Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/FastCode

FastCode

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I cannot find any coverage of this contest to indicate that it meets the general notability guideline can be met. (PROD was was contested). SmartSE (talk) 17:56, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the article should be clarified (or perhaps you're just misreading it) but it's not the contest that's important. It's not "covered" because only the participants in the contest actually care about the competition itself. The improved code that comes out of it, on the other hand, is quite significant and is well-known in the Delphi community. There's no good reason to delete this article just because one minor detail doesn't have much "coverage" in blogs or news. 69.46.35.146 (talk) 19:02, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But the article says FastCode is the contest - is this true? IOW, the thing you refer to as "one minor detail" is the subject of the entire article, right? I may have mangled this when I removed the copyrighted text, but it sure seemed to say this all along. If FastCode is well known in the Delphi community, then it should be pretty easy to find reliable sources to help satisfy the general notability guidelines, which are required for a subject to be a stand-alone article. Do such sources exist? If so, please add them to the article or let me know about them so I can do it. If not, then what you mean by "well-known" is not the same as notability as we talk about it on wikipedia, and we should delete this article. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:26, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Edited the article to clarify that FastCode is a programming project implemented as a contest. And there are five sources in the article so far, three of them from official Embarcadero sources. So can we drop the "no reliable sources" nonsense already? 69.46.35.146 (talk) 20:10, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Three are self-published and the other is not independent and they are therefore not what we consider to be "reliable" as WP:RS explains. SmartSE (talk) 20:16, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Simply because the articles happen to be found in blogs doesn't mean they're automatically to be discounted as "self-published". They're not just any old person's blog rambling about whatever; those are links from official technical blogs from top Delphi team members, hosted by Embarcadero, the owner of Delphi. That's about as official as it gets for a major software product that's sold over the Internet. 69.46.35.146 (talk) 20:30, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The main problem is not that they're blogs - I think those blogs would be fine for certain kinds of verification, etc. But most of them are not independent sources. We need sources from unaffiliated organizations in order to establish notability. The entire premise of this discussion is the general notability guidelines; it would be helpful to read them for anyone who wishes to participate here. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 20:42, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The nature of something technical and used by Embarcadero (even though it's run by third party programmers) is that most articles about it will be by the people who wrote it - they know the most, after all! - or Embarcadero, since they make Delphi. While I agree with the motive behind the guidelines is good, in this case it's counter-productive and serves to exclude the most informative content.

(You can see this easily by looking at similar pages - take [1] or [2] for example. Most of those pages' references don't qualify by those standards, yet anyone who knows about either of the products would agree (a) they're notable and (b) they're good sources.)

I'm not arguing the motive; just pointing out it's counter-productive, circular, and serves to remove information from Wikipedia. I'm sure you don't want that.

Btw, I'm a neutral third party - a normal Delphi programmer, just one well aware of how useful FastCode has been. Thought I'd put in my two cents since the moderators seem to not move in Delphi circles.

TL;DR Argument is counterproductive in this specific case, it's a guideline & look at similar articles; you should add sources that know most about the topic.

06:39, 20 January 2011 (UTC)203.45.22.138 (talk) David M

Redirect to Embarcadero Delphi, which mentions FastCode. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 20:05, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that that's probably the best solution. SmartSE (talk) 20:16, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - From what I can gather, it is a coding project at sourceforge structured as a competition. But regardless, I cannot find significant coverage in reliable sources to establish notability. All I am able to find are blogs and forum posts. -- Whpq (talk) 20:06, 19 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 02:25, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]