Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/RASCII

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 and rename to Rough ASCII, which is a more common term that has more source hits. Ultimately, there seems to be no strong desire to delete the article. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 16:47, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

RASCII[edit]

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A search turned up nothing except two "what does this word mean?"-type sites. Fails WP:GNG, WP:NOTDICT and WP:NOTNEO. Narky Blert (talk) 18:48, 27 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 00:45, 28 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Delete as a WP:BEFORE search found no significant coverage in reliable sources (fails WP:GNG). -KAP03(^{Talk • Contributions • Email}) 17:04, 29 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Merge and redirect to Scopist. This is a dictdef at best, and we don't need that chart. --Lockley (talk) 20:49, 1 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep I'm puzzled by this article. Is RASCII a rough draft format? Or a character set? What does "shifted" mean here? If this is a modal form (like Baudot) of ASCII, and it's true that it was adopted for court reporting in the US as early as 1960 (presumably those strange little machines I only get to see on old transatlantic TV cop shows), then this is technically interesting (ASCII is never modal) and worthy of an encyclopedia. Can anyone work to improve it? Andy Dingley (talk) 22:27, 3 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Those "strange little machines" are probably stenotypes. According to the history on Stenograph's Web site, they were used at least as far back as the 1930's, and presumably didn't use anything related to ASCII back then; they might not have used any encoding, as the older machines appear to be typewriter-like, not teletypewriter-like. That history page mentions the "Stenograph Data Writer" from 1963, which writes to a magnetic tape, presumably in some character encoding, but that may or may not have been the encoding given on the RASCII page. That encoding has no citations for it, so we currently have no reason to believe it exists except in the imagination of whoever put it there. Guy Harris (talk) 22:08, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it exists. A moment's looking for it will (in typical lawyerese) find extensive legal argument on who should pay for it, and nothing at all on what it is. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:39, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I didn't make it clear that "it" refers to the character encoding on RASCII. There may be a ton of lawyers referring to "rough ASCIIs" or "RASCIIs", but they could be called "(rough) ASCII"s because they're encoded in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or some extension thereof, rather than in the encoding given on the RASCII page. What's needed is a citation to believe that said encoding exists and is actually being used for digital legal transcripts. Guy Harris (talk) 23:48, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Winged Blades^Godric 04:48, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy Delete this is either a hoax or synthesis of two un-related (and non-notable) topics. Power~enwiki (talk) 04:49, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please be careful before you call something a "hoax". I'm probably as astonished about the topic as you are, but some quick Google search already indicates that "RASCII" exists in general and is not something made up by the creator of the article, who, judged by the valuable info he provided for other articles, is acting in good faith. I can't comment on the specific character set mentioned in the article (yet), but that's an issue of unreferenced (and therefore possibly incomplete or confused) information, and doesn't affect the notability of the topic "as is". --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:40, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 17:47, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, but rename. To be honest, I never heard of this one so far, but a quick Google search already reveals so many hits and congruent descriptions, that we can be sure it exists and is not made up (as suggested by another commentor). However, I found considerably more hits for terms like "Rough ASCII", "Uncertified Rough Draft", "Uncertified Unedited Rough Draft" and a few more variants than for "RASCII", so the article should probably be renamed into something like "Rough ASCII" (although that cannot have been the original name if it was introduced in the 1950s, as ASCII didn't exist before 1963).

As Andy points out further above, if it would turn out that a certain standard symbol or character set would (have been) used for these drafts, as described in the article, this is historically relevant to be included. Let's try to find a reference for it, even though it might turn out to be difficult if it's from the 1950s... However, that's about a reference for a specific info in the article, and it does not affect notability of "Rough ASCII" (or similar) as a whole, which can be easily established by a Google search.

Even though I think notability is given, let's try to select some of the better references turning up in Google in order to not leave it as an unreferenced article for much longer. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:40, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

ASCII started, I think, in 1957 but didn't get the name "ASCII" until 1960 and wasn't adopted as a standard until 1963. So there were "ASCIIs" before that date. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:28, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[Citation needed] on that "started in 1957". And if it didn't get the name "ASCII" until 1960, there couldn't have been "ASCIIs", under that name, before 1960, except in a context where "ASCII" stood for something unrelated to ASCII. And there wouldn't have been "ASCII"s before court transcripts were put into electronic form. Perhaps the article should be about the notion of a rough draft of a legal transcript, but that notion isn't particularly tied to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, except perhaps to the extent that, once transcripts were put into electronic form, they were recorded in ASCII rather than, say, EBCDIC, and those electronic transcripts were referred to "ASCIIs", perhaps because they're raw text in ASCII rather than something marked up in, say, Microsoft Word format. And, if it's about the notion of a rough draft of a legal transcript, perhaps it should be a section in the transcript (law) article rather than an article on its own.

And that character chart definitely needs a citation. Guy Harris (talk) 21:55, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Why wouldn't there have been ASCII before court transcripts?

ASCII grew out of the same US Navy work that gave us Grace Hopper, COBOL and CODASYL. It was an attempt to produce a rational character set that would be sortable in database use, without the modality of Baudot from the Telex world and without the non-contiguous, machine-dependent, punch card-derived BCD messes that would give us EBCDIC. The US Army had already done something similar with FIELDATA, but of course the USN would rather use Cyrillic than something from their real enemy. Andy Dingley (talk) 00:03, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Why wouldn't there have been ASCII before court transcripts?" Because there were courts, and court reporters, before there were computers. Next question? Guy Harris (talk) 00:44, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

OK, enough with the snarky edit summaries.

You stated, "And there wouldn't have been "ASCII"s before court transcripts were put into electronic form." I questioned this. Maybe you're so unfamiliar with this topic. Do you think that ASCII exists only to support court transcripts? Do you think that court transcripts are the only reason for ASCII variants? Andy Dingley (talk) 01:09, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, by "ASCII"s I meant "those things that lawyers, and people supporting lawyers, call "ASCII"s, e.g. "rough ASCII"s". What did you mean by "ASCIIs" when you said "So there were "ASCIIs" before that date." Did you mean "character sets called ASCII" (which would have been drafts, not official standards, until the 1963 published spec), or did you mean "rough, and possibly no longer rough, ASCIIs, in the sense that the term is used in the legal profession"?

It is rather unlikely that the term "rough ASCII" would have been used before there was an "ASCII" to which it would refer. So, as Matthiaspaul said, "that cannot have been the original name if it was introduced in the 1950s, as ASCII didn't exist before 1963". Guy Harris (talk) 03:57, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(See, for example, this page from a court reporting service, which speaks of "converting a PDF into an ASCII" - not "to an ASCII text document", just "to an ASCII", so "ASCII", even without "rough", is used to refer to an ASCII text file. The plural would presumably be "ASCIIs".) Guy Harris (talk) 04:05, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware of a few draft proposals of the ASCII standard before its first publication in 1963, but they are all dated after 1960. AKAIK, the first meeting towards ASCII was held in 1960. Andy, if you have better info regarding the early history of ASCII, please add it to the ASCII article.

However, regarding this "RASCII" article, we don't necessarily need to choose the original name (whatever it was) used for these rough court text drafts. If "Rough ASCII" would turn out to be the most commonly used term today, this is a valid title for the article, even if the concept predates ASCII. If another term is found to be more common, we can choose that as well. My point above was, that the present title "RASCII" does not appear to be the best possible title for the article. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:38, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, So Why 12:12, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by nom

"a quick Google search already reveals so many hits and congruent descriptions"

"let's try to select some of the better references turning up in Google"

Which ones would those be? Don't waffle, add them to the article! Because I haven't seen any. Narky Blert (talk) 22:38, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I already added a bunch of them to the article (there are many more), but don't have the time to pretty them up. Over time, we can select better ones, but this should already establish that the concept and term is real and is obviously commonly used in court environments, and is not something made up.

I could not find any reference discussing this particular character set so far. I agree that we should find a source for this, but researching this in libraries may take months or even years to find a reference. My point is that with or without such a particular reference, the topic "Rough ASCII" (or similar) "as is" is notable. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:38, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Half the article discusses a character set (which I don't believe exists), the other half discusses court reporting (and I believe "RASCII" is a jargon term for "rough draft"). Nobody here seems clear which one the article refers to. Power~enwiki (talk) 00:24, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I refer to "Rough ASCII" (or similar). The character set table is nice extra info (if it can be verified), but does not affect the notability of the topic. This AfD is about the notability of the topic, not about individual information still being unreferenced in an article - that's something dealt with in normal article development, not at AfD. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:38, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The page must be renamed if kept under that theory. Many of the sources [1] don't mention ASCII at all, and certainly don't mention RASCII. Power~enwiki (talk) 20:18, 15 July 2017 (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.