Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Qi (programming language) (2nd nomination)

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. Stifle (talk) 19:55, 28 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Qi (programming language)

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Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG. All the sources cited in the article are primary. Google searches failed to turn up anything useful. Previous AfD outcome in 2007 was keep, but only because it was a brand-new article, not because there was evidence of notability. Msnicki (talk) 10:22, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: This discussion has been noticed by the Qi community [1] [2] —Ruud 20:09, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

~~Weak keep~~. I struggled on this, as there are lots of primary and unreliable sources, but I think I've found one - a paperback book on the language has been commercially published with an ISBN number as seen here. --Ritchie333 (talk) 11:40, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The author of the book, Mark Tarver, is also the author of Qi, making that a WP:PRIMARY source and not helpful in establishing notability. Msnicki (talk) 17:54, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That may be the case, but in order to be commercially published, the book would have had to have gone through whatever editorial and peer review process Upfront Publishing have. I don't think it would be a completely primary source unless they directly reprinted whatever he threw at them verbatim without looking at any of it. --Ritchie333 (talk) 18:00, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

A respected publisher with a reputation for fact-checking could make a source WP:RELIABLE, i.e., likely accurate in what it reports. But this particular publisher, Upfront Publishing, now called FastPrint is a vanity press; they print anything. And even if it was reliable, it would still be WP:PRIMARY and unusable for establishing notability. From WP:INDEPENDENT, "Every article on Wikipedia must be based upon verifiable statements from multiple third-party reliable sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. A third-party source is one that is entirely independent of the subject being covered, e.g., a newspaper reporter covering a story that they are not involved in except in their capacity as a reporter." Also, from WP:SPIP, "The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, author, inventor, or vendor) have actually considered the topic notable enough that they have written and published non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it – without incentive, promotion, or other influence by people connected to the topic matter." Msnicki (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete : Oh yes, it's a vanity press after all. Never mind. --Ritchie333 (talk) 10:38, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: No independent significant coverage. SL93 (talk) 22:31, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:07, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do not delete, let them make a revision The Qi Programming language is an important conceptual development. It brings types and logic progamming to functional programming. It might not be the most efficient logic programming language implementation, but it might give a good future prespective a possible integration of both worlds. It is in competition with other approaches such as Closure/Kanren and you name it. Janburse (talk) 14:20, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Edit: Hi Andy,

I guess Qi and Shen are supposed to be two different products although not independent. They share some properties:

http://www.shenlanguage.org/Documentation/shendoc.htm#Shen%20and%20Qi:%20differences

So they can be both notable independently, Qi is even supposed to have its own license. But on the other hand we find the verb superceded here:

http://www.lambdassociates.org/wiki.htm

Which indecates that Qi and Shen are not branches, but Shen is a subsequent release of Qi. Janburse (talk) 15:28, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything. Is the article's subject notable enough to appear in multiple, reliable sources? As you'll see from the above discussion, I had a good hard, look for some, and after some argument concluded that there isn't really anything out there now that passes muster. One possible outcome is to userfy the page, then as and when reliable sources do appear, the article can be put back in the main space. --Ritchie333 (talk) 14:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just to confirm, you did search for e.g. Qi Lisp instead of just Qi (a Chinese term of art of significant importance, which is of course no accident)? Hga (talk) 17:29, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Qi+Lisp+Shen is the more productive.

When this is deleted, and before the Shen (programming language) article is inevitably deleted too, then much of the content here could usefully be merged to that. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:13, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Woah, hang on, let's not all get down in the dumps about this just yet! I can't honestly remember the search terms I used, but I think I did "qi language" "qi programming" "qi lisp" "qi debugging" plus a few other variants. Plus of course there's that well known UK TV Quiz show to get out of the way! It is frustrating that there is a lot of stuff on it, but it's all a bit too close to home to treat as a secondary source. I've been the position where I've had stuff deleted or at least put up for AfD because I have private sources that i can't publicly prove enough to cross WP:RS, and yeah it's a pain in the neck. However, at least it's a pain in the neck consistently across everything, I guess. One thing's for sure - I would always qualify a failure to satisfy WP:N with it being not notable now or not notable yet, which is to say it might be notable in the future. Hence the recommendation to userfy so it doesn't get flushed down the bin just because it's not quite ready for prime time.

You could try getting Paul Graham to blog about it. ;-) --Ritchie333 (talk) 21:23, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Richie333 makes a really good point. Wikipedia is not a WP:CRYSTALBALL; you have to actually have the sources, not just good prospects for getting them someday. If the topic really should be notable and the only thing standing in the way is a couple good independent sources, then do the obvious: Start a little guerrilla effort to get some journalists interested in writing about it, the same way most entrepreneurs would tackle the problem. Pick up the phone or send them email and start pestering them. They have lots of experience dealing with PR flacks and other pests, so if you're just flogging junk, they know how to get rid of you. But they're always looking for stories and interesting products to review, so if you've got one, go for it. If you can convince them it's notable, that goes a long way to convincing us. Msnicki (talk) 21:41, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Qi is an important programming language that explores the combination of traditional Lisp with pattern matching, rather than verbose arcana with car / cdr. It would be useful to have encylopedic coverage of it.

However this is Wikipedia, and WP:Notability is a simplistic concept that is exercised by subject-unaware editors who think that a lambda is a baby sheep. As non self-published sources do seem unaccountably thin, then this article is doomed. Best thing is to not waste time on it, but do something more likely not to get squelched instead. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:45, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Qi was enough to win Mark Tarver a "Promising Inventor" gong from Stony Brook University in the early 2000s. That ought to be sourceable. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:19, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Did you find anything on this? —Ruud 20:43, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Weak delete As a programming language theorist I'd say this language looks at least interesting and I'd be interested in knowing how the expressivity of its type system compares to that of Coq or Agda.

If I put my Wikipedia hat on, I'd have to say delete. I can find some articles by Tarver on his earlier work on SEQUEL, but, as Tarver seems to have left academia, nothing on Qi or Shen. My advise would be to get something published on Qi, get cited, and then get a Wikipedia article. We have articles on some pretty obscure languages (Epigram, Cayenne), but those did receive notice by various researchers in the PLT community.

If a strong enough link with SEQUEL can be established, perhaps a single article covering SEQUEL, Qi and Shen might pass as notable. —Ruud 20:43, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In addition to the Stony Brook award (surely we can verify that), how about this:

Qi was later used within a postdoctoral project to develop a multiagent transport model illustrating Wardrop's Principle (6, 7).

6. M.Tarver and M. I. Faé Wardrop’s Principle Revisited: a multiagent approach, Congresso de Pesquisa e Ensino em Transportes, ANPET, 2002.

7. M.Tarver and M. I. Faé Applications of MultiAgents in Transport, Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2005.

[ In reply to the concept expressed in the sentence that starts with "If a strong enough link with SEQUEL can be established...." ]

Taver quickly whipped up this which I gather could support that type of article, perhaps with a bit more fleshing out. However, while I can see that as vaguely serving the purposes of Wikipedia, it would seem to be otherwise pretty pointless. Especially since as you note it might at best pass muster, especially to "subject-unaware editors who think that a lambda is a baby sheep". Hga (talk) 21:14, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What we really need here are some mentions of Qi by authorities who are not Tarver. If he included claims such as "Qi has the most powerful type theory of any language that will ever be invented." and tautologies such as "It is guaranteed to terminate in Qi too, provided that the user does not add non-terminating type rules." [3] in a paper submitted to JFP or ICFP it would surely get rejected. We'd therefore rather not see them on Wikipedia either. Insisting on reliable and independent sources is the way we try to prevent that. —Ruud 22:38, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm sure the postdoc had good things to say about Qi ^_^, but he's not likely a good authority. I expect we'll not fight the delete of this and the Shen article, but "We'll be back" when we have some notability support, which the project hasn't seen as a priority to date. Although I don't know the status of blogs, which of course are where so much of the action in this area has moved. Or how about the example of Lambda the Ultimate, which I gather has some degree of status, curation, etc.? Hga (talk) 23:55, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To get reliable independent coverage, think about who is it that normally writes about this sort of stuff, doing product reviews and similar articles in publications we'd likely accept as reliable and independent. I'd go pester people like Martin Heller or Larry Seltzer or whoever it is you think would be a better match. Good luck. Msnicki (talk) 00:13, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The previous LtU threads didn't seem to garner much (favourable) discussion though: [4] (especially the comment by Adam Chlipala) and [5]. —Ruud 01:55, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Please, keep the article. It gives a great overview of the language in a nice concise and structured way. As such it adds a great value in itself for people interested in Qi and it's type system. It's easy to get a feel of a language and gives a reader a clue of what to expect if she wants do dive in. Qi does indeed lack unbiased materials but it's often mentioned in discussions about type theory and programming language design (notably on LtU and Reddit-programming and Reddit-compsci). Ruud suggest having a joint article on Qi and Shen but I'm somewhat worried that the resulting article will be too long and confusing. So, I would rather wait till that joint article is up and reaches a comparable quality. Then we can safely remove a dedicated article for Qi. Listochkin (talk) 10:11, 6 January 2012 (UTC) — Listochkin (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

Keep an article because it's good?! What sort of against-policy heresy is this?! Technical articles are only to be kept if a 20 character string can be pattern-matched against an irrelevant text from Google Books, on a totally different topic. Next you'll be suggesting that articles are here to be read, not just to be kept on the shelf and their perfection of form and compliancy with policy admired from afar. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:38, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. The main source for this language, "Functional Programming in Qi" by Tarver, has only been cited once according to Google scholar, by Tarver himself (the other cite listed by GS appears to be a false positive). I also found a trivial mention in the preface of ECOOP'08. That is enough to convince me that this language has not yet had a chance to make a significant impact in theory or in practice, and that the multiple third-party sources with nontrivial coverage required by WP:GNG do not exist. No prejudice against recreation in some future date when this language becomes significantly more popular. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:14, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. "The other one" is not a false positive. Try one of the other hits from google scholar on that paper. The one you referred to links to the sliders. Other hits links to the paper itself. [6].— Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.103.211.90 (talk) 13:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC) — 213.103.211.90 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

Ok, but that article still only mentions Qi in a trivial way that does not help towards passing WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:55, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Okay, I followed Ruud's link at the top to peek at what the Qi community thinks of us. Some remarks: As explained at WP:PROBLEM, we do not delete articles because of content problems; if an article's not well-written or incorrect in what it reports, that can be always be fixed by anyone willing to put in the effort. But to have an article on Wikipedia, the topic needs to be WP:NOTABLE: Someone other than the people connected with the topic have to have decided it was sufficiently interesting that they thought about it and wrote something that got published in a reliable publication. This is a more technical, more precise use of the term than most of us would use in ordinary conversion where, if something seems notable, that's close enough. Here, it's not enough that an author thinks his work should be notable, it actually has to be. It's not enough that others should take note, they actually have to do it. If we didn't do this, we'd be overrun with spam. Wikipedia is not a WP:WEBHOST. But this bar of notability really isn't that high. If a couple reliable independent sources say a topic is notable, we take their word for it. If PCWeek isn't the right place to get some coverage, how about an ACM or IEEE journal? All it takes is a couple people not named Mark Tarver writing a couple short articles and getting them published somewhere. My suggestion would be WP:USERFY the article while you go get something published. Msnicki (talk) 20:32, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Bryce (talk | contribs) 05:14, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. When did a popularity of a particular article (or the popularity of the general knowledge-area that it tried to give light to) become the criteria for deletion? That should not be the case unless the article is completely irrelevant to current circumstances. This is a bad judgement call being made by the proposers. When "Shen" the language, which is supposedly the successor to Qi, gets more traction and even its own article, I would propose at that point to have this article be merged with it. In the meantime, a blurb on the Qi article about Shen should be entered in.. Lapax —Preceding undated comment added 08:44, 14 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Do you have a reason you feel we should keep it? I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I read your remarks several times and I couldn't find where you stated one. I understand that you don't think we should decide based on popularity, but no one's suggested we do that anyway. We decide based on notability WP:N: if reliable independent secondary sources exist, it's notable and we keep it, otherwise we don't. So far, no one has been able to find any such sources. Do you know of some? Msnicki (talk) 19:28, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I found a couple , from language and programming conference notes online that refer to Qi and Mark Tarver's talks about the next generation of Lisps.. [ACM: Activities of the 5th European Lisp and Scheme Workshop], [Object-Oriented Technology ECOOP 2008 Workshop Reader] . Not sure if these are sufficient as references.. Lapax —Preceding undated comment added 03:23, 15 January 2012 (UTC).[reply]

Delete Only noted for its obscurity. Is this IQ backwards? These source-code based obscure language pages just make Wikipedia look bad. History2007 (talk) 15:01, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's an ignorant and uninformed comment. If you don't know about the topic you are talking about, and don't even bother googling the topic, don't comment. Qi/Shen has an active community, has been used for real software, has several academic references, quite a few blog posts, has a language committee, is financed by the users, and often being discussed in online fora. This deletion request is actually quite ridiculous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.103.210.20 (talk) 23:54, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Wifione ^Message 11:36, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: Using Ruud's evaluations above to instead vote a keep: the article should be kept in order for the Qi community get a chance to evolve the section Architecture which use to be foundational for whether a research or otherwise innovative software is WP:NOTABLE if its usage community is (still) small. Rursus dixit. (^mbork³!) 19:14, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Doesn't affect the discussion here but FYI following a request, the content has been transwiki'd to Wikibooks. QU ^TalkQu 12:15, 25 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Transwiki. I'm the editor that copied the article's content to Wikibooks. I'm sure this is a hackish work as I'm not experienced with that project; I'm stepping here to remind others that afd admits several options other than Keep or Delete. The current article doesn't have sources establishing notability, but that doesn't mean that it should be lost; it can be merged or copied to an apropriate Wikimedia site. Diego (talk) 13:02, 25 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- I'm not sure if Wikibooks is the best place to collect articles on borderline-notable programming languages. Starting a dedicated Wiki(a) (á la Esolang) might be a better idea. There authors don't have to worry about constraints like notability, neutrality, accuracy and quality. —Ruud 15:03, 25 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Possibly, however, notability (which I think is the issue driving this specific AfD) is not a criteria for inclusion in Wikibooks. We have plenty of obscure material! QU ^TalkQu 09:30, 26 January 2012 (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.