Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tosca (software)

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. Spartaz ^Humbug! 19:12, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Tosca (software)

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Fails WP:PRODUCT. I can't find any substantial coverage in reliable sources. Consistent efforts over many years to spam WP - see TRICENTIS Technology & Consulting which also fails WP:CORP. SmartSE (talk) 11:29, 14 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Does not fail WP:PRODUCT. Sources are indeed reliable and verifiable. Publications and authors cited are reputable. I am not familiar with deleted article TRICENTIS Technology & Consulting, and do not see how its violations relate to the article under discussion. I am working on rewriting article to address issues of neutrality and would appreciate the chance to complete my work. --Gisli Súrsson (talk) 12:10, 14 March 2014 (UTC) — Gisli Súrsson (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
Restore TRICENTIS Technology & Consulting and merge Tosca there This nomination shows no work that can be reproduced, but does speak to years of questionable decisions by Wikipedia admins. See Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Article Incubator/TRICENTIS Technology & Consulting in which two admins ~~intent on moving articles from the incubator to deletespace did a number on~~ with a history of deleting articles in the incubator deleted a properly improved Wikipedia article with references showing national and international attention. As a WP:NOQUORUM situation, this MfD should have been closed at most as a soft delete, and not as per Silence (Doctor Who). This is not a glamorous topic, one that titillates the mass market, so proper respect must be given when international third parties attend to the topic. I think that Tricentis is the more wp:notable and that Tosca should be merged to Tricentis. The current article has some material that is of no interest from the viewpoint of an encyclopedia, so would benefit with a merge to the parent article. Unscintillating (talk) 11:20, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That is not entirely accurate. As an admin I can see the page history. What actually happened here was the article was incubated in 2011. There it sat untouched until 2013. Then you worked on the article and had a long conversation with yourself on the talk page in which you agreed with your own proposal to move it back to mainspace. Yet you never did so. A month later I nominated it for MFD. Neither you nor anybody besides me said a single word about the nomination, and so it was deleted. I would really appreciate it if you would stop attacking my motivations at every possible opportunity. The incubator is dead. Get over it already. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:20, 16 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I also checked the deleted version of that article before nominating this for deletion (and again just now), but I couldn't find anything to show that the requirements for CORP or GNG were met based on the references cited or a search in gbooks and factiva. SmartSE (talk) 23:53, 17 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Business-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:13, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 15:13, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Austria-related deletion discussions. Unscintillating (talk) 16:27, 15 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. The existing article is a bit of a mess, but it's clear that folks have tried to source the statements. There are some not-too-unreasonable WP:RS trade-rags buried in the current refs for the article. I suspect more such WP:RS exist, for somebody that speaks German and works in Austria/Switzerland/Germany where the company does most of their business. The ones I found below are new, from what I can tell.

some additional sources for Tricentris/Tosca

Found some academic hits, mostly just WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions, plus only the first (v.likely: IEEE/IFETS), second (likely: MNT/IJLRST) and perhaps the third (big *maybe*) are likely to be WP:RS per our current WP:SCHOLAR guidelines. 2010 Latvia,[1] 2012 India,[2] 2012 Germany,[3] 2012 Czech Republic,[4] 2013 Sweden.[5]/[6] There was also this 2008 newsletter from Latvia, I think about a conference at the university, see page 7.[7]

Found some book hits, not sure if they are WP:RS (some could be self-pub), nor if the coverage is merely WP:NOTEWORTHY rather than in-depth enough for WP:N, but as with the academic stuff above, the reasonable number for a piece of commercial stuff is indicative that the company/product is known. 2012, Experiences of Test Automation, Graham & Fewster - 2012.[8] 2012, Foundations of Software Testing, Black & Graham.[9] 2012, SWQD, Software Quality: 4th Int'l Conf, Biffl & Winkler & Bergsmann (eds), Springer-Verlag.[10][11] 2013, Improving the Test Process, Bath & Van Veenendaal.[12] (I also got some lawyer-hits... the words are apparently Latin-enough to be courtroom terms?)

What I found pretty convincing for wikiNotability purposes was industry-stuff. Here is an in-English electronics-manufacturing trade-rag, for instance, with an in-depth WP:N-level interview of a Tricentris manager about the company & product.[13][14] Blurb about a deal in India.[15] The kicker was the Magic Quadrant published by Gartner; here is a Microsoft-cached-reprint of the 2011 award.[16] As a newcomer to the ranking in Jan'11, Tricentis got 300 words from Garnter... but they are the primary "enterprise software ranking" and being on the Magic Quadrant list is pretty wikiNotable methinks, if backed up by other coverage (see article reflist && above).

Additional industry-stuff: the company claims to be a Gartner winner in 2013 as well.[17] Recent reports are heavily-paywalled-stuff, but can prolly be verified as coming from Garnter using WP:RX services, or interlibrary loan, or somesuch. I don't doubt the factual nature of these cites, despite the 'reprint' status of both; Gartner is very touchy about their trademark. :-) Similarly, the company-homepage alleges their big customers include BMW (cars) / Siemens (mfg) / Allianz (bank) in Germany, UBS (bank) in Switzerland, plus Southwest Airlines and HBO (teevee) in the USA.[18] Again, one tends to trust this sort of list; places like BMW are happy to sue the pants off you for trademark infringement, if you claim to be their supplier without their permission. Note the distinction I'm making here: I'm not saying that we can use the WP:ABOUTSELF rule to claim in *mainspace* that the company won two Gartner awards and has this big list of clients... I'm saying, that here in AfD, these claims are plausibly-enough WP:V, from traderags or German-lang-papers or somesuch, that they can help indicate whether the company is wikiNotable or not (by contrast the local pizza chain has prolly also dealt commercially with BMW ... but doesn't get trademark permission to boast about it on http://pizza4u.com ... which is my point).

Bottom line, I think the German-language refs already in the article, the EETimes/EDN story, and the Garnter 2011 win (plus the likely-to-be-verifiable 2013 win held in reserve) add up to be WP:N. This company is a bit on the edge; in the Tosca/Tricentis industry (see List_of_GUI_testing_tools) the big five players are IBM, HP, Micro Focus fka Borland, Microsoft, and Oracle fka Sun Microsystems, all GIGANTIC compared to Tricentris. There are several notable FLOSS tools like Selenium (software), in the niche, as well. So how does Tosca make a profit? Well, because their niche ain't fun stuff like databases, webservers, spreadsheets, and browsers, let alone 'apps' about flying birds knocking over little green pigs. Tosca is boring enterprise software, used for verifying the security of back-end banking stuff, or for bullet-proofing software used in the manufacturing of cars & electronics, and SERUIZ things like that. Big software, that runs big businesses, with lots of money to spend. Some people have the opinion that only huge hypercorp businesses belong in wikipedia, like IBM, which Tricentris defintely isn't... but my opinion is simple: if Tricentris/Tosca meets WP:GNG, we should have the article. I tend not to spend as much time on WP:CORP as a means to define wikiNotability, since it is a guideline which echos the WP:GNG policy... and for that matter, WP:42. But from doing the sourcing, there seems to be pretty significant coverage in multiple wikiReliable sources independent of the topic in question.

p.s. I have no opinion on 'correctness' of the incubator thing in 2011, when Tricentris was deleted and yet Tosca was kept, but I'll ping Beeblebrox in case they wish to comment. From my scan of the sources, Tricentris just makes the one product Tosca (software), so if we keep the overall topic, it should be an article about the company (with a subsection on the product), as Unscintillating suggested above (and as the WP:PRODUCT guideline suggests also). 74.192.84.101 (talk) 01:03, 16 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for taking the time to research sources. Personally though, I don't think it changes much since they are either very brief or in very specialist publications. The Gartner source is the best, but that's still not really sufficient to merit an article - more a mention in List of GUI testing tools. SmartSE (talk) 23:53, 17 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here are three references, the first two suggested by the last DRV:

Unscintillating (talk) 02:37, 16 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Unscintillating: Can you please link to the original sources rather than translated ones? I can't access them properly like that. Thanks SmartSE (talk) 23:53, 17 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My concern in the previous deletion discussion was based solely the article languishing indefinitely in the incubator. I have no opinion on its fitness as a mainspace article. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:52, 16 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete Fails WP:PRODUCT and WP:GNG; the apparently-COI editing is indicative. Miniapolis 23:37, 17 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Delete as above. Simply not a notable product (or company) in any reasonable encyclopedic sense. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 14:27, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Notice A stealth edit has been made to this page with the edit comment "ridiculous", which has removed a comment of mine and restored an edit that I removed as a personal attack. ANI became involved. Although I have objected to this page being a WP:BATTLEGROUND, this view has not been sustained. Unscintillating (talk) 23:00, 22 March 2014 (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.