Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xmonad (2nd nomination)

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. John254 01:34, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Xmonad

Xmonad (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

I AFDed this in May. The result was No Consensus and the argument was presumably that xmonad may yet become notable. It hasn't. The tiny article from OSNews is still the only mention of xmonad in a notable publication. The references all go to either the author's pages or of their friend's from #haskell.

This is clearly an insignificant hobby project that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia. Therefore I propose its deletion - Catofax (talk) 10:31, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. So I see Catofax is back for another spin on the AfD wheel, which actually surprises me: if it was no-consensus back then, the case for keep is even stronger now. To cover a few points:

1. XMonad has been actively and continually developed since, with many improvements and extensions contributed since. I think it's covered a good 4 releases since May with another imminent, and XMonadContrib (the extensions) has grown even more, to ~100 addons.
2. Catofax's assertion that the OSNews article is "still the only mention of xmonad in a notable publication" is laughable. He should look harder at the article - I've linked to quite a few bits of coverage. Quite aside from the other OSNews article, all the Web coverage, the Haskell community report and Weekly News, there are: two invited talks, one by Simon Peyton Jones of Microsoft for OSCON (a pretty major programming conference) and one by Don Stewart covering his paper; oh, did I mention the peer-reviewed paper published by Don Stewart and Spencer Janssen in the ACM's Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell workshop? (I stress the paper as some of the previous AfD voters were interested in academic results and supported because they believed something would come of it; well, something did, and I understand the authors are planning an expanded paper for JFP.)

Don Stewart and Spencer Janssen are the authors of xmonad. It is utterly dishonest of you not to mention this. If I write an article about something I made, do I get a wikipedia page? Catofax (talk) 18:42, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

The issue here is the ACM's coverage, that is a highly regarded, verifiable, external source. And yes if you write an article in a major publication about something that something then gets a wikipedia page. jbolden1517^Talk 20:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

1. Popularity counts. As noted by someone else in the 1st AfD, there are many many hits for XMonad online. It's included in many of the major distros and Unixes (about all that are missing are Fedora and SUSE - Fedora though seems to be packaged but not yet through the submissions process), and by the best statistics one can get for this sort of thing, XMonad has passed StumpWM and probably dwm in popularity.
2. And finally, a bit of history for those who weren't around the first time: remember that the nominator came here from a 4chan discussion intending to get this article deleted, and that 8 months later, his account's contribs are still dominated by XMonad-related activity (and he hasn't exactly been expanding the article, if you follow). --Gwern (contribs) 01:51 24 December 2007 (GMT)

• Comment. Last time, the AfD had to be relisted as not enough people commented. I would just as soon not have that happen again, so I'm going to contact everyone who edited the 1st AfD and notify them of this AfD; I believe this falls under the allowed forms of canvassing described by WP:CANVASS as long as I contact everyone and not just the keepers. The outcome was neutral so presumably contacting everyone would be neutral as well. --Gwern (contribs) 01:56 24 December 2007 (GMT)
• Keep There are lots of notable references moreso than the last time. The best I can think of is one of the keynote talks to OSCON conference: Simon Peyton Jones talk video part1 part2 and slides. This should have been an easy keep the last time, its gotten easier since then. jbolden1517^Talk 04:00, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep there are now suffficient ordinary sources to support notability. Further, while I argued last time that

"The external sources are not independent, and so this does not erase the concerns. The people who work with the program telling each other about it. An article on other subjects with sources of this nature would be rapidly deleted without much argument. WP seems to be asked to make an exception on this subject, because of the acknowledged technical competence of the various editors here. It could perhaps reasonably be argued that these are the only available sources, that knowledge of such programs is diffused in this manner, and that the importance is shown by the impressiveness of the work itself. I'd be willing to accept such a complete re-orientation of the notability rules if we accepted this for all phenomena and projects that have similarly blog-based and self-publishing sources. I am open to the argument that anything adequately documented on its own terms should be included--I might even support it. What I do not accept is that it should apply only to this subject area DGG 02:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)"

I would now say that the principle is becoming accepted generally. We can and should use the best sources available, as long as they appear to represent a responsible view of the subject.

I was advised of this AfD, and this shows the benefits of doing so--based on the improved contents and conventional sourcing, and the change in apparent general acceptance of sources, I changed my opinion on the article. Fair notice isn't canvassing, but promotes consensus. DGG (talk) 05:33, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

• Keep. Believe it or not that even with over 2 million articles I sometimes want information on a topic for which the Wikipedia has no information. I am implacably opposed to deleting well-sourced factual articles and as long as we can find independent sources for this article, which it appears we can, then it should stay. Greenshed (talk) 13:38, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep as per Gwern and jbolden1517's comments demonstrating the existence of reliable sources. xmonad is notable both as a window manager implemented in a remarkably small amount of code (and window managers are clearly a significant topic -- see Category:X window managers) and as a significant practical application implemented in a pure functional programming language. The nom's claim that "this is clearly an insignificant hobby project" is manifestly lacking in merit. (Disclaimer: I'm a satisfied user of xmonad and have been known to have a beer with one of the authors.) SparsityProblem (talk) 20:07, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
• Keep. Seems to be getting consistently more coverage. The academic coverage of Xmonad is also quite relevant - Wikipedia is not supposed to be limited to topics that a shallow newspaper like USA Today would cover. Xmonad has a good amount of coverage within appropriate academic circles - if it isn't notable enough for Wikipedia, then huge swathes of interesting research will have to be ignored if we want to be consistent. Bhimaji (talk) 20:40, 24 December 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.