Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Shen (programming language)

Shen (programming language)

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Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. Every single source offered is WP:PRIMARY and thus unsuitable. Googling turned up nothing useful. This article has been tagged for COI, notability and primary sources for almost 3 years. Msnicki (talk) 10:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

keep Shen is an important step in language development, even if now a deliberately unimportant language. It would be a negative effect on WP (Shen doesn't care) to remove coverage of it from WP.

Sourcing is awkward as, as with so many modern topics in CS, that coverage is mostly in the sort of on-line sources that WP has set itself against (although this never seems to limit articles on web comics). Mike Fogus' blog http://blog.fogus.me/?s=shen explains some of the Shen issues and Fogus ought to be considered as RS for functional languages.

The article here is currently poor. It fails to explain the major limitation on Shen, its licensing. Tarver's strict policy on licensing against forking development has seriously limited Shen development by others, or in other directions. As a result, pretty much all coverage of Shen will be from 2011 and it's a dead language beyond that point. IMHO, the licence restrictions killed the project. However it's not a non-notable corpse. Coverage of developments in programming language theory should include Qi and Shen. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and I see that you're now going for a third AfD nomination against Qi: WP:Articles for deletion/Qi (programming language) (3rd nomination)

Keep trying! I'm sure you'll catch that pesky wabbit someday. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:10, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A couple questions, Andy: Where are the reliable independent sources? Or in the alternative, what do you rely in the guidelines that supports notability without sources? Every one of the reasons you've given seems to be a reason why the article should be deleted, not kept. Msnicki (talk) 11:20, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. NORTH AMERICA¹⁰⁰⁰ 18:00, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Here's the problem I have with the argument that the work represents "an important step in language development". No one's argued anyone's using Qi or Shen and the author, Mark Tarver, is an academic, so I'm inclined to test the claim of importance in the way we often do in academia, which is to ask how often the work has been cited. Here's a Google scholar search on Tarver's papers. His paper on Qi has received only 3 citations and his paper on Shen has received only 2. Drilling down, three of those combined 5 citations are by Tarver himself, leaving these papers with only one citation each by anyone other than the author. Within the STEM disciplines, a significant paper is generally understood to be one that receives over 1000 citations. Qi and Shen are not only not important, almost no one's even noticed they exist. Msnicki (talk) 20:08, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Strong delete The spiritual successor of Qi and even less notable. There don't seem to be any sources other than those authored by the languages designer. —Ruud 10:11, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Ideally I would argue for merging into the Qi article, but as Andy Dingley notes, and I'll extend, at best wonky licencing has caused these languages to be stillborn. The first version of Qi was GPL, but the author found that unsatisfactory and for the 2nd version made a custom license that e.g. required owning a copy of a page in the Qi book to make closed source commercial use of the language, with the obvious problem of the book eventually going out of print, as it did. Shen was less restrictively licensed, but the license was much more complex. A recent campaign that netted £2500 to BSD license it didn't actually result in a clean, unmodified BSD license, resulting in hard feelings that further harmed the tiny Shen community. So I can't argue for notability now or in the future :-(, unless someone gets inspired by them and creates another language, which, if it becomes notable, could then include Qi and Shen history in its history. Hga (talk) 13:59, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]