Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kryder's law

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 of the debate was keep, no consensus. SushiGeek 09:15, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kryder's law

Nominated for deletion because article appears to be a non-notable neologism created for a sensationalistic SciAm headline which Seagate doesn't even agree with. It's the exact same law(doubling every 18mo), when corrected for timeframe(wikipedia article makers originally miswrote the timeframe), as Moore's law. And it didn't hold up at the time the SciAm article was wrote, for the last several years. Lesqual 08:07, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Clarification - The name stems from a sensationalistic Scientific American article. The "law" itself is based on two data samples - what data density was many years ago and what it is now, and it doesn't fit any other range of data, particularly the last several years. The use of the name is very small, leading me to believe that Wikipedia is the primary source of the information for people using it. I could concievably publish a column in a respectable newspaper entitled "Bush's law," that the second president in a dynasty's administration always end horribly, based on George W Bush. But I would be ignoring John Quincy Adams, I would be coining a neologism, and so it would be wrong for Wikipedia to write an article about it, particularly one that mistakenly alleges that W is not the son of Barbara. Correcting that misrepresentation would not fix the article. Placing it under "American Political Dynasties" might. Likewise, renaming this to 'Hard drive areal density growth,' along with analysis, while too dry for a SciAm column, might fit an encyclopedia. Or filing it under a 'related phenomena' heading in the Moore's law article could work. Or deleting it and writing those articles anew.Lesqual

• Yeah, delete it. Moogleii

• Merge into Moore's Law, possibly create a section to collate other laws relating to computer trends. (yes, I changed my vote) --ZachPruckowski 16:39, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• Keep article has been rewritten. Lesqual misrepresents the website, it has no affiliation with seagate. nevertheless, the law is fundementally wrong and seems to have been written from a sciam article while vastly misquoting it (1956-2005 = 10.5 years, 100 billion fold increase = 1000 fold increase). the law is wrong, but the article needs to stay there to say that. --Qleem 08:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
• Keep (Agreeing with Qleem.) While the law is wrong, it is mentioned out there (e.g. on the Internet). Therefore, people who never heard of it before, and are interested in it are likely to search for it. Wikipedia should offer the correct information to them. The article has been rewritten and is now a whole lot better: it states very clearly that the law is wrong and how the wrong statement originated. That's exactly what an encyclopedia article on this law should say. – Adhemar

• Smerge to Moore's law or Hard disk. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-04-09 08:54Z

Question: Does "Smerge" mean "section merge" or something? I've never seen it before (haven't been in many AfD discussions). --ZachPruckowski 09:07, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

"Smerge" is a contraction of "slight merge", coined by User:R. fiend. It means merging a few key facts from an article, or a summarized version of it, into another article (as opposed to a regular merge, which can imply merging all of the first article's contents). –Sommers ^(Talk) 10:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete, if and only if no supporting evidence is produced to demonstrate that this is not a neologism.
  "Kryder's Law" gets only 568 hits on Google, compared to over 2 million for "Moore's Law", which implies it is not a widely-used term. Moreover, most of the first page of those hits (apart from Wikipedia's article in second place) seems to consist of references to the SciAm article of that name, not to the "law" as such. So it is not at all clear that it belongs on Wikipedia. The fact that the article has been rewritten to acknowledge the mistake does not change this: if the information is incorrect, it should be removed, not kept with a disclaimer!
  The verifiable information in this article -- the concept of such a law applying to storage growth, and the figures showing how fast it's happening, and the implications for computing -- could usefully be merged into Moore's Law. But if there is not, in fact, a widely-recognised law named for Kryder, we must not suggest there is one. — Haeleth Talk 10:09, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Wikipedia:Deletion_policy on neologisms: Reasons for deletion: "Original research (including the coining of neologisms) - but if it's a source text, it should be moved to Wikisource (see below)." The article did not, in any way, shape, or form, coin the term Kryder's law, whether or not it is a neologism is irrelevant. SciAm certainly used the term before the article was written. Qleem 18:40, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - or perhaps provide a redirect to a section ender "Moore's Law" as suggested by others above, which should give brief mention of the "Kryders Law" story. Right now this article is a primary source of misinformation, of the sort much beloved of Wikipedia's detractors.

--Panzerb0y 10:47, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

has the misinformation not been corrected? Qleem 16:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• Keep - The huge growth in hard drive capacity is a major driving force in computing, with important societal implications ranging from privacy loss to copyright law. It is technologically distinct from Moore's law, which deals with integrated circuit density. That Scientific American, a widely respected publication, may have coined the term hardly makes it less notable. --agr 18:20, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• It is my understanding that the issue is that the name may have been created by a wikipedia editor, who proceeded to draw some wrong conclusions from the article. --ZachPruckowski 18:41, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Please follow the link to the SciAm article [1] (which is given in the Wikipedia article in question). The title of the SciAm article is "Kryder's Law."--agr 19:17, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. It's non-notable, for one thing. Only Wikipedia mirrors and direct references to the Scientific American article use it. Whether Scientific American coined the term is less important than whether other people now use it. And other people *don't* use it. I can't believe all these keep votes suggesting it should be kept because it's used on the Internet--it isn't used at all.
  And while it's true that the Scientific American article has as its title the phrase Kryder's Law, that doesn't mean the article is really trying to introduce something called Kryder's Law. It'd be like me publishing an article about an archeologist which compares him to Indiana Jones, then titling the article "'Indy' Smith". The title is just an attempt to make a clever comparison. Ken Arromdee 04:24, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Your complaint seems to be about the title of the article, not it's content. It's the article that is being proposed for deletion. The article describes a very important phenominon in the computer industry. The original SciAm article coined a name for it. If you have a better name, suggest one.--agr 15:07, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

But you thought the name was important enough to "correct" an editor who claimed the name was created by Wikipedia. If so, then it's important enough for me to correct the correction.

The phenomenon itself doesn't actually hold true. If you feel some pressing need to describe it anyway, it would have to be merged into Moore's Law and described as an incorrect belief. Ken Arromdee 15:50, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Neologisms by Wikipedians is frowned on yned the no original research policy, so a correction was in order. I'm not sure what you mean by "phenomenon itself doesn't actually hold true" -- that there has been dramatic improvements in disk storage capacity is indisputable. But this discussion belongs on the article's talk page. --agr 16:31, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

The fact remains that this is "out there." What is wikipedia for if not to accumulate pages on knowledge that would not be included in standard reference books? Obviously people know about it, or no one would create/contribute to the article. Don't erase all the work and research that people (myself included) have put into this. Qleem 17:13, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

• Keep This is an important article as now written, since it provides good information about one of the three primary hardware enablers of computer technology, the other two being processors and networks. This has nothing to do with Moore's Law and I would not merge this with the Moore's Law article. Rather I would suggest changing the title to something like Disk Drive Areal Density Growth and removing all but one of the references to Kryder's Law, leaving only a link to the unfortunate SciAm article and the statement that no such "law" was ever proposed. http://www.storagemojo.com

• Keep I keep hearing Moore's Law, Moore's Law yada yada. As the poster above says, this has nothing to do with Moore's Law. RTFA and you'll find that, according to the SciAm article's data, HD growth has been far slower than Moore' Law would predict. Moreover, Moore's Law has jack squat to do with HD growth. To quote from the page, "the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, will double in about 18 months." Note, if you will, that that's integrated circuit, not magnetic storage capacity, nor magnetic storage cost, nor anything else to do with Kryder's law. Moreover, smerging would directly contradict the last section of the Moore's Law article: "Not all aspects of computing technology develop in capacities and speed according to Moore's Law. Random Access Memory (RAM) speeds and hard drive seek times improve at best a few percentages per year." To recap, the Law applies only to ICs and semiconductors. Smerging would be foolish at best, and destructive at worst. Qleem 03:59, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
• Proposal I've gone through and reread all the criticism and keep arguments here and on the talk page, and the sciam article, and the article itself. It seems the major objections are: the name, and the perceived relationship to Moore's law. The major arguments to keep seem to be: It's written, it's out there, Wikipedia editors didn't coin the neologism, it's a distinct phenomenon from Moore's law, and it's an important idea that needs to stay on the wiki (feel free to add more objs or for below this if I left anything out). My proposal is two-fold. Firstly, the article could be rewritten to be very clear on just what it is this law refers to, namely platter bit/sq inch density growth in hard drives, not capacity, nor price/GB, nor anything else. Secondly, the article could be moved (and Kryder's law redirected to) Hard Disk Density Growth or similar. The link on Hard disk would need to point there too. This would put the article under a more "encyclopaedic" name, remove any ambiguity, promote a more thorough rewrite, and still maintain the content and the ability for people to search for Kryder's law. Qleem 20:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

It *isn't* out there, except in that single article--Google shows little to no use--and it *is* a neologism. Just because the title of the Scientific American article is Kryder's Law doesn't mean it isn't a neologism; the Scientific American article is not really using it for a law any more than the hypothetical Bush's Law is a law or 'Indy' Smith is a nickname. Moreover, the supposed content isn't true. As even you admit, hard disks don't grow at the speed that Moore's Law predicts, which was the original contention.

It's true that you can write an article about disk drive space that doesn't use the original name and doesn't make the major claim of the original article, but there's only a semantic difference between "delete the article" and "rewrite the article into something that's completely unrelated to the original except that it has disk drive space in it". If you're going to do that, we're better off deleting the article, writing the disk drive space article separately, and not even pretending that the disk drive space article has anything to do with this one. Ken Arromdee 13:47, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I guess I should bold this, since so many people manage to miss it: according to Wikipedia:Deletion_policy neologisms are not grounds for deletion unless they are coined by the wikipedia article. In response to Ken, it is my experience that writing an article from scratch is almost never better than rewriting an existing, closely related article. Is anyone actually opposed to moving it? Qleem 16:30, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Its use as a name for a law is a neologism coined by Wikipedia. The Scientific American article didn't seriously use it as a name for a law, despite containing the word "Law".

As for moving the article vs. creating a new one--you are already proposing creating a new article. You're just not calling it "creating a new article". It doesn't have the same name as the original article, nor does it state the same central point; I'd call that a new article. Go ahead and do it, as long as you're *sure* that your "same article" doesn't have any of the questionable content from the original. Ken Arromdee 20:45, 12 April 2006 (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.