Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zodiac (cipher)

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 keep. The Nordic Goddess Kristen ^{Worship her} 00:24, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Zodiac (cipher)

Zodiac (cipher) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

The article makes no assertion of notability for this cipher - being very broken doesn't suffice. ciphergoth (talk) 09:29, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Just to go into this in a bit more detail - lots of people design ciphers, most of whom don't really have much expertise in breaking them. Those who do know how to break them can have fun doing so, and occasionally get a paper out of it, but it would seem perverse to consider a cipher notable because it's broken, unless the break is independently interesting in some way - in other words, if the paper that breaks it is frequently cited. ciphergoth (talk) 09:35, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

• "Assertions of notability" form no part of our Wikipedia:Deletion policy, nor does the nominator's idea of "fun" or the fact that a cipher may have been documented as broken. Wikipedia:Notability is quite clear on what notability actually is.

  As the references and further reading sections of the article indicate, multiple published works exist, that are from authors independent of Lee, the creator, that document this subject with noticably more than passing mentions and that are pretty much canonical examples of reliablity for Wikipedia purposes. (IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, for example, is a peer-reviewed academic journal with a policy of publishing original research that advances its field. That Ciphergoth thinks that people have "fun" submitting papers to it does not change the fact that it is a serious journal, and that publications in it can be relied upon to have been written by experts in the field and reviewed by an editorial and review board of their peers.) The Primary Notability Criterion is satisfied.

  Remember the readers. They might want to look these subjects up. It's what we're writing an encyclopaedia for. Keep. Uncle G (talk) 12:11, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

• Keep. If people considered it worth investing the time to write research papers on this cipher, then it is clearly notable. Why would anybody waste their time attacking a non-notable cipher? The publication, therfore, of the cryptanalysis of this cipher is evidence of notability. JulesH (talk) 12:20, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
• Keep - at least several academic papers on it.  J L G 4 1 0 4  12:39, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
• Keep. Clearly notable per academic articles. This is a useful, interesting article—why the urge to delete? Graymornings_(talk) 13:00, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
• Keep - Multiple articles in peer-reviewed academic journals referenced in the article establish notability. Grandmartin11 (talk) 22:36, 22 January 2009 (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.