foxbunny (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

As the Zen saying goes, you can polish a brick as long as you want, but you'll never get a mirror. It may be a decent article now in terms of simple information (I hope the Awesome wiki or whatever has as good an overview), but that's orthogonal to issues of notability. --Gwern (contribs) 18:46 1 February 2010 (GMT)

Your points are orthogonal to what I've said, too, Gwern. I have a feeling you weren't reading past the first sentence. Anyway, notability policy is thoroughly broken because it is allowed to override the principle of usefulness. In fact, the whole policy system is broken from where we stand. --Foxbunny (talk) 15:15, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I'll also add another note, just to point out the bigger picture. Let's say we do agree that awesome article is to go. It's no good. It sucks. It's a brick. Ok, it's deleted. Poof. Now, we have an article on wmii next, because it's even worse. It's also marked as not following the notability policy and doesn't cite a single credible 3rd party reference. ion (window manager) is just waiting to be marked for notability, too. Larswm and dwm? Why are they even there? xmonad and ratpoison are lucky. One got referenced by OSNews, one by IBM Developer Works. Good for them. So what's the point? The point is, things like OSNews and IBM Developer Works are now able to say what is relevant to the Wikipedia users and what is not. It also says that if we get an OSNews editor to write about awesome, our article will suddenly comply with the notability guideline, and hence we can influence the fate of an article. Finally, it says that we should check OSNews and IBM Developer Works before we contribute anything to Wikipedia, because anything that doesn't come from those and similar sources will be rejected and cast into oblivion with an optional Zen quote. I tell you again, this whole notability business is broken and if you try to be anal about enforcing it, you will end up with a broken Wikipedia only mainstream people find useful. --Foxbunny (talk) 15:40, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

• Comment Some detailed 3rd party sources include: [1]; [2]; [3]; [4]; [5]; [6]; [7]; [8]; [9]; etc. LotLE×talk 23:55, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Well, all of those are forums threads, you tube videos, or blogs of random geeks nobody has ever heard of. I'll see if I can find something more acceptable; it looks like "awesomeWM" is an alternative title spelling. Pcap ping 00:00, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
  • By the way, the tuxtraining.com blog entry you provided (probably the most notable source of all of those, but still an Alexa rank of 300,000 or so) only had 4 diggs [10], so I'm not reassured that this is a popular WM. Pcap ping 00:05, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
  • I did a fairly extensive search, and the only WP:RS mention I could find is in a table with many other WMs in this book. Still it's a "weak delete" for me. Pcap ping 01:24, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
• Delete per nom, specifically that no reliable third party sources have been found to exist. Added emphasis on the "reliable" part. JBsupreme (talk) 00:02, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
• Keep. We've had this discussion before. It's a useful article. I understand that Wikipedia has strong need for verifiability and notability, but awesome is fairly widely used and I'm sure that something will eventually make the jump from verboten sources like blogs to mainstream media and the citation bean counters can be satisfied. I know it's bad to expose my politics, but I think that it's frankly silly to consider deletion of a decently-written, content-ful, and useful article every couple of months. --Roguelazer (talk) 08:50, 31 January 2010 (UTC)
  • This is an age old argument, which is why we have WP:USEFUL. ;-) We shouldnt' really should not speculate on whether or not something will become notable down the road, just because the article is well written or useful/interesting. JBsupreme (talk) 17:19, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

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Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, JForget 00:52, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

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Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Arbitrarily0 ^(talk) 13:00, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

• Commment Combat WP:BIAS by transwikifying to en.wikigeekia.org, the site for articles on unix software and lists of occurences of farting in episodes of The Simpsons.--Pontificalibus (talk) 19:25, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Your link seems to be broken. --Gwern (contribs) 01:43 14 February 2010 (GMT)

It was a joke. Pcap ping 01:52, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

• Keep. -- Among people who know that there are several window managers, Awesome is well-known. Google currently yields 400 000 hits for the phrase "awesome+window+manager" --Joti (talk) 09:10, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
  • Response We do not retain articles based on Google hit counts, which can easily be manipulated. We rely on non-trivial coverage from reliable third party publications. Do you have any evidence of that? JBsupreme (talk) 09:12, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
  • "Awesome" is also an adjective. A search like that returns a lot of other awesome window managers... Pcap ping 11:01, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
• Just an observation but all of the keep arguments amount to WP:WELLKNOWN, WP:USEFUL, and WP:POPULARITY, in that order. JBsupreme (talk) 09:13, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

• Delete Discussions here run afoul of so many of the arguments to avoid essays, this AFD might be worth linking in those as examples. Those familiar with the topic are sure it should be notable but when the demand for references in 3rd party sources comes, efforts fall flat. There are plenty of magazines that cover linux exclusively, notability guidelines should be meetable using something from one of those as a reference, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Blogs and other primary sources just arent going to cut it, no matter how many of them there are. RadioFan (talk) 13:10, 17 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delete. WP:ILIKEIT, WP:WELLKNOWN, and WP:USEFUL seem to be the only arguments put forth by those wanting to keep the article. Where are the independent third-party sources? —Psychonaut (talk) 15:41, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
• Delete per the lack of sufficient coverage in reliable sources. Most of the sources on Google News Archive (with the search term: "Awesome" "window manager") are either forums or unrelated results. Awesome (window manager) fails Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Verifiability. Cunard (talk) 22:10, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

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.