Talk:The Engine

Notability?
Ping User:Toughpigs who removed the notability tag. Can you find any in-depth coverage? Being one of the first fictional depictions of a computer is cool, but not necessarily relavant to having its own stand-alone article. This content can be very well just merged to Gulliver's Travels or such, unless you can find in-depth coverage, which I am not seeing. In-depth, mind you, is more than one-two sentences. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 04:56, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There are already sources written on the page. They are offline sources, and therefore not accessible to you right now. If you have a problem with those sources, then you should go and look them up before you assume that they are insufficient. I don't think it's a good idea to go around putting a notability tag on any random article that doesn't have immediately accessible online sources. -- Toughpigs (talk) 05:01, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Since you just copy-pasted your answer from another page, I just direct you to my identical answer there: . The tag is warranted as the article has problems. Fix them or leave the tag. PS. I do have access to Lem's Summa, and he mentions this entity in half a sentence: " and which was rightly mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels." It does not even mention The Engine, and it is frankly not 100% this device is what Lem means. Now, seems to be reasonably in depth, but GNG requires multiple sources. Hence the tag. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here  05:21, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Wow! Very notable! :-)
If it really is the first fictional description of a computer, then that's darned freakin' notable! Wow! Still, we would need some number of sources talking about it (i.e. "secondary" sources) to support that.

If we (as editors) expect people to think "the first fictional computer" (which ever one that might be) to be exciting or notable, then we would still need source(s) talking about it, but the number and quality of them needed would be "fewer". I think "the first fictional computer" is darned exciting, but the important part is that I expect most others to think so too. So, it wouldn't take much in the way of secondary sources talking about the matter to "prove" (as it were) that the matter is notable enough for inclusion.

The single inline citation (IEEE) secondary source might do the trick for notability. I think that by itself it would be marginally good enough to dispense with the tag(s). But, there are actually three secondary sources already in the article. The other two are in the "external sources" section. So yeah, that's plenty. The article is not "single source" and there's more than enough secondary writing referenced about the matter to establish notability. I'll remove both tags.

73.219.90.8 (talk) 04:47, 25 April 2020 (UTC)