Talk:Wheel (computing)

Connections
...I don't know how to work in:


 * This is related to chat room and ICQ door games.


 * Also related to stacking at MIT.

&mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 00:19, 2005 August 9 (UTC)

Etymology
Where did the term "wheel" come from in this context? Steering wheel? -- Dachannien TalkContrib 22:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Big wheel, colloquialism for "important person". David spector (talk) 01:14, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Unhelpful and uncited
I have been reading about "wheel wars" in Wikipedia administrative pages for about two weeks now, and decided to find out what the term means. This article did not explain that. It said it was a "practical joke" based on an operating system i have never heard of -- with no citation. A previous editor's request for etymology has gone unanswered since March, 2008 -- yet this term is used almost daily among Admins of Wikipedia. Do they even know what they are referring to? I have added some citation tags, but really, on the face of it, this reference to an operating system called "TENEX" -- an operating system so obscure that it is not even listed in Wikipedia, to judge by the lack of a wiki-link -- sounds like a "practical joke" all its own. And what on Earth are "chat room and ICQ door games" and "stacking at MIT" -- referred to above in this talk page -- and what do *they* have to do with "wheel wars"?

Surely, if there is a factual basis to these claims, and some etymological basis for this term, and it is not merely a "practical joke," then someone can make this a better article, right? cat yronwode Catherineyronwode (talk) 19:13, 12 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Did you miss the notice at the top of the article? . KillerChihuahua?!? 22:36, 12 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, but that was self-referential to Wikipedia and Wiki-refs are too self-referential to be notable, unless supported by other examples of usage. Jack-A-Roe has fixed it, i think, with his renaming. It makes a lot more sense now. cat yronwode 64.142.90.33 (talk) 06:43, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Page title changed due to lack of sources
I did a lot of searching today on Google and other search engines to find references for the term "wheel war".  I was not able to find anything relevant, other than many pages using the Wikipedia definition as their source, except one item in the Jargon File, that did not match the definition in this article. I've added that secondary definition and reference, but the primary meaning still remains unsourced, with a fact tag on it.

Since there were no references at all, but there were references to the more basic term "Wheel" referring to the unix group of users with higher levels of system access, I rewrote the article from that perspective, added the references and moved the page title.

If anyone can find enough sources to move the page back to "wheel war", that would be fine with me, but without sources, that page title just doesn't pass WP:V or WP:N. I was quite surprised that with so much searching I wasn't able to find them, maybe the term really is not used much outside of Wikipedia. --Jack-A-Roe (talk) 05:40, 13 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Jack-A-Roe. I thought i was missing some joke. The way you have rewritten the article, it makes perfet sense now, Good work! cat yronwode not logged in but still me 64.142.90.33 (talk) 06:39, 13 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm collecting examples of this word in use at Wiktionary:Citations:wheel war. If anyone finds any Wiktionary-worthy sources (Published books/papers/magazines/scripts or Usenet archives, NOT web-pages except in exceptional circumstances) containing the term, it would be interesting to add them to that page - otherwise we might have to assume that this is a dord. Conrad.Irwin (on wikt) 14:45, 13 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I did a lot of searching before renaming the article, and I was not able to find any significant uses of the term "wheel war", in print or usenet or even on web pages - other than in direct regard to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects.


 * The term "wheel" in the context of Unix has many uses in books about Unix, hundreds of books - so that one is not a dord. I used the search term +wheel +unix and many pages came up.   But "wheel war" does not bring any results at all in books or journals other than random juxtapositions of the two words that do not refer to the computing usage.  Adding the qualifiers "unix" or "computer" or "computing" resulted in zero hits on Google Books and Scholar. -Jack-A-Roe (talk) 18:09, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Merge
I was reading this article, and I think the article would the section about UNIX Wheel groups and UNIX Wheel Wars should be merged into SU article, with a disambiguation page for the term wheel wars, and a wheel group search redirecting straight to SU.

I really don't think the content in this article is significant enough to warrant its own separate article.[signature missing]


 * You may be right. There needs to be a limit to the level of detail, so WP doesn't get so large and expensive to host that it self-destructs. David spector (talk) 01:22, 20 December 2009 (UTC)