Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ADD (x86 instruction)

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. MBisanz ^talk 00:47, 27 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ADD (x86 instruction)[edit]

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Too detailed for an encyclopedia, this article is essentially a tutorial for a x86 assembly instruction. All other encyclopedic content can be merged. Delete or merge to x86 instruction listings per WP:NOPAGE. Esquivalience ^t 22:24, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. Everymorning (talk) 22:50, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete until a better article is available as I agree that it currently looks more like a guide. SwisterTwister talk 00:09, 11 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Nothing wrong with the article, but Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal. As far as an encyclopedia goes, this topic is fully covered in the x86 assembly language article by the paragraph under Integer ALU instructions. --Bejnar (talk) 17:04, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:10, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

keep Are you planning to delete the whole of Category:x86 instructions and its children too?

WP is not a paper encyclopedia. It is not limited by page count. The topic here is clearly highly notable (it is very widely covered by sources, which is our benchmark). It is significant to technology - if you're reading this, you're probably doing it via x86 ADD instructions somewhere. So just what is the policy-based reason for deleting this? "Not interesting to me" is not a policy-based reason. Nor is "delete until a better article is available" (we have a myriad such articles, far worse than this, and we can't get rid of them.

Maybe WP should never discuss any opcode, for any processor. But if it does, this would seem to be one of the most important, thus most justified for coverage. Not the most interesting perhaps; a commonplace ADD doesn't have the obscure charm of HCF (Halt and Catch Fire), it's not interesting enough to make me want to spend time writing it. But that isn't a valid reason to delete. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:01, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In response to Andy Dingley's question _Are you planning to delete the whole of Category:x86 instructions and its children too? The answer is no. (1) Afd is a piecemeal process, each article being evaluated on its own merits. (2) many of the articles at Category:x86 instructions are fine articles, like AES instruction set. The policy reason to delete is "What Wikipedia is Not". It is not a manual or a textbook, and that seems to be what this article is trying to be. --Bejnar (talk) 06:21, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There is no good reason to not have this article. What policy does it break?

@Andy Dingley: You ask What policy does it break? The policy that it breaks is Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. Please read it. --Bejnar (talk) 17:22, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I presume you mean by that the "instruction manual" clause. However that depends on whether you see discussion of an opcode as an instruction manual and nothing more. A programmer might see that, a processor designer certainly wouldn't. Even if an article text is no more than a limited scope at a particular time, we should judge deletion on the basis of the topic, not the article. Opcodes are broader than this. We wouldn't delete VW Beetle just because there's also a Haynes manual for it. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:56, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If we agree that a set of articles on opcodes are a reasonable thing, then that would be a strange set if it then excluded one of the most common of all. It would not be surprising if such an article hadn't yet been produced, but in this case it has. It's bizarre indeed to then set out to find arcane reasons why it could then be deleted. No-one gains from such a deletion. The encylopedia is not improved by it. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:11, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per WP:NOTMANUAL -- RoySmith (talk) 01:45, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Move to ADD (computer instruction), trim down the x86 material and the pseudo navigation "template", and expand it into a general article about the ADD instruction on the lines of the NOP article. While Wikipedia doesn't need to provide a detailed reference manual for the x86 architecture, the instruction itself is certainly worth an article. StarryGrandma (talk) 02:43, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting idea. There might be some things to say about add instructions in general. Various ways of handling (and signalling) cary, overflow, negative, zero, etc. Chaining operations to perform multi-precision operations. I suppose it's possible that such an article could be written, but I'm having a hard time seeing it. I could certainly see an article about typical modern ALU architectures (maybe this already exists?), but an article about a particular arithmetic operation seems unlikely to me. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:36, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 12:16, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. As others have pointed out, Wikipedia is not a manual or texbook. There are other Wikimedia projects better suited to that. StarryGrandma's idea could work, but I'm not sure what content from this article would be salvaged. It's basically a manual for a specific x86 instruction. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 05:41, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Comment This article contains history, which is not something found in a manual. Unscintillating (talk) 00:10, 26 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I could find no history in this article, certainly there is no such section, and I didn't see any refernce to versions. Are you refering to the differences between processors? Lastly, manuals sometimes do include "history" in that they refer to different instructions that may be required when dealing with different versions, or in this case processors. --Bejnar (talk) 07:44, 26 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Extensions were introduced with I80386 (32-bit operands) and x86-64 (64-bit operands)." My point remains that the objection of NOT MANUAL doesn't seem to fit. Unscintillating (talk) 09:32, 26 December 2015 (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.