There has been a recent intensification in the trend of deleting
software-related articles
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Software).
I think this is a useful enterprise, in order to declutter Wikipedia
of dead projects or software with very little information to go about
it.
Among those deletions there have been cases of articles on active
software projects, with large user bases, being deleted on grounds of
lack of notability (e.g. [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Foswiki]]).
In order to assess notability, I'm wondering about the particular
situation of open-source software. OSS benefits from instant
verifiability, in that anyone can download the code and check the
claims in the article. Sure, an editor writing in detail about their
discoveries this way would constitute WP:OR. On the other hand, fact
checking in comparison tables simply requires referencing the
software's documentation, or live demos - see [[Comparison of
JavaScript frameworks]].
Often, the size of developer base, and automatically-generated
statistics about the project longevity and activity can be found on
sites such as Ohloh (example for [[Foswiki]] -
https://www.ohloh.net/projects/foswiki) or GitHub (example for
[[MojoMojo]] -
http://github.com/marcusramberg/mojomojo/). Most such
software is not the "subject of multiple, reliable, independent,
non-trivial, published works", and most can never be. For example, the
[[Mediawiki]] article does not satisfy these criteria, but nobody
doubts its notability.
Having in mind the above, what do fellow editors think about
open-source software under active development and with a sizable
developer community and user base: can it satisfy [[Wikipedia:Inherent
notability]]?
Best regards,
Dan Dascalescu
([[User:Dandv]])