Talk:Scoop (software)

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[edit] References

I believe that the inter-wiki and external links in this article are sufficient to verify the information presented. If a specific piece of information is not verifiable in that fashion, please add specific "citation needed" flags to those pieces of information, or mention those pieces of information in this discussion page instead of marking the entire article unreferenced -- an article-wide tag does little to help other editors make improvements. Ubernostrum 02:27, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see it reference ... non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the software's author as inidicated in the proposed notability guideline. I don't doubt that the subject is notable, and I think the article's contributors can come up with independent sources much more quickly than I can. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 02:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Which parts of the article do you feel need references? There are certainly a few things I think need cleaning out (the gigantic feature list, in particular, can almost certainly go), but most of the available information on Scoop comes either from the developers (I'm not one, by the way -- I used to work with Scoop when I was freelancing, so I know a bit about it) or (in the case of verifying sites it powers) from Scoop-powered sites. Ubernostrum 06:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I would like to see it expanded to include why this software is notable, with references to verify it. One place to do that, perhaps, is in the last paragraph of the "Overview" section where it talks about its broader use. With respect to the notability guideline, sources independent of kuro5hin are needed to meet the verifiability requirement. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 01:37, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, for one thing it currently powers kuro5hin (which is notable, and verifiable both from that site and from the Wikipedia article on kuro5hin linked here) and Daily Kos (which is notable, verifiable both from that site and from the Wikipedia article on Daily Kos linked here) and a variety of other community sites (verifiable from those sites, but including such a list in the article could be viewed as spam). However, I'm not sure of the best way to emphasize this beyond what's already in the article -- any attempt to integrate more such information would essentially boil down to "in response to demands from a Wikipedia user, please see the following argument for the notability of this software", and that would be unencyclopedic (and, as I pointed out in an earlier comment, notability is not and never has been an official policy of the English-language Wikipedia). Ubernostrum 02:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

What is your take on the various notability guidelines and their application? ✤ JonHarder ^talk 17:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

My personal opinion is that the notability criterion should be carefully applied with consideration for context and individual situations, rather than the broad-brush approach common on Wikipedia, which usually throws the baby out with the bathwater, and that debates over notability are perhaps the lowest form of Internet discussion yet discovered by man. In the context of this article, however, I feel that the information present in the article concerning the uses of Scoop is sufficient to establish the notability of Scoop as a piece of software, and that there's really no good way to edit an article to say "this software is notable because...", since there's no form of words which doesn't essentially boil down to the unencyclopedic "this software is notable because...". Articles shouldn't need to go to lengths to establish the notability of their subjects -- they should speak to the verifiable facts about their topics and if there's a question about notability, that's what talk pages are for. Ubernostrum 05:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I like what you are saying here for the most part and am fine with this approach with one exception. I think this article would benefit with at least one reference to some sort of independent source that has covered the topic in some non-trivial way. This is consistent with the policy of relying primarily on secondary sources. ✤ JonHarder ^talk 22:26, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Both kuru5hin and Daily Kos have produced fairly extensive commentary on Scoop in the past. I'm sure this can't be too hard. Chris Cunningham 09:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)