Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hiren's boot CD

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. Majorly _{(o rly?)} 14:36, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hiren's boot CD

Hiren's boot CD (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Unreferenced, non-notable software (not every boot CD is notable!) /Blaxthos 19:49, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

• Delete as nominator. /Blaxthos 19:50, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Wouldn't have guessed it from the article, but Google seems to like it, as do the Digg crowd. I'm surprised, but it looks like this is a candidate for cleanup, not deletion. -FunnyMan 20:13, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. I would give a few links to torrent trackers here showing its popularity but I don't think I'm allowed to do that, am I? --- Jocke Pirat - Talk : Contribs 20:53, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Blog posts and requests for download locations isn't really the same as reliable sources with any sort of WP:Notability. Google/digg hits shouldn't be the measure for inclusion on Wikipedia -- let's stick to our rules for inclusion, not how popular a warez CD is on torrent/warez sites. /Blaxthos 20:55, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Say that you look at the amount of torrents there are for the CD's current version and the amount of comments in various trackers. Is that not a decent measurement of popularity? --- Jocke Pirat - Talk : Contribs 22:40, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

No. If it were truely WP:Notable, it would be WP:ATTribituable to reliable sources. It may appear notable within a technocentric niche (which has a higher probability to vote in WP:AFD discussions ;-) ), but it still doesn't meet our core requirements of notability and attribution. /Blaxthos 22:51, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. It has gained notablity - I remember seeing it all over the place when looking for a boot CD on my own. Had I been able to find a download link at the time, it's likely this CD would have been able to solve the technical snafu I was having (instead it took about five hours of Google-massage before a working entry leaked out that wasn't spam or crippleware). It seems the "warez" scene is at a disadvantage, as by part of its nature it's near impossible to find what the more overly bureaucratic-minded editors would consider a "reliable source" of information. Once a "reliable source" publishes something about a warez outlet or whathaveyou, it tends to disappear rather rapidly. I believe the standards should be different with something like this, which still serves a useful enough purpose (if memory serves me correctly, it was one of the first "free" boot CDs of any sort, legal or not), and carries a legacy that, even if it's part of the youth-corrupting and profit-killing warez industry, passes notability. --Action Jackson IV 21:24, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't it take more "Skillz" to work out how to fix a system problem within legal means (with freeware) rather than just downloading Hiren's boot CD and fixing it using that.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mutley (talk • contribs) 04:45, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

It would take some money for some of the problems you can fix with Hiren's Boot CD. I don't think there are freeware alternatives to such things as data recovery. However, there is some freeware on the CD made by hackers, crackers, and freelance developers IIRC. The pirated software I've seen in the CD's list have mostly been in partitioning, data recovery, and antivirus plus the DOS utilities if they aren't from FreeDOS. --- Jocke Pirat - Talk : Contribs 21:24, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

• Delete. But it should be added to List_of_LiveDistros btw it isn't a distro as such but other boot cds have been added to this page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mutley (talk • contribs) 08:50, 9 March 2007 (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.