Talk:OggPCM

Starting discussion about article content, maybe removal
As somebody who has participated in the development of OggPCM (as it stands now), I too am unsure whether it should be described on Wikipedia. It can have a place in here as part of the Ogg family free standardization effort, but then it narily has any support anywhere despite having existed for a number of years now. Thus pretty much no secondary, much less tertiary reference to it exist. That means that it could fail two of the red flags now noted on the article page (notability, primary sources) if it weren't for its connection with the overall XIPH supported Ogg project...within whose ambit it really stays rather relevant for at least two reasons.

1) The Ogg container format derives notability from its current use at least in the anime circuits, and as the only container which actually follows an open development model. Matroska is the only contender there, but its development model is more closed than the XIPH one, making Ogg perhaps a bit more connected to the Free Software movement than Matroska is. Eventhough it's a lesser used format now, and even if it too follows the LGPL licence with its associated libraries instead of the full GPL one which FSF would fully endorse. At least Richard Stallman has seemed more concerned with the Ogg than with the Matroska effort, and especially with the open codecs which live within XIPH/Ogg, than with the ones Matroska only incorporates by reference and doesn't help develop.

Because of that, OggPCM too could derive some vicarious notability points. It is a purely openly derived, XIPH-mediated at one point, straight PCM format. No fringes. That sort of thing doesn't exist anywhere else, so that it is sort of notable in itself if the history is filled out.

2) No extant uncompressed format besides OggPCM is as general as it is. At the level of standardization the already notable Ogg container specification refers back to OggPCM as its part, partly because truly multichannel future formats aren't supported even by FLAC as the only lossless (compressed) format that is free. OggPCM has also remained stable for a while now, so that within at least the XIPH/Ogg effort it would remain the one and only standard for pure PCM audio if something like that were to be used in the future. Which there is reason to believe will happen at some point when audio compression ceases to be an issue thanks to storage space becoming continually cheaper at an exponential rate.

In that way, OggPCM can be thought of as a formally sanctioned placeholder as part of a broader standard which is already notable. In that way, it could be both notable and could be excused for not having secondary references just yet. Just as e.g. the article about ASN.1 ECN was started far before there were any actual implementations, and even now there being precious few, with the article still existing.

So, if y'll are willing to derive the notability of the article from its associations to the Ogg project and the Free Software movement in general, and to live with the fact that not every notable project always possesses secondary references, I'd be willing to fill out the article from stub to a real one.

If not, I too would vote for deletion, with the caveat that the primary sources be noted on the primary page on the Ogg and/or XIPH articles, and whatever content is extant/I might add be incorporated into the body of said page. (I'd appreciate if you dropped a note on my talk page if something big happens before I remember this topic again. Individual updates are easily lost for me amongst hundreds a day, and my own sporadic editorial manner doesn't exactly work without some communal help. :) Decoy (talk) 02:01, 24 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Based on what you say, I suggest that the current content is merged and redirected into Ogg. This would retain the bulk of the textual content there and existing links to the current page would redirect there. Stuartyeates (talk) 05:38, 24 July 2012 (UTC)