Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computing/Archive 14

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Archive 14

Latest stable software release templates

Many of the templates in Category:Latest stable software release templates were last updated in 2008, 2010, 2011, and so on, and are for abandoned software. I propose those pages be deleted, with their contents moved to the respective article infobox.

This proposal would address a separate problem, which is that most such templates are desperately out of date. If these templates only existed for currently-supported apps, it would make it easier to use Petscan to look for unmaintained/out of date templates (sort by date on Petscan), and to bring them up to date.

Also, since this is WP:COMPUTING, it would be real nice if someone could create a bot that parses the relevant pages, and keeps these templates automatically up to date. It would take far less time to review bot changes than to make these changes ourselves; it would prevent the pages from being too out of date, and it would save us from doing such boring, menial and unimportant work manually. DFlhb (talk) 18:30, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't see how these templates help with maintenance. Seems to be more of a hindrance. Whether updated manually or by bot, there has to a (cited) source for the information. I'm not sure how well a bot will be able to handle this given the variety of sources used. ~Kvng (talk) 15:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Compute

Compute currently redirects to Computing, which I guess reflects the use of the term as a verb ('to compute'). But this term has in recent years acquired another meaning, as a noun, where as far as I can see it refers to computational power. Where is that second meaning treated on Wikipedia? What to do with the redirect? – Uanfala (talk) 13:31, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

So maybe somewhere add a link to Computer performance? ~Kvng (talk) 15:39, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Reliability of Wccftech

I've opened up a discussion about Wccftech on Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#RfC:_Wccftech_articles and I would appreciate if more people left their opinions on the matter. - nathanielcwm (talk) 12:43, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Applied Predictive Technologies request

Hello, I'm Sarah from Mastercard. I've posted an edit request for one of our subsidiaries, Applied Predictive Technologies. You can see the request here. I used the request edit template and thought I would also let editors here know in case it is of interest to anyone. Thanks! SarahP2023 (talk) 18:48, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been selected for improvement!

Hello, Please note that Audio editing software, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of the Articles for improvement. The article is scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by — MusikBot talk 00:05, 15 May 2023 (UTC) on behalf of the AFI team

PMU and SMU

I noticed these articles, Power Management Unit (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) and System Management Unit (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), they are written to seem to only exist on Macintosh computers, but PMUs and SMUs exist all over the place, not just as Apple parts. Shouldn't these be rewritten to show the wider world of PMUs and SMUs ? -- 64.229.90.172 (talk) 13:59, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Unless expanded, both articles would be better covered as a section/subsection of an another article (with possible redirects). Specific chips are only rarely notable enough for a stand-alone article. Pavlor (talk) 05:04, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

I suggest WP:BLAR or merging rather than AfD or PROD. Those topics might be notable and it would be nice to keep the revision history. But they don't need to exist in their current state.

A lot of our hardware articles suffer from the same problem, and it's best to BLAR most of them into more foundational articles, expand and improve those, and only then, split back out when length becomes a concern. There are far too many stubs and it's hard to know what they're really about or how they fit together, since many of these stubs lack sourcing. DFlhb (talk) 05:20, 15 May 2023 (UTC)

Best practices for History section

Are there commonly accepted best practices for writing History section? Many computing articles have them in the beginning.

For historical articles, for example Cray-1, it unquestionably makes sense. It's a lot harder to understand purpose of them in modern ones, such as Google Ads or Brave (web browser), where they tend to attract news-like coverage without clear threshold for inclusion or purpose. In many cases, it looks like the material from "History" would often be better suited for another section of the article.

Are there any relevant guidelines or prior discussions that would indicate state of the present consensus for writing History in articles for current-day computing topics, as well as whether History is always expected to be the first section? PaulT2022 (talk) 10:54, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

20 years (Google Ads) is quite a long history for a computing related subject. I don't see this as a NOTNEWS issue (note I'm rarely interested in subjects younger than 25 years, so I have next to no experience with articles about recent topics). I'm not aware of any project specific guideline covering this (unlike eg. articles about videogames). Pavlor (talk) 11:17, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

I guess, it's more a question of Google launched AdWords in 2000. Initially, Google set up and managed advertisers' campaigns. Google soon introduced the AdWords self-service portal to accommodate small businesses and those who wanted to manage their own campaigns. being next to an in-class academic exercise for tertiary students and In 2018, Bloomberg News reported that Google had paid millions of dollars to Mastercard having same weight. (If we are to take Google Ads as an example, but there are no shortage of articles with similarly written History section.)

I'm not sure I see how this is a useful explanation of the Google Ads history. What determines importance of a given news report to the overall history of the article subject?

I was hoping to discover (or develop?) some sort of collegial standard instead of relying on ad-hoc argument in case of individual articles. PaulT2022 (talk) 14:23, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

You're right, editors should not be in the business of judging the relative importance of primary sources like news stories. Generally in trying to ascertain the due weight of various historical facts, it is best to use secondary or tertiary reliable sources to establish their relative importance. For Google Ads, look for sources that discuss the history of Google Ads or Google in general. They should give a good idea of the milestones for the service and those could used to organize a history section and justify eliminating minor events with no secondary coverage. If a topic is so new that there are no RS discussing its history, it's probably best to not (yet) have a History section. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 17:35, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Importance

Would be nice to build a detailed importance table, like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Video_games/Assessment#Importance_scale. quite a few of our top-importance articles don't seem foundational, but it's quite tough to decide how to rate. DFlhb (talk) 21:46, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

We have one at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Computing/Assessment#Importance. Are you requesting more detail? ~Kvng (talk) 14:42, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Given the project's broad scope, detailed importance criteria would improve consistency; we should be able to ask 50 editors to apply the criteria to an article, and not end up with differing ratings. The criteria's focus on networking also contributes to ambiguity.

Rather than Internet Protocol be Top-importance, I'd rather have Computer network, Programming language, Data science, Computer science, Operating system, Mainframe, Personal computer, etc., notable companies, and broad historical eras. These are major subfields and "textbook subjects". Just note that beyond Internet Protocol, I've re-rated maybe two dozen articles, stuff like Microsoft Windows and Mac (computer) that wholly fit within these aforementioned topics. Perfectly willing to self-revert those re-ratings if you think I should. My rough inspiration was the WP:VG assessment scale which seemed better than ours. DFlhb (talk) 20:48, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

PROD of Functional decomposition

FYI. The article Functional decomposition has been PRODed. If anyone cares about it, they should take steps to clean it up a bit. I think its a valid (software and systems) engineering topic, but what do I know. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 00:34, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I have WP:DEPRODDED based on what I take to be an objection. ~Kvng (talk) 15:53, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Now nominated for deletion. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Functional decomposition Russ Woodroofe (talk) 10:14, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

New APT request

Hello again, this is Sarah from Mastercard. Dropping by to let editors here know that I've posted another request on Talk:Applied Predictive Technologies in case anyone here is interested in taking a look. Thank you! SarahP2023 (talk) 13:30, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Wolfram Language being opensource/proprietary

There has been some discussion on whether it is open source or not [1]

Anyone knows a proper source regarding this matter? FallingPineapple (talk) 01:59, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

WP:RSN Discussion of a source related to FOSS topics

is here FYI. -- Yae4 (talk) 18:49, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

AfC Review of Draft:Kenneth L. McMillan

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

(Cross-posted here from the talks page on Wikiproject Computer science).

Hi,

I recently worked on an article draft about Ken McMillan, the computer scientist (Draft:Kenneth L. McMillan). I contributed the article because I noticed there is a German Wikipedia page about him (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._McMillan) and McMillan's name has been referenced in several related Wikipedia articles (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Kanellakis_Award, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Esparza). Help for improving the draft and reviewing would be much appreciated, thanks! 2601:48:4300:580:597B:D8B6:B6F8:647A (talk) 16:05, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Good article reassessment for History of artificial intelligence

History of artificial intelligence has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:51, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Reliable source for Bush hid the facts bug

Hello!

This old, formerly unexplained Windows bug has been explained completely in a recently published YouTube video. Unfortunately, the explanation in the Wikipedia article is wrong, and the YouTube article doesn't look like a suitable source. The video does say how to reproduce the bug though, which I believe hasn't been done before. Someone familiar with what sources might work in an article like this should have a look. Thanks! --Renerpho (talk) 19:35, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Requested move: Computer security

FYI, there is an RM at Talk:Computer security#Requested move 4 July 2023. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Not moved. Some reorganization will be done instead. ~Kvng (talk) 14:19, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Office Assistant has an RFC on the name of the paperclip character

Office Assistant, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has an RFC for the best name to use for the paperclip character. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Averixus (talk) 14:18, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

Credibility bot

As this is a highly active WikiProject, I would like to introduce you to Credibility bot. This is a bot that makes it easier to track source usage across articles through automated reports and alerts. We piloted this approach at Wikipedia:Vaccine safety and we want to offer it to any subject area or domain. We need your support to demonstrate demand for this toolkit. If you have a desire for this functionality, or would like to leave other feedback, please endorse the tool or comment at WP:CREDBOT. Thanks! Harej (talk) 17:44, 5 August 2023 (UTC)