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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. Barkeep49 (talk) 03:46, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Augur (software)

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Augur (software) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Every substantive edit to this article appears to be by a WP:SPA, some of which have usernames that Google directly to the company and others have usernames that imply company / role accounts.

The sources mainly read like churnalism (a couple closely match old press releases), with remarkably little interest despite the blockchain buzzword.

The article states that the product peaked at 265 daily users, dropping to 37 post launch. It's hard to find objective evidence of significance outside the cryptocurrency bubble. Guy (help!) 01:28, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. CASSIOPEIA(talk) 03:37, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. CASSIOPEIA(talk) 03:37, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment This got tremendous notice inside the crypto bubble, fwiw (not much). But I do remember more mainstream coverage than the meagre sources presently on the article. I'll have a dig tomorrow - it's possible I'm just remembering Matt Levine making fun of it - David Gerard (talk) 01:35, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • OK, my memory was wrong - not even Matt Levine made fun of it. Sources in the article: IBTimes probably OK (Ian Allison knows his stuff), Fox News substantial IMO, Bloomberg substantial, Fortune churnalist fluff, MIT churnalist fluff, Economist short but not fluff - though it adds very little new and is more of a summary. Substantial articles not already in the article: Bloomberg has this from 2015 (gosh this is interesting!) and this (assassination markets!) from 2018. Nothing in FT, Guardian or BBC. Passing mentions in NYT and Telegraph, in articles on other topics. This is literally the entire RS coverage. I'm unconvinced this is enough for WP:NCORP or WP:GNG. Leaning delete - David Gerard (talk) 01:47, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • Wavering - given discussion below, I expect a not-disgraceful article could be written from the extant RSes. If it does achieve notability, it'll be as a flash-in-the-pan if there are readers wondering "whatever happened to ..." So, currently not strongly convinced either way - David Gerard (talk) 09:40, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: Augur is notable per WP:NCORP. The list provided above by David alone is enough to meet all of the conditions: IBTimes, Fox News, Bloomberg, Fortune, MIT, Economist. These all have one or more full length articles about Augur, are all considered realiable sources by Wikipedia standards, are all secondary sources, and are all independent. Micah Zoltu (talk) 02:04, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • What David means to say is that he believes I have a COI and has filed a COIN against me. It is not yet resolved and I'm not convinced I have a COI. I did a short stint of contract work for Forecast Foundation a couple years ago but I haven't worked for or been paid by them for a long time. Since David has decided to bring up COI here, I would also like to inform readers that David has a published book for sale that basically says (my own summary) "all blockchains are bad and all applications built on blockchains are bad". He also has a blog with Patreon subscribers where the primary topic is how bad blockchains are and how all blockchain stuff is bad. Given this, it is entirely unsurprising that he would want to delete a blockchain project page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MicahZoltu (talk • contribs) 17:44, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep (came here seeing this topic mentioned at WP:COIN). David Gerard's list of sources is probably enough to establish notability, but we also have:
  • Fröberg E, Ingre G, Knudsen S (2018), Blockchain and Prediction Markets: An Analysis of Three Organizations Implementing Prediction Markets Using Blockchain Technology, and the Future of Blockchain Prediction Market (pdf), KTH Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap (EECS)
which appears to be an independent report from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology[1] analysing the Augur software, which takes it comfortably over the line I think. Alexbrn (talk) 05:00, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
ooh, that's quite a nice one - is it peer-reviewed? If so that's a top-quality blockchain source. If not, it's probably worth the "further reading" you put it in - David Gerard (talk) 19:24, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Don't think so, but it's a cut above the normal for this topic space. Alexbrn (talk) 19:50, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Clarification about the Swedish terminology: it is an examensarbete – a degree project – at the undergraduate/Bachelor's level (Grundnivå, 15 HP). --bonadea contributions talk 13:34, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
ah, about like an honours thesis? - David Gerard (talk) 17:23, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
A thesis at this level certainly doesn't have the level of review needed to contribute to notability. Only a PhD thesis would possibly do so. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:36, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
My understanding of a honours degree is that it is one step up from a Bachelor's, while still an undergraduate degree. If I am right about that, then no. This is simply a BA level paper, a compulsory component of all BA degrees (or equivalent professional degrees – I don't know whether KTH uses the BA/MA terminology) for all subjects within the Swedish system, and it is not peer reviewed. --bonadea contributions talk 06:07, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete for a slew of reasons but primarily the nom's statement. Praxidicae (talk) 16:42, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete with extreme prejudice it had a few articles when it opened and a few hundred trades. And then essentially nothing. Is it still alive? It's impossible to say, nobody has bothered writing an obituary as far as I see it. The Bloomberg article is interesting especially when it quotes CFTC folks and others on the question of legality. Folks like this won't say "This is illegal" until the lawyers write and file their briefs. They might as well have said it though. I'd paraphrase all the legal comments as "How could this possibly be legal?" They apparently never got around to the stage of writing and filing briefs. If anybody could provide evidence that this market is still alive in any economic sense, let me know and I might reconsider. Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:11, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete This article is about a dead fish. Chisme (talk) 22:26, 30 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:NOTTEMPORARY Wikipedia has articles on many products, platforms, businesses, technologies, etc. that were notable for a time, then faded into non-use. The purpose of an Encyclopedia isn't to present "articles on current events" but rather to aggregate knowledge about various topics that have been notable at some point in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem is a great example of this, no one is talking about it anymore in MSM, but it was a thing that happened and it was significant for its time. The same is true fro basically every biography type article, the person generally doesn't get talked about after their death but they were notable in their time and thus the article stays indefinitely. Micah Zoltu (talk) 10:27, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. David Gerard dismisses this Fortune article as "churnalist fluff" but it is a full length article by a named journalist that is not a simple re-hash of company press releases so in any other context would be considered a reasonable source. Overall I think there is enough to justify an article. I also agree that WP:NOTTEMPORARY applies - it is only necessary to establish that it was notable, not that it remains active and profitable today. Rhanbury (talk) 19:12, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Also, whether or not its activities were legal or ethical is not relevant to the question of notability. Rhanbury (talk) 19:16, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to offer an opinion here, since I was part of the Forecast Foundation team for several years. That said, I thought it would be worth mentioning that Augur has been discussed in a number of academic papers:
I think most (all?) of these are peer-reviewed. In addition, Augur was discussed in a 2016 policy primer from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University:
FWIW, I've always felt that Augur is most notable from a research point-of-view, as a (so far!) working solution to the "oracle problem". Of course I am biased, but, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Augur to have its own Wikipedia page -- in my opinion it is considerably less obscure than many other research topics that have their own entries. Just my 2 cents! Tinybike (talk) 02:54, 2 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
One other reference I forgot to add is Blockchain Revolution, by Don and Alex Tapscott, which discusses Augur:
Look for the word "Augur" instead Cifoxs (talk) 07:46, 3 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It depends on the article. It's mostly used as an example. For instance, Heiss et al's "From oracles to trustworthy data on-chaining systems" cites Augur as an example of a "voting-based data on-chaining" system, briefly discusses what Augur is, and has a table comparing it to other systems. Bentov et al's "Decentralized prediction market without arbiters" cites Augur as an example of a decentralized prediction market, then they criticize Augur's solution, then they propose a different solution. (These articles are not primarily about Augur, though, if that's what you're asking.) I linked to the articles, so please have a look through them yourself -- no need to take my word for it.
Stepping back for a second to look at the bigger picture, I have to say: I think that the WP article in its current form is useless, and unfortunately it's not obvious to me how to improve it without referencing primary sources. There's definitely been some coverage in the mainstream media, but not enough to paint a reasonable picture of what Augur is using only those sources. From reading through the Talk page, my sense is that most of the back-and-forth warring on this page has been driven by people including information beyond what's been covered in mainstream sources, because that is currently the only way to describe Augur reasonably well.
So, here's my suggestion: replace the article with a stub for now (e.g. "Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain" could be the entire article). The article could be expanded if/when there's more thorough mainstream media coverage in the future. Tinybike (talk) 00:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Primary sources can be used, they just can't prove notability, see WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD. Jonpatterns (talk) 11:52, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but, from reading through Talk:Augur_(software) this appears to not be the case. As far as I can tell, every time a primary source (or crypto trade source) has been used in the article, it has been reverted. See for example David Gerard's comments under the "Extended additions need RSes" and "Augur (software) revert: extensive unsourced rambling" sections. (Quote: "As you know, crypto articles are under harsh sanctions - because crypto articles were getting filled with reams of precisely this sort of primary-sourced nonsense.") Currently, the WP article does not even cite the Augur whitepaper
  • Peterson J, Krug J, Zoltu M, Williams AK, Alexander S (2018). "Augur: a decentralized oracle and prediction market platform". arXiv:1501.01042 [cs.CR].
which is a surprising omission if there's no policy against it.
I wasn't aware of WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD. Does it apply to crypto pages on WP? (Do different sections of WP have different rules?) Tinybike (talk) 22:33, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
so, crypto has super harsh rules in place under WP:GS/Crypto, which are there because the crypto articles were overcome with a firehose of spam - multi-thousand word passages sourced to the project wiki, etc. So this leads to harshness on sourcing - basically, get coverage in mainstream WP:RSes - not even crypto sites. Peer-reviewed academic work counts. Books may count (or may not, if they're Packt shovelware they're a bit dubious). Lots of things die at AFD because they can't show good third-party sourcing of proper news coverage and/or academic peer-reviewed sources. I'm not laying out a list of written rules, I'm describing the lay of the land - there are some very pro-crypto editors who've come to realise that this sort of harshness actually makes our crypto stuff not suck.
anyway I'm strongly suspecting this article will live, and academic peer-reviewed sources are awesome, and conference proceedings are pretty good - David Gerard (talk) 23:26, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Given the proliferation of scams in the space, I can see why crypto would have harsher sourcing rules, but excluding all crypto sites feels like "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Many (most?) crypto news sites are highly dubious, but there are a handful (e.g. The Block) that are in my opinion pretty reliable. (Personally, I would trust a crypto-related article from The Block much more than one from Fox News.) Is there a procedure for whitelisting particular sources? If not, is that something that the editors here would be open to? Tinybike (talk) 04:33, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
(this is tangential to this AFD, but ...) Everything's open to re-evaulation in principle. I'd have a look at the discussions surrounding Coindesk - see the ones linked from WP:RSP#CoinDesk. CoinDesk doesn't lie about facts, and corrects when caught out (e.g. the recent one on Kik), but has a tendency to write glowing articles about things that don't exist and never happen if they have the word "blockchain" in - so absolutely unusable for notability. Other crypto sites are worse. Blockchain press looks a bit like "specialist press", but is in practice advocacy press. The Block has done the same - e.g. their recent puff piece on the Bakkt futures, directly claiming them as evidence of number go up any moment now. Anyway, if the discussion were to happen, the place for it would be at WP:RSN - David Gerard (talk) 07:45, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
What is the reason for not having Augurs white paper as a reference in the article? I am unable to see anything related to that in the sanction notice. Cifoxs (talk) 08:17, 5 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I know this is a bit off-topic, but, just to clarify: are you saying that CoinDesk just can't be used for notability, or that it can't be used at all? I agree with the former, but the latter seems like an awfully extreme position to me. Tinybike (talk) 06:33, 6 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Here are some more academic publications that talk about Augur (I think are these all peer-reviewed):
Here's a recent article about Augur in TheStreet.com (which is not a crypto-specific news site, although I don't know if it's considered reliable or not):
Here's a lecture series from the University of Buffalo focused on Augur and Grid+:
Here are some books that discuss Augur:
Here's a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
(Note: as I understand it, NBER working papers are not peer-reviewed.) Tinybike (talk) 07:14, 6 December 2019 (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.
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