Wikipedia article

[Maximus5]

Article in wikipedia was proposed for deletion.

If you may share new facts or evidences (not shared yet), you are welcome.

From wikipedia notes:

There have been attempts to recruit editors of specific viewpoints to this article. If you've come here in response to such recruitment, please review the relevant Wikipedia policy on recruitment of editors, as well as the neutral point of view policy. Disputes on Wikipedia are resolved by consensus, not by majority vote.

[oldmud0]

If it's a notability issue, there is nothing we can do about it. Unless you can get one of the big tech news to make an article on it.

[tobiashochguertel]

What can we do @Maximus5 ?

[Maximus5]

I'm not sure what we can. Big tech news for notable sources? Also, there was a request for article improvements.

[The-MAZZTer]

Well there is a link to the standards the article does not meet; so analyze them and figure out where text on ConEmu would fit where it WOULD be considered notable.

[leycec]

Let's do this.

An Ideological Divide

In the early 2000's, an ideological spectrum referred to by the two antipoles "deletionism" and "inclusionism" erupted on Wikipedia. Ironically, this bitter feud received sufficient media attention to be included in Wikipedia:

"Deletionists" are proponents of selective coverage and removal of articles seen as unnecessary or highly substandard... Deletionists favor objectivity and conformity, holding that "Wikipedia is not Google," a "junkyard," or "a dumping ground for facts." They argue that the interest of enough people is a necessary condition for article quality, and articles about trivial subjects damage the credibility and future success of Wikipedia. They advocate the establishment and enforcement of specific standards and policies as a form of jurisprudence.

"Inclusionists" are proponents of broad retention, including retention of "harmless" articles and articles otherwise deemed substandard to allow for future improvement... Inclusionists may argue that the interest of a few is a sufficient condition for the existence of an article, since such articles are harmless and there is no restriction on space in Wikipedia. Favoring the idiosyncratic and subjective, an inclusionist slogan is "Wikipedia is not paper."

Observe the use of such words as "conformity," "enforcement," and "jurisprudence" in describing deletionists. But what sort of human might be attracted to words like that?

The Deletionists Have Won

Yes, that sort.

To paint with an admittedly wide brush, deletionists are both fundamentalist and conservative (in every categorical sense of those adjectives); inclusionists are not. Since spoken language is inherently subjective, however, there exists no unbiased means of quantifying which articles satisfy the deletionists' necessary condition of "...the interest of enough people" and which do not.

Given that, deletionism is inherently biased towards maintenance of status quo topics – which, in my concerned opinion, is antithetical to our continued accumulation of knowledge as a species. Unfortunately, at least with respect to open-source software, the deletionists have won.

The War on Open-Source

I can hardly count the number of open-source projects with Wikipedia pages that either were successfully deleted or are currently flagged for deletion. The reason why is simple: Wikipedia's notability requirements for software articles are sufficiently draconian that effectively no open-source software meets them. These requirements can be synopsized by the following catechism:

If Google books, Google news, and Google scholar yield no hits for your project, your article will be deleted.

Then let us query:

1. Is ConEmu sufficiently complex to require the publication of for-profit dead-tree books disseminating its use?
   • No, of course not.
2. Is ConEmu sufficiently mainstream to incentivize the scrutiny of for-profit mass media television or newspaper outlets?
   • No, of course not.
3. Is ConEmu sufficiently academic to warrant the publication of for-profit peer-reviewed papers formalizing its theory?
   • No, of course not. (Yes, Elsevier and related academic publishers are highly profitable. Let us ponder the ethicality of privatizing a common good payed for purely by taxpayer dollars. But I digress.)

Of course, few to no open-source projects ever have or will meet such ludicrous eligibility requirements.

The size of your userbase is irrelevant. The number of daily downloads, frontpage hits, blog posts, or tech articles vis-à-vis your project is irrelevant. All that matters to the garden-variety Wikipedian is: "Do members of the for-profit intelligentsia profit from and therefore formally discuss your work in a publicly monetized setting?"

If not, you're going to have a hard time. Hence, open-source software has a hard time. Hence, Wikipedia has become effectively castrated with respect to open-source software.

On the bright side, nature abhors a vacuum. By ceding all of the informational territory on open-source software to the vacuum of /dev/null, Wikipedia has made it trivial for competitors with less rigidly doctrinaire policies to capture their readership. (Let us pray to Stallman this happens soon.)

tl;dr

Due to a dysfunctional culture of fundamentalist zealotry, Wikipedia fails with respect to open-source software. There's little to nothing we can do about that. Best of luck, Maximus5 and cohort.

[oldmud0]

Wikipedians do not have that kind of attitude to every form of OSS.

Take 7-Zip, for instance. Yes, CNet, ZDNet et al. have talked about it (you make it sound as if CNN needs to cover this too), but another criteria that makes 7-Zip notable is its historical value. It is a 16-year-old graphical file archiver made by the same person who made the 7z file format and the LZMA compression algorithm. It is notable because it is a clear open-source competitor to RAR.

However, one thing that ticks me off about Wikipedia is how admins often override voting (ex. everyone can say "no" in a close discussion and the admin will say "yes" and delete it anyway), and how deleted articles cannot be recovered. Instead you have to go in there right before it's deleted, salvage the article, and bring it back to userspace.

[timothystewart6]

isn't this big enough ;) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx

[Maximus5]

It's a "blog" someone may says... blogs are not good sources as W.rules say. Really strange as for me.

[Maximus5]

Anyone is welcome to discussion Articles for deletion/ConEmu with facts and evidences.

Also, contribution to the artice itself is appreciated. Rewrite as prose? Make it more academic?

[daniel-rikowski]

Would creating an article in a different language help?

Related: ConEmu was mentioned in print in one of the largest computer magazines in Germany.(http://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2013-9-Systemwartung-per-Kommandozeile-2323785.html (paywalled))

[Maximus5]

@daniel-rikowski Different language articles are interesting, but they wouldn't help this exact issue about english article.

Thx for the link.

[BYK]

May be we can get an article on SmashingMagazine?

[Maximus5]

It would be nice I believe. But who will write it? I'm not sure about this magazine and it's authors. Is it community work?

[BYK]

It's this: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

They have a "coding" section and we can submit articles there explaining ConEmu and how it would benefit people working on Windows. I'd suggest showing them ConEmu + PowerShell or ConEmu + Xonsh

[mikemichaelis]

Fails WP:PRODUCT - does not apply to ConEmu - see Notability (organizations and companies)

Simply stated, an organization is a group of more than one person formed together for a purpose. This includes commercial and non-commercial activities, such as charitable organizations, educational institutions, hospitals, institutions, interest groups, social clubs, companies, partnerships, proprietorships, religious denominations, sects, etc.

This guideline does not cover small groups of closely related people such as families, entertainment groups, co-authors, and co-inventors covered by WP:Notability (people).

Regardless, we just need to put some attention into the article.

I found ConEmu a few weeks ago and have fallen in love with it. I'm doing a lot of GStreamer work and I like the ability to quickly move between console windows and have both Cygwin and PS windows open also. It is also amazing to put Notepad into a tab and use it for command editing. Makes my life with command line work a million times better.

I actually found ConEmu off an article talking about PowerShell (forget the topic) but it referenced an article written by Scott Hanselman about ConEmu

I see somebody referenced the Hanselman article above with link. I'm leaving the reference anyway.

[majkinetor]

Why do we care honestly? Wikipedia editors are notorious toward non-mainstream-whatever-in-any-domain and they quickly categorize many things as frindge. I was editing wikipedia before and no matter how good references were I stood no chance against admin editors - depending on the page in question the writings can be reverted in a matter of minutes.

[sbrl]

It's probably not going to help, but what if we try to fix the other issues with the article instead, if we can't meet the notability requirements? It looks like the notability requirement isn't the only issue with the article.

[DraTeots]

I'm not sure if this could help, but here is a good review in Russian in one of the largest (or the largest) online IT journal in Russia.
http://habrahabr.ru/post/164687/

Update.
Oops... Ok... The author is Maximus5...

[fatso83]

Why care at all? This article has very little content that is interesting for anyone. It's basically a product page. I don't think anyone will miss it, but that does not make ConEmu any less good.

[DraTeots]

Why care at all? As an example I was struggling with cmd for years. And even when ConEmu was already in play, I couldn't find it by googling like "cmd replacement" for a long time. So I appreciate as much information about ConEmu over internet as possible. Weight of the wiki and wiki pages nowadays is awesome. It is free. Why should ConEmu loose it?

[fatso83]

If finding ConEmu is the problem, then better focus on SEO-optimization of the homepage so that Google can find it. Wikipedia is not a hack for SEO.

[DraTeots]

That relates to what I mean. I'm not a SEO expert in any kind but have heard that being referenced by sites like Wiki or Stackoverflow is very good for SEO.

I agree with you in terms that deleting Wiki article isn't killing the project. At the same time I recalled my long forgotten wiki account and tried to help. If many community members will try to help, the page, probably, will not be deleted. Why not? )

[codewarrior0]

For what it's worth, I followed @leycec here because he's a funny guy, and now I'm using ConEmu as a replacement for conhost.exe. (It handles the ANSI codes in the output of py.test when running from Git Bash! Joy!)

So uh, I probably wouldn't have discovered ConEmu if its article hadn't been flagged for deletion. How about that?

[mikemichaelis]

I agree with DraTeots, it is worth putting effort into and keeping the article. Letting it go simply because some people don't see any immediate need is irresponsible, or well, lazy.

[Maximus5]

Thanks to all participants.