[WikiEN-l] Q regarding notablity and blocking of account.

[Chris Howie]

On Jan 7, 2008 1:35 PM, Ulrich <us at activestocks.de> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> i am having some difficulties understanding some decisions and need some
> words of clarification from you people.
>
> I am the lead developer of a project called ActiveQuant, which got
> deleted recently. There was some notability discussion about this
> software and i clearly pointed out that delisting ActiveQuant is not
> only unfair but also unjust in my eyes. A very important other library
> called QuantLib got delisted, too. The main problem these two projects
> were suffering from is notability.
>
> Now, as these two projects got deleted, i enforced the same rule
> (missing notability) on other projects and marked them as to be deleted.


You may want to have a look at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:POINT
>.

(Of lesser importance, but still relevant to this topic is <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:COI>.)


> Someone with account HU12 therefore initiated a block against my account
> and rolled back my delete requests without knowing that these projects
> of course have exactly the same notability issues and must therefore be
> deleted, too.
>

Nothing "must" be deleted.  Community consensus decides what stays and what
is deleted, and usually considers several factors, such as the ratio between
time spent and benefit to the project.  The higher the ratio, the more
likely that deletion will happen.

To go even further, he has now removed permission to modify my own talk
> page, as he accuses me to abuse the method to request unblocking. I
> still request unblocking of my account and deletion of these other
> projects (actually most other open source listings on wikipedia suffer
> from this notability rule), or get rid of this notability rule which
> doesn't make much sense for most open source software distributed on the
> internet.
>

Notability is a guideline, not policy.  It makes an argument but is not a
fast rule at all, therefore it doesn't need to be deleted but also doesn't
need to be enforced on everything that doesn't meet the criteria presented.


> Anyway, to the main point of my email:
>
> Could someone please be so kind and explain to me
> a) why has my delete-request been removed from those other projects,
> although it is perfectly valid
> b) why has my account been blocked
>

The POINT article I linked above adequately describes my point.


> I really can't reason this, i also must admit that there are dozens of
> other pages that have missing references or notability problems and why
> has our page (ActiveQuant) been deleted, although there were other
> people, not only me, complaining about this delete request. I do value
> the hint from this other guy (can't remember his name right now), that
> once ActiveQuant has reached notability by i.e. a book about it or a
> magazine article as a backening it will have no notablity issues anymore
> and is valid for resubmission! But again, why are other projects that
> have even less text and information to learn from (software related,
> i.e. architectural insight) still listed?


Maybe the community thinks that there is more worth in keeping them,
especially considering that the principal author in those cases may not be
the developer.  Pushing for the retention of an article that you are
personally involved with raises eyebrows.

I hope this provides some clarification.  Let me know if I can help further.

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers