Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/William Pitcock

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. The reason I am closing this as a No Consensus closure is because while the people on the keep side have the majority, most of their arguments are not strong at all, and are not based in policy. The delete party, on the other hand, has fairly strong arguments that are based in policy. However, as this analysis does not leave much left to determine consensus with, this is a no consensus closure. (X! · talk) · @242 · 04:49, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

William Pitcock

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No reliable sources provided, claims to notability are borderline. KFP (talk | contribs) 00:04, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I have added some sources for this page. --Jacob Myers _{(Flame me!)} 00:34, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: He is definitely notable. He had a hand in creating the IRC daemon used on freenode, and created Audacious Media Player, which is a widely used piece of software. --Jacob Myers _{(Flame me!)} 00:13, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: I also agree. He wrote the IRCD that Freenode uses, which happens to be the network of choice for Wikipedia. I don't know why this is even up for debate. Diablo-D3 (talk) 00:16, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: He is notable for creating many softwares in use by many people. I found this as a source, but I'm not sure where exactly it could be used. If someone would like to be bold and use it as an inline source for the article, that'd be awesome. AndreniW (talk) 00:23, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: 50,000 users use software he has had a part in, including a lot of you who will be reading this now. Given most of it is transparent, I still believe he's notable. Cfuenty1 (talk) 01:17, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: William Pitcock's contributions to DroneBL, Atheme, and other projects mentioned in the article are sufficiently significant in my view that an article on him is appropriate, given the number of users who interact with his software daily and the significance of it both within the IRC community, and on a larger scale given the number of open source projects using Freenode and similar networks to host their support, development, or community discussion channels.. If it is felt that insufficient references or similar issues outside of notability guidelines themselves are present, then I feel it would be better to flag it for improvement rather than delete, especially given that it is a very young article. --Namegduf Live (talk) 01:29, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - I still do not see reliable sources, and being a developer of notable software does not necessarily merit inclusion in Wikipedia (think of the tens of thousands of devs involved in the development of Microsoft Windows, for example). --KFP (talk | contribs) 01:31, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Given a single one of his accomplishments, he's unnotable I admit, but given the sum of them, he's definitely notable. Just because you haven't heard of him doesn't necessarily mean he's not notable. --Jacob Myers _{(Flame me!)} 02:34, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Every day, I use software he's been developing, and it's great software. Still, we'll need reliable sources. --KFP (talk | contribs) 02:48, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: KFP, you're essentially arguing that we should also remove the articles on freenode and Wikipedia itself due to being non-notable because they don't have enough useful references. Diablo-D3 (talk) 08:55, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: So I suppose Raymond Chen, Dave Cutler, and Alan Cox's articles need to be deleted too. 8 of 11 refs on Ray's page are to himself. Does that mean one could use, for instance, nenoblog to ref Pitcock's article? AndreniW (talk) 03:20, 16 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm? The fact that we have plenty of other poorly sourced articles should not enter into this discussion, I'm afraid. --KFP (talk | contribs) 01:56, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep - notability established. Refs provided. Crap refs deleted. Some refs still needed but not a concern for overall notability. Article cleaned up. This debate formatted (no text changes) - perhaps other pollsters here could conform to AfD debate format rules. To oppose a deletion, it is probably more usual to say keep preceded by a bulleted new entry. Thanks.--Kudpung (talk) 03:53, 18 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. No decent references added. Might be well known in his field of work, but we need reliable sources talking about the guy and I don't see any: Ref 1 - nothing about him; Ref 2 - primary source and only says that he wrote DroneBL with Steve Church, cannot be used to show notability; Ref 3 - just a list of people, not a reliable source, nothing to establish notability; Ref 4 - just a log of maintenance tweaks, not a reliable source, nothing to establish notability; Ref 5 - nothing about the person; Ref 6 - nothing about him, but simply about a domain he supposedly owns (but is not actually verified by the source). My own searching could come up with nothing better. A quick reminder on our notability guideline: A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has been the subject of published secondary source material which is reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject. None of the sources in the article come anywhere near close to meeting this. Quantpole (talk) 10:10, 19 February 2010 (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.