On Sat, 28 Mar 2009, Dan Dascalescu wrote: Oh, ick. That has several problems, some of which have been endemic: -- The ban on canvassing for votes and the "it's not a vote" mantra is used to keep people who are knowledgeable but don't regularly edit Wikipedia from participating. (And it's been misused, even then; vote canvassing is a reason to ignore a headcount, but it's not a reason not to pay attention to the *arguments* and *evidence* from the newcomers. Arguments and evidence are just as good whether they come from canvassing or not.) -- The claim that a forked software project doesn't inherit notability. While obviously a forked project doesn't inherit notability every time, there are circumstances where using any smidgen of common sense we should realize that it does, but notability has thrown away common sense long ago. I think a free software fork of a project that is notable but has been taken proprietary, where most of the developers moved to the free project, is by any sane standard notable. -- The requirement for third party reliable sources for software projects done over the Internet is broken. People don't generally write books or even cnn.com articles about free software projects except for the *very* biggest ones. (And why are we limiting it to reliable sources anyway? Unreliable sources are no good to establish facts, but they should be fine for notability. For instance, if Rush Limbaugh talks for weeks about your software project, it's probably notable.) -- The whole notability thing boils down to one of the same problems that (yes, again) got spoiler warnings deleted. Deleting something via rules which demand its deletion effectively prevents people interested in the original article from stopping the deletion--they won't be there for the discussion that creates the rules, so the first time they'll know about the rule is when it's used on them, at which point it's too late to actually do anything about it.