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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.  JGHowes  talk 17:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

SurveyJS

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SurveyJS (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Most of the sources available on this software are associated (press releases, churnalism) or unreliable (blog posts). This article tries to make a case for notability by quoting download statistics and github forks, neither of which are relevant for our purposes. It also makes a large deal out of a pair of academic works - one a book, one conference proceedings. Each gets a paragraph in the history section of the article. But neither of these have substantial content about SurveyJS - they are trivial mentions. I've done some looking and haven't found better sourcing. I don't believe this meets either WP:NSOFTWARE or WP:GNG and should be deleted. MrOllie (talk) 23:34, 29 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. MrOllie (talk) 23:34, 29 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Response:
Thank you for the constructive feedback and the opportunity to have this discussion. Please allow me to explain what inspired me to write the article and why I believe the subject is notable:
Survey software is a niche field. It is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia article. There are several related articles on the subject, including one which compares the software tools from the field. The comparison table lists 15 software packages (as of January 2021). Only one of those is an open source project - LimeSurvey. Of the commercial ones, there are six whose articles cite only PR sources with regards to their notability: CreateSurvey, Sogosurvey, Formsite, Formstack, Satmetrix, Survio.
The open-source one, LimeSurvey, establishes notability mainly by citing download stats from its source code repository on SourceForge.
The Reliability and Significance of Sources section of WP:NSOFTWARE states the following: “- The way the app is distributed. It is reasonable to allow relatively informal sources for free and open-source software, if significance can be shown.“ With that in mind I am surprised by the dismissal of most of the sources offered for SurveyJS, especially GitHub stats and academic publications.
Many FOSS articles rely on stats to establish popularity. For example, Magit is a niche software tool, which cites only blog posts and GitHub stats. Magit does not appear in any news articles or books.
I believe that the references for SurveyJS show that the product is notable in the context of the survey software niche. Wikipedia currently offers articles about this niche, but does not represent the open source landscape objectively. The popularity of SurveyJS is comparable to that of LimeSurvey, yet only LimeSurvey gets mentioned. Thus I believe the quality of Wikipedia's materials on the topic of survey software tools will get improved by the inclusion of the SurveyJS article.
Orilux (talk) 18:35, 30 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Follow-up:
The auto-generated scholar link in the find sources section of this page produces 67 results of academic papers from universities in different countries and in different languages. One of those papers, from a joint project between the British museum in London and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute explains in detail the unique characteristics of SurveyJS, which led to them choosing it for the project over other platforms: Improving Visitor Evaluation at the British Museum.
Orilux (talk) 15:19, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's an undergrad paper written by some WPI students. The Google scholar search turns up some trivial mentions, a few more undergrad term papers and the like, and some OCR errors (a few sources about geological surveys misidentifying 'survey is' as 'surveyjs.' We need both substantial content and reliability in the same sources. - MrOllie (talk) 15:23, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
MrOllie, you raise two issues - reliability and significance. It was me who raised the issue of reliability first, by quoting the guidlines for FOSS in WP:NSOFTWARE, which state that it is reasonable to allow relatively informal sources, such as blog posts. This is consistent with other FOSS articles. Can you please comment on that?
The scholar search results, be them undergrad papers or master theses, are consistent with each other: they all refer to this software library as the researcher's tool of choice for performing their experiemnts. Several of the papers discuss the software selection process and highlight the same unique characteristics that influenced the choice (MIT license, offline capabilities, JSON compatibility, etc.). Those papers span over a period of 3 years and come from universities in the USA, UK, Japan, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Ghana, Russia and more. This level of popularity, combined with the repository stats, news articles and blog posts, more than satisfy the guidelines, especially in this niche category. Orilux (talk) 08:47, 5 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Orilux, Per WP:RS, blog posts are not useful. This is an open source program, but it is produced by a commercial entity who seeks to make money off of the paid variant. If other FOSS articles are inappropriately sourced that may be a reason to fix or delete those articles, not to add more badly sourced stuff. Undergrad papers, too, are not useful sources. MrOllie (talk) 14:12, 5 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • MrOllie, there is no "paid variant" of this software library. The project was initiated by a commercial entity, but that has no relevance to it being open-source. It is an absolute fact that this project is open-source. WP:NSOFTWARE does not specify any exceptions for OSS so your suggestion that these guidlines are somehow not applicable here is unacceptable. The commercial entity is not the subject of the article. I am in no way affiliated with this company or any of the authors of the library. I am not even a contributor to the project. I found the name of the original author by examining the source code repository's history. I have experience in this field and I already explained what motivated me to create the article. I did include the "Related software" section, because I believe it to be relevant in the same way that WordPress talks about Automattic and Wordpress.com. I have no objections to removing this section if you believe that will improve the article. I never said that other FOSS articles are inappropriately sourced. I only gave examples of some FOSS articles that use informal sources. What I did say was inapropriately sourced, was a bunch of commercial products on the Comparison of survey software page. Orilux (talk) 21:43, 5 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:43, 6 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Daniel (talk) 08:36, 16 February 2021 (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.
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