Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Works Records System

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. T. Canens (talk) 22:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Works Records System

Works Records System (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Contested PROD. This appears to be software which was developed by ICI for its own internal use. The article gives no indication that it was ever distributed outside of ICI. Software which a company develops for its own internal needs usually isn't notable, and usually isn't described in reliable sources-of course, there are exceptions to this general rule, but I cannot find any reliable sources for this article despite searching, so there is no evidence this software counts as one of those exceptions.

While a Google search will find some hits for this, it appears they are mostly dependent on this Wikipedia article (e.g. this blog post by Dan Bricklin criticising Wikipedia's topic on this content), the usual Wikipedia mirrors and reprints, or e.g. [1] which was created by Ken Dakin who (according to this very article) was one of the developers of this software. None of the sources found by Google appear to be independent reliable sources.

The only source the article gives is a document in the posession of The Computer History Museum in California. Now, no doubt this document exists and describes this software (the document itself is not online, but you can find in it in their catalog). However, this is clearly just an internal manual written within ICI. Many or most companies which develop software for their own use will write manuals. Those manuals are not independent reliable sources, they are essentially self-published sources, or to be more precise unpublished sources. Even if someone donates one of them to a museum collection, that does not magically turn it into an independent reliable source.

Although the edit history doesn't conclusively prove it (since it was created by an IP), I strongly suspect this article was created by Ken Dakin, who it appears has chosen to use Wikipedia to document the achievements of his career. We have recently deleted two articles which he created for a similar purpose; see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/IBM OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug) and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SIMON (Batch Interactive test/debug). In the dicussion about those articles, it was suggested by some that there may be old offline (paper) reliable sources describing the software which cannot be found through Internet based searches, such as magazines from the 1970s which have not been digitised. That justification for keeping the article was not accepted. However, in any event, I don't think that justification applies here, because it is unlikely that this software was ever discussed in reliable sources at the time, since even today most software internally developed by a company for its own use is never discussed in RS, and there is no reason to believe that norm was not true in the 1970s as well. SJK (talk) 11:36, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. SJK (talk) 11:38, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• @Kvng, Fieari, SwisterTwister, Uncle G, and CoffeeWithMarkets: Pinging editors who participated in previous related AFD. SJK (talk) 11:40, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete as my searches have found one link so far and that was Books, current article is still overall questionable and could be Drafted instead (as I mentioned at the other AfD) if needed. SwisterTwister talk 17:18, 10 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @SwisterTwister: would be interested to know what the Books link you found was. My own Books search for "works records system" finds (1) a bunch of books containing reprints of Wikipedia article (which are not independent reliable sources for WP:GNG purposes per WP:CIRC and Wikipedia:Potentially unreliable sources/Books that plagiarize Wikipedia), (2) a bunch of 1930s references to "public works records system" (obviously these references are talking about something other than the topic of this article). SJK (talk) 07:22, 11 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  The only Google Scholar hit I get is this preprint in French. It extensively discusses past controversies over whether this "Works Records System" should be discussed in English Wikipedia's Spreadsheet article. This source cannot be used to demonstrate the notability of WRS since it is primarily concerned with documenting on-Wikipedia controversies about WRS, rather than being interested in WRS in its own right. (In any event, preprints like this are borderline as reliable sources.) SJK (talk) 07:35, 11 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - This one is different from the other two recently deleted articles. Here is the claimed notability:

The Works records system, which went "live" in 1974 represented the first known use of: an interactive online spreadsheet, a three-dimensional spreadsheet and a shared public spreadsheet

If true, and reported in independant sources, this is a clear establishment of notability, regardless of whether or not it was originally and only ever used internally within a private company. (Note that this notability establishment should also be moved to the lead)

The Ken Dakin link is one such source. But also, the computer history museum record is another corroboration. Yes, from the catalog, all we can see online is that they have a copy of the manual, but we have to ask WHY they have a copy of the manual. It seems pretty clear that they are keeping the manual because of the notability claim above... being the first interactive 3D shared public spreadsheet. So this is not a case of having hypothetical contemporary sources, this is a case of a curated exclusive museum making an editorial choice about the significance of this topic. As such, we should keep it. Fieari (talk) 23:45, 12 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Fieari: You are making the assumption that being accepted by the Computer History Museum (CHM) is an indicator of notability, but we simply don't know whether that is true. While obviously the museum won't accept everything, we don't know how detailed an examination they make into an artifact before deciding to accept it, nor how well their own criteria line up with Wikipedia's criteria of notability. Looking at their published acceptance criteria, the main criteria for rejecting documents appears to be that they already possess them (such as in mass-produced journals or magazines, and also certain extremely common items of vendor documentation such as IBM mainframe reference cards). They explicitly mention they "are particularly interested in prototypes, personal papers... homemade items...". Given they are "particularly interested" in these items, we can reasonably infer that they won't be selective in accepting them; but since "personal papers" and "homemade items" are unlikely (except in exceptional cases) to be notable for Wikipedia's purposes, this is a sign that their own acceptance policy doesn't align well with Wikipedia's notability policy, and hence acceptance in their collection isn't a good indicator of notability for Wikipedia's purposes. We can't infer that, just because they accepted this document from Ken Dakin, they have evaluated and agree with his claims of its historical importance–they may have simply gone "computer-related internal corporate document from the 1970s, we don't have it, hence accept"–indeed, I think the later is the case. I get the impression from CHM's criteria that they'll accept just about anything that is computer-related, old enough, and they don't already have, and perform only a very cursory investigation of the historical significance of artifacts before agreeing to accept them–so acceptance by them tells us little or nothing about notability for Wikipedia's purposes. This is especially the case for documents, which unlike actual computers take up very little space.

The contents of museum collections are WP:PRIMARY sources. For WP:GNG, we want secondary sources. It is up to historians and others to go through museum collections and determine what is significant and what is not, and their results are published in reliable secondary sources. Wikipedia shouldn't directly rely on Museum collections as a source because doing so is a form of WP:OR.

Regarding the "claimed notability" sentence, you say "If true, and reported in independant sources, this is a clear establishment of notability"–but it isn't reported in independent reliable sources, which is the problem.

WP:GNG requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". The Ken Dakin link is not "independent of the subject" since he was one of the key developers of this software. It's also questionable whether it is a "reliable source" because it wasn't published in an established publication, a peer-reviewed journal, or a book by a mainstream publisher–it's a page on a museum's website. While a page on a museum website might in some cases be a reliable source, in this case we have no information on what process of review the museum took before posting that brief reminiscence by Ken Dakin. That page appears to be orphaned–I can't find a link to it from the page navigation structure of their website, and nor can I locate it through their search engine. SJK (talk) 00:50, 13 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment This looks really interesting, though it's got literally one reference. It made Hacker News today - I put a comment that there's an AFD, noting that what it really needs is Wikipedia-quality sources. Perhaps this will flush out more solid information - David Gerard (talk) 22:18, 14 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - This article contains quite interesting information that is currently not found anywhere else online. To fix the major problems with the article (lack of reliable sources, hyperbole), I would like to offer a bonus assignment to students of my HCI course that would consist of analysing original sources (e.g., the report in the Computer History Museum or the Youtube video with Ken Dakin) and revising the article accordingly. (For the result of a similar assignment last year, compare GOMS (old version) to GOMS). I will know whether any students would like to pick up this task by mid-July. Raphman (talk) 07:16, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @Raphman: the problem is that even if your students find the document in the Computing History Museum and read or copy it, there's still no evidence it's an independent reliable source (WP:RS). It appears to be an internal, unpublished document, created by employees of a corporation to describe one of its internal computer systems. Documents like that generally aren't considered reliable sources. (There are millions of such documents in existence, although they generally aren't publicly available–I've written some of them in my professional life, and many other people in IT have done the same–but we generally can't cite such documents in Wikipedia articles.) Likewise, if they review the YouTube video–Youtube videos generally speaking aren't considered a reliable source. (There may be exceptions to that general rule–such as YouTube videos created by academic experts or by professional journalists–but I don't believe this case falls into one of those exceptions.) This situation is very different from GOMS since appears to actually be covered in reliable sources (e.g. conference papers), unlike this. SJK (talk) 09:41, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @SJK:, yes, I understand and agree in general. I feel not experienced enough to contribute to the discussion about (Wikipedian) notability. My argument was (or should have been) that there are further problems with this article besides *notability* which could and should be tackled. Do I understand WP:RS correctly?: I and/or my students could obtain the primary (unnotable) source (and other related resources), write a technical report about WRS based on this primary source, publish it on the university's ePub server, and then use it as a reliable secondary source? In my view, the reason why there are no secondary sources about WRS is not its general lack of notability or verifiability, but a lack of attention by the academic community. I feel a little bit uneasy for a topic that I have just learned about today to be completely purged from the web soon.-- Raphman (talk • contribs) 14:04, 15 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @Raphman: Writing a paper, or getting your students to write a paper, as you describe, and publishing it as a technical report, would of course be an improvement over the current situation. There'd still be two issues though (1) technical reports are kind of borderline as reliable sources – ideally, if you or they could get it published in a respected journal, there would be no doubts about that issue; (2) WP:GNG says "There is no fixed number of sources required since sources vary in quality and depth of coverage, but multiple sources are generally expected"–so if there was a single reliable secondary source on this, it would still be an issue. So obviously what you are suggesting would be an improvement in the situation, but would it be enough of an improvement to answer all the concerns about the existence of this Wikipedia article? Possibly not. SJK (talk) 10:37, 16 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @SJK:, thank you for the explanation. I would still prefer to keep this article for the reasons mentioned above. However, as this is my first AfD discussion, I'll have to concede that my vote is not necessarily well-informed. Is there a way to make full-history copy (i.e., not move) of the article in my User:raphman/ space? (I know about move but couldn't find anything about copying). I would like to have a full copy of this article in case it gets deleted. Raphman (talk) 14:28, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @Raphman: It is possible to move the article to your user space instead of deleting it, see Wikipedia:Userfication. Personally, I have no objection to doing that since you have expressed an interest in trying to improve it to meet Wikipedia notability standards. Since the AFD is still in progress, we can't do that until the AFD closes, but if the closing admin wants to do that, I have no objection. SJK (talk) 08:41, 20 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment for computer science and technology. technical reports can be the most reliable sources. That's the way industry works. And the academic analysis of technical reports is certainly a RS, because even if you regard the reports to be primary sources, the academic study of history consists of the interpretation of primary sources. DGG ( talk ) 21:06, 16 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  @DGG: I doubt that the document in the CHM counts as a "technical report", in the sense that research labs and university computer science departments sometimes publish technical reports (none of us have seen the document, but the CHM catalog classes it as a "manual", which is a rather different category of document)–so I take it you are commenting on the technical report Raphman was talking about writing? In the later case, it's a bit hypothetical for this AFD since it hasn't been written yet. But, in any case, the status of technical reports as reliable sources depends a lot on factors like how respected the authors are and how widely cited it is. I don't think it can be disputed that conference proceedings and journals are higher quality reliable sources (which hence should be given more weight), because there is more review, and being more noticeable it is more likely than any questionable or controversial claims will be challenged by other researchers. A technical report which is issued by a well-known and respected researcher, at a respected institution, and which is widely cited, is obviously worth a lot more than one written by less qualified authors and which everyone ignores. This is why I said technical reports are "borderline"–whether they are RS, and their quality as RS, varies from technical report to technical report, and the quality/reliability variability is arguably greater for TRs than for conference proceedings and journals. And for GNG purposes, RS quality is a relevant consideration–if there is a smaller number of sources, it's more important that they be higher quality, whereas when there are many sources, the individual quality of any of those sources is less important. SJK (talk) 21:57, 16 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - while this is very interesting, this entire article is clearly an autobiography and original research. No evidence of outside coverage is provided, only internal manuals. Blythwood (talk) 05:40, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - no evidence of notability Samat lib (talk) 06:43, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete - No objective secondary coverage, which is unsurprising for an internally-developed and internally-used system. Tech paper or not, a source that is written by the creator can't be considered reliable, because it isn't independent, and any sort of museum acquisition is always subjective. MSJapan (talk) 06:55, 24 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.