Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SIMON (Batch Interactive test/debug)

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. The consensus is that without sources, this article failes GNG. The argument that "sources might exist offline which we are not aware of/do not have access to" is not sufficient to keep an unsourced article. PhantomSteve/talk|contribs\ 17:31, 7 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

SIMON (Batch Interactive test/debug)[edit]

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Contested PROD. I have searched for WP:RS I am unable to find any; hence I believe it fails WP:GNG. Note that this article appears to have been created by the author of the software in question (User:Kdakin), who also created the recently deleted article on another one of his products (OLIVER). I will repeat my position (which I argued for extensively in that AFD) that the possibility that unknown/unidentified sources might exist is no reason to keep the article. The onus is on those who oppose deletion to demonstrate that sufficient sources exist to justify keeping the article; while the nominator ought to search for sources (which I have), that obligation extends only to searching those sources which are readily available to them for searching. SJK (talk) 05:23, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Kvng, Fieari, SwisterTwister, Uncle G, and CoffeeWithMarkets: Pinging editors who participated in previous related AFD. SJK (talk) 05:26, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. SJK (talk) 05:28, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2016 May 29. —^{cyberbot I}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 08:22, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Beyond the software itself not being particularly notable, the conflict-of-interest question is troubling, and this really seems like an open-and-shut case for deletion. CoffeeWithMarkets (talk) 18:49, 29 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - I made the same argument in Oliver. I believe that this sort of article is useful for computing history, and that there should be print references available that do not exist online in any form. The fact that we don't currently have access to said references is not a reason to delete. That said, given that the Oliver AFD consensus was delete, I suspect this one will go similarly. I am not in a place where I can find physical references at this time, so I won't be able to help more than this protest. I would still like my viewpoint on the record. Fieari (talk) 01:20, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- I think most of the contents of this article (and the Oliver one) are personal recollections of the author of the software in question. The information probably wasn't published in independent WP:RS even in the 1970s or 1980s, just in self-published / non-independent sources (manuals, working papers, etc.). (Speaking from my personal experience – I have been involved professionally in software development, but the software I've worked on largely isn't mentioned in RS, because most software development doesn't result in the production of RS as output. In some cases text I've written has been incorporated into manuals published by my employer, but a manual published by a software vendor isn't an independent source for establishing the notability of that software–that's my experience today, and I expect the situation in the 1970s and 1980s was similar.) Wikipedia is not an appropriate repository for those sort of recollections, even though I do think they are valuable. If one wants to publish recollections like this, a better course of action might be to submit a paper to the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. (And of course, since that's a reliable source, such a publication could potentially be used to establish notability for the purposes of Wikipedia.)SJK (talk) 09:00, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - This is a fair point, and you may be right. I guess I'm mostly going off a gut feeling based on the fact that this sort of topic was typically considered notable at the time, and that the published magazines of the time can be difficult to navigate today. You believe that no such sources exist, I think they might exist but are difficult to find, or at least I'm granting the benefit of the doubt regarding it. But I am willing to admit I might be wrong. I just prefer granting the benefit of the doubt when possible. Fieari (talk) 06:20, 2 June 2016 (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.