Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bill Woodcock


 * 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 keep. Improving the article is highly encouraged per comments below to prevent renomination in the near future. (non-admin closure) ASTIG😎  (ICE T • ICE CUBE) 23:20, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Bill Woodcock

 * – ( View AfD View log )

With no prejudice to the subject, who is an active Wikipedia editor and, outside of Wikipedia, does marvellous job for the global IT infrastructure – but neither the article nor all the listed sources contain any evidence of notability. The sources do attest that the person exists, is active professionally and has co-authored a few publicly available reports, but unfortunately there is little else to comply with WP:NBIO. — kashmīrī  TALK  19:02, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. —  kashmīrī  TALK  19:02, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. —  kashmīrī  TALK  19:02, 24 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 20:02, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

keep Bill Woodcock has certainly a been notable person in the quiet underpinnings of Internet governance for decades. He has been a supporter of internet decentralization before it became a fad, and champion of the non-commercial uses of the internet which have otherwise been foundering in recent years due to commercialization and competing national interests. He has been also been a champion of free speech and other human rights, and in particular has been fighting surveillance by both state and corporations. As founder of the PCH non-profit he has been at the core of the internet peering infrastructure which allows smaller organizations to compete with big centralized companies and offer censorship resistant services. His activities have included keeping .ORG available for non-commercial interests, and allowed smaller and poor countries to be able to offer top-level domains, secure DNS services, and other internet services for their citizens, that they otherwise were not capable of offering without the use of a commercial gatekeeper. In all of these efforts, he has been servicing the larger unsung security coordination efforts for internet infrastructure that otherwise fall between the cracks as there is little financial support for them. His work in these areas have been public, are verifiable, and he is widely recognized as a major contributor to Internet governance. He is not an academic, but a major past and currently active practitioner in his field, and should not be subject to the academic requirements for Wikipedia notability. His page may need some edits, but his role as a notable figure should remain part of the historical record, especially given Wikipedia's larger role as a historian for the Internet. (I was co-editor of IETF RFC 2246, the TLS Protocol 1.0, and am a co-author of the W3C Decentralized Identifier specification, so I can speak to the subject of notability of internet professionals). ChristopherA (talk) 00:27, 25 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Fabulous. Now need a few independent, reliable sources for that. We can't base an encyclopaedia on "Hey, an editor just happens to know the article subject", or the article subject posting their autobiography here. — kashmīrī  TALK  20:27, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

keep Articles about Bill Woodcock and the impact of his projects in The New York Times, Wired, and Forbes without a doubt constitute notability, so I’m surprised deletion is under consideration, especially as Wikipedia.ORG would not have been up and running reliably 2010 - 2020 without the work of Packet Clearing House, and the DNS infrastructure it provided to Afilias. jubois (talk) 08:54, 25 May 2021 (UTC) — jubois (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.


 * I see no article about Bill Woodcock listed in the references – can you point me towards one? Also, this is not a deletion discussion for Packet Clearing House. We have notability policies which are not based on how "important" the subject was but what the sources say about them. We even had deletion discussions about large corporations with $2 billion annual turnover without whom many modern medicines would not exist – precisely for lack of sources. That's how it works here. — kashmīrī  TALK  09:02, 25 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The IEEE biographical article cited in the external links section seems to be exactly that. If your objection is that it’s in the external links section, when references is more frequently used now, that’s an artifact of its age, and you can fix that easily enough by moving it to where you think it’s most applicable. As an aside: while celebrities may be famous for being famous, engineers, scientists, and artists are notable for their works -- which is why the coverage of Woodcock's projects is relevant to the large number of people that rely on infrastructure he has helped to build. Notability_(people) states "People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject" -- as in Wired, NYT, etc. Jubois (talk) 13:24, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * That one is behind a paywall. However, still no multiple reliable sources are listed. Currently, the consensus is that a lone interview or a feature article, esp. in niche media, is insufficient for a standalone encyclopaedia article. — kashmīrī  TALK  18:39, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Comment I was expecting to find, that Woodcock is actually notable in Wikipedia terms but trawling through the sources there appears to be zero in-depth significant coverage, just endless listings and passing mentions, I've only looked at 15 so far. Theroadislong (talk) 17:46, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Weak delete Having looked at all 26 references, most do not even mention him, those that do are just listings or passing mentions. Unless some in-depth coverage can be found (or the notability guidelines changed), it seems that sadly he doesn't warrant an article. Theroadislong (talk) 17:54, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Keep Some of the links were broken and needed to be cleaned up and put in modern syntax, but I’ve just done that, and there’s not just the biographical piece in the IEEE, there are also the three pieces in the New York Times, the long one in Wired, the one in Forbes, et cetera. I did a quick Google search, and there are plenty more like that, but I haven’t had time to add any new material. No question this article is notable, it just needed a little cleanup and updating (and still needs more). DaveHuddleston (talk) 21:10, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Keep Between the several NYT pieces on his work, the IEEE biography, the somewhat-melodramatic Wired long piece, the article clearly meets WP:BASIC with room to spare. And if someone has time to add content, Google search turns up some good interviews and articles about his work. JK.Kite (talk) 15:30, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Keep He's got a bunch of articles in major publications about him, there's a lot of interviews and other information about him out there, and he's clearly done very interesting things. The article needs work, and I'm willing to put some in to improve the quality and make it conform better to quality standards. Pmetzger (talk) 13:15, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

FYI, I'm performing a major edit of the page to make it better organized, better cited, and more readable.Pmetzger (talk) 13:57, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

What a surprising number of editors responded here who have not edited for years and now suddenly woke up to join this deletion discussion. Stealth canvassing comes to mind. — kashmīrī  TALK  14:50, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Keep Subject meets the "The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in a specific field" criterion on Notability_(people), and there are multiple secondary sources indicating this. I had just fetched some, with the goal of improving the article's completeness and sourcing, when I saw here that Pmetzger has begun a similar improvement process already. I'll first look at what Pmetzger has done and then if I have any further improvements to make I'll integrate them. By the way, kashmīrī, while stealth canvassing is of course a real thing, I think we should assume good faith: a reasonable explanation for why people are chiming in and making efforts to improve the article is that they know the subject's specific field and thus understand the subject's importance within that field. My goal, and I assume Pmetzger's as well, is to make the article reflect a reality that we already know (from long familiarity with the field and the subject's work within it) to be true. The fact that the article did not formerly reflect this reality is the problem, and the solution is to fix it. --Karl Fogel 17:36, 31 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't mind help improving the article, Karl Fogel, there's a lot to do. Pmetzger (talk) 19:11, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
 * If it helps to make a better Wikipedia, then of course it net positive. For now, the article reads like a CV - it lists all the positions, current Board memberships, past Board memberships, and what looks like a complete publication list. Turning it into an encyclopaedia entry will require quite some work. — kashmīrī  TALK  19:32, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, kashmīrī .  The article could definitely be further improved, though that's a somewhat separate question from subject's notability.  I've tried to add some material that would make it into a better encyclopedia entry, by including Woodcock's activism against the sale of the .ORG registry -- that certainly belongs here.  (One consequence was that I then realized another Board membership to add to the existing list, a membership that's directly related to the aforementioned activism, so I added that in a followup edit.  While I normally wouldn't create such a list in an article I'm editing, if the list is already present I'll add to it, under the theory of "improve what's there already".  There is an argument for having those kinds of position lists in a biographical entry -- the reader often wants to know what the subject's institutional affiliations are -- but I agree it can make the article look rather CV-ish.)  In any case, I think it would be useful to separate the "is the subject notable" concern from the "what improvements could be made to this article to make it a better encyclopedia entry" concern.  There are now multiple sources cited about his contributions, and the article also now includes a greater number of topic areas.  The presence of the CV-like lists does not detract from the other material.  There is a lot of work still to be done, and, as with most Wikipedia articles, this one probably won't ever reach perfection.  --Karl Fogel 22:07, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, I still fail to understand why the reader should know that the subject was a commissioner at some Telecommunications Commission at a US town 20 years ago. It belongs more to a CV. Similarly, why do we need to know that the subject has published 1.5 pages (!) on a fairly arcane term "public core", or that he has co-authored a specialised survey? We certainly don't mention authors of all the myriads of surveys ever created and published (I myself had a few). Unfortunately, the article still reads borderline CV and WP:PUFFERY.
 * Additionally, sentences like "Woodcock built the first global-scale FIPS 140-2 Level 4 DNSSEC dnssec signing infrastructure" – where we know that it wasn't him alone to build it, there certainly were more people there. Or "Woodcock has developed networking products for Cisco, Agilent, and Farallon" – when certainly he worked with others on them (unless someone can source that he was, for instance, the chief architect of those protocols?). As I am seeing it, there is plenty of sentences about what the subject did in his lifetime, with significant WP:PEACOCK, but relatively little about why all of it merits a place in an encyclopaedia. — kashmīrī  TALK  22:48, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Hey, I'm not defending those things :-). I agree with you about some of that stuff, though in a few cases it's a judgement call.  I just didn't feel like removing those items when I could focus my time on adding encyclopedia-worthy material instead.  (You could remove things you feel are inappropriate; I suspect you have a clearer idea of what they are than I do, so you might do a better job than I would.)  My assertion is just that if one ignores the CV-style stuff, there is still a biography of a notable person remaining.  Right now I think it's the opening paragraph that probably needs the most work, and that's where I'll focus next (though I may not have a chance to do it for another couple of days). --Karl Fogel 23:06, 31 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it.</b> 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.