Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Backslash paper

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. The consensus here seems to be that the issue over sourcing has not been adequately adressed. After reading through the discussion, it appears that the prevalent opinion is that the citations mentioned by Davidwr are not sufficient to establish notability, since they are not about the subject, Delirium has a reasonable sumup of the situation. Hence, I am closing the discussion with a deletion. Sjakkalle (Check!) 11:08, 6 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Backslash paper

Delete as not notable. Additionally, the article is only linked to from one single article, Slashdot effect. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:27, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and improve. The underlying paper has been cited over 100 times. Citations include papers on web servers, P2P, ddos-handling, and other applications. I don't know if the papers citing it actually implement it, for all I know they may cite the paper as the wrong way to go about doing things, but at first glance it's enough to make me say "not now" to a deletion request. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 16:05, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Reading WP:NOTE, I do not believe mere citation in other papers comes even close to qualifying as the "significant coverage" required for notability. --Cybercobra (talk) 07:38, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - The thing is, we don't know if these are mere citations or if other scholars are relying on this paper in a significant way, at least not without looking at a sampling of the 100+ papers in question. I'm more inclined to give this the benefit of the doubt than spend hours digging through and in some cases paying for access to those papers. However, if you or another editor were to pick a dozen of those at random and come back and say they were near-trivial citations, then I'd be inclined to no longer give the benefit of the doubt. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 19:55, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - It is up to the article to demonstrate notability, not for us to give them the benefit of the doubt. DreamGuy (talk) 20:22, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      - Precisely. I attempted a quicker deletion method, but there was one objection over how apparent its (non-)notability was and that user gave it the benefit of the doubt, thus necessitating this discussion. We are now here to decide the fate of the article, not to further leave it in an ambiguous state with regards to its notability. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - There's no "maybe"; either it's notable or it's not. Mere "benefit of the doubt" is not a notability justification. Further, if the concept is truly notable, there'd be an extremely high likelihood it would be covered at least once or twice in something other than a scholarly paper. Googling for "backslash protocol" gives the WP article as the only relevant hit. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:08, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - One of the papers citing the source cited by this article devotes exactly one sentence to this subject: "Backslash [31] is also a peer-to-peer caching solution, but it replaces the current Web servers and proxies to make deployment of distributed caching transparent to the clients." Uncle G (talk) 06:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete until sources that meet Wikipedia's standards of notability are met, and then it can be recreated, assuming it ever gets there. Mere citations on other pages do not establish notability, mentioned in a conference proceeding (which list all sorts of gunk, a lot of that is basically paid press releases) doesn't help either, and blogs etc. are no good. DreamGuy (talk) 19:47, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
keep per davidwr reasoning aboveOo7565 (talk) 06:19, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Rename into "Backslash (software)" and then improve; The paper itself is not covered in this article, only the software is. Also, the paper might not be notable but the software ismightthis is closer to what I meant. --Pgallert (talk) 20:37, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually, the article is about the concept which the paper describes and which is presumably embodied in software somewhere. It might be better titled "Backslash (communications protocol)" or something like that. One of the improvements the article needs is some links to implementations. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 23:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - I don't like the idea of calling everything a protocol that has been designed to become one one day. As long as no-one standardised Backslash it is barely software (but this might be my personal fringe theory as I'm not sure how many experts would agree). --Pgallert (talk) 10:25, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- What evidence do you have for the software being notable, keeping WP:NOTE in mind? --Cybercobra (talk) 06:14, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - My rationale (as member of the networking working group) generally is not to have too much deleted that would have to be recreated later. But with the suffix (paper) I believe it cannot stay in WP. Or do we really want to have an article about each and every academic paper of some quality? So no, I don't have much to corroborate the importance of "Backslash (software)" but as this thread is not unanimous I think it will likely end with a keep, and if it is being kept, it should at least be kept pointing to the software, and not to the paper about the software. --Pgallert (talk) 10:25, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - On a more general level: WP:NOTE imho generally fails in the case of academic papers because these are automatically cross-referenced multiple times, use reliable sources, are sometimes written by notable people, and still often have no general importance. If you want to get rid of them, likely WP:IAR or WP:DUCK is all you can pull out. --Pgallert (talk) 10:25, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    - No, it doesn't. You simply aren't applying it properly. Referencing a paper as a source in another published work is not the same as writing about that paper. It is published works written about the paper itself that would establish notability of the paper as a subject. Published works written about the same topic as the original paper, that reference the original paper, establish notability of that common topic, not of the published works that cover it.
      Such discussion is irrelevant in this instance. The word "paper" in the title of this article is clearly a misnomer, as the article is about the protocol, not the paper that discusses the protocol. Uncle G (talk) 06:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, MBisanz ^talk 00:06, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

When this came up at Proposed Deletion, I looked to see whether it is rescuable. It isn't without a lot of work. The article is about one protocol proposed by one set of researchers, to solve a general issue. The general issue is flash crowds, and how HTTP content servers can be constructed in order to handle them. Our article, of course, gives no indication that there has been any scholarship whatsoever into that aspect of the subject. ☺ In all of the papers that I read, this particular protocol gets little more than tangential mention (akin to the example given above) as one of a laundry lists of ideas that people have had to address this problem. There's ample scope for a general article on how content HTTP servers handle flash crowds. But this isn't it, and as something that magnifies a miniscule aspect of the real subject out of all proportion, it isn't a very good start to a proper article. It would require renaming, refactoring, and almost complete rewriting. It would be pretty much the same effort to start from scratch with a redlink as it would be to start with this. In sources, this subject is little more than a 1-sentence aside in discussion of a general subject. This can be refactored into a non-stub article, though, so by strict application of deletion policy deletion is not required. But in reality we don't gain much with either outcome of this discussion. This is effectively a footnote to a real article, without the rest of the article above the footnote to go along with it. Uncle G (talk) 06:25, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. As an academic, I'd hardly claim that a paper being cited 100 times makes the paper itself a notable subject suitable for its own encyclopedia article, especially if many of those citations are in passing. As an article on the concept (or protocol, or whatever), the main problem seems to be a lack of secondary sources: I can't find anything anyone has written about it that isn't either: 1) by the authors themselves; or 2) a brief related-work mention. No writeups in a survey article, textbook, or other such secondary source that would indicate it's considered generally worth noting in at least some research community. --Delirium (talk) 18:02, 1 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Exactly the point I've been making. Something actually notable would be mentioned (at least once) in something other than an academic paper. --Cybercobra (talk) 04:37, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: no indication of substantive third-party coverage (citation hits don't count -- many are likely to be mere mention in literature surveys, etc) establishing notability. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 10:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.