Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/DMDirc

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 no consensus. There is no consensus for action here, and I don't see one emerging soon, hence the close. Would suggest that redirection would solve a lot of problems, but that is an editorial decision to be made independent of this AfD Fritzpoll (talk) 00:22, 11 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

DMDirc

Non-notable software, fails WP:N. ukexpat (talk) 20:20, 1 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. -- ukexpat (talk) 20:21, 1 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Fails WP:N. Not a single proper reference despite several favourable claims in the second part of the article. Vyvyan Basterd (talk) 11:23, 3 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I've added some references to this section to what documentation currently exists. Dataforce (talk) 15:48, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Those are all selfrefs and therefore not reliable sources per WP:RS.

Comment: Actually, the official documentation is perfectly acceptable when used to verify the features and functionality of software and is usually preferred over published works that are often out of date by the time they are published due to the fact that software (and in particular open source software) tends to change rapidly. The only issue I see here is the notability guideline, which is almost always a problem for software that hasn't been written about in a physical book. This has been a huge problem for IRC-related topics which in turn has resulted in Wikipedia's current coverage of IRC-related topics getting very outdated. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:26, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - The article is no less notable than Coolsmile, Jini (IRC client), LimeChat, Vortec IRC, and the client is often covered on a variety of irc-news reporting sites such as http://www.irc-junkie.org/, http://ircreport.com/, and http://www.wyldryde.org 78.32.24.9 (talk) 10:05, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Those all appear to be blogs, not reliable sources. – ukexpat (talk) 16:10, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment While I'm not sure about wyldryde.org (it isn't pulling up right now), irc-junkie.org and ircreport.com are two of only a handful of IRC-related news sites that exist. "Blog style" reporting does not mean a source is "unreliable" and this is made quite clear in Wikipedia:Reliable sources#Statements of opinion. In particular, I trust irc-junkie.org's reporting about IRC-related topics and won't hesitate to cite them if they happen to give coverage to a particular topic. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:26, 4 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, (X! · talk) · @229 · 04:29, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Subject does not appear to be generally notable. It is reported on IRC news sites, but only given passing coverage. I see no indication that this client is having any impact even within the IRC community. No hits on News, Books, or Scholar. Fails WP:N "significant coverage in reliable sources". --Odie5533 (talk) 13:07, 8 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

According to the official twitter page There was over 3300 downloads for the previous stable release, so its having an impact somewhere, theres no way of knowing the exact number of users as by default the client turns off any functionality that may compromise privacy (auto updates, automatic error submission). There has also been a few favorable reviews elsewhere such as Softonic Softonic 2 (Spanish) and ircinfo (Russian) 78.32.24.9 (talk) 11:45, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Self references, including "Official Twitter" messages are not reliable sources.

Comment I think this needs some clarification. As I already said above, some self references used in an article about software are fine as additional references when used to verify features or functionality, or when they are not otherwise being used to establish notability. In the case of this specific article, while the material is verifiable, notability is borderline. It is quite apparent that the software is indeed in popular use but because individual software programs such as this aren't commonly written about in say a published book, the notability guideline makes it very difficult to give the subject of IRC as a whole (overall, not this specific article) proper coverage. As it is currently, we are only giving coverage to a minority of these software programs (some of which are no longer in popular use) because those are the only applications that have been written about in a published book (some due to security flaws), distributed as part of a major operating system distribution, etc. This has resulted in an inability to give this subject proper, unbiased, equal coverage. The only workable solution currently is to merge many of these smaller articles into a much larger article (which is currently in-progress for IRC-related articles). While I personally don't think this is the best solution in the long term, in the short term it deals with the problems that the notability guideline is currently creating for these type of articles and allows us to give the subject as a whole much better, unbiased coverage. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:14, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Redirect to Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients#DMDirc to save the trouble of requesting undeletion of this article later when these are all merged into a larger article. --Tothwolf (talk) 17:22, 9 July 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.