Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cloud engineering


 * 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. Closing as no consensus. There appears to be significant concern that the article was trimmed prior to AFD. In my opinion, a link to a prior revisions is plenty to carry on the discussion. However, there is sufficient concern in this discussion to warrent a close with no prejudice to renomination especially after WP:PAYWALL has been clarified to the nominator. v/r - TP 01:36, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Cloud engineering

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Subject not sufficiently verifiably notable for dedicated article, which was written by a conflicted editor using original research and citing unreliable sources including blogs, event agendas, conference panels(!?) and/or irrelevant sources. The closest thing to a verifiable reliable source failed to satisfy WP:PAYWALL. Hence I propose:
 * Delete or Merge with cloud computing -- samj in out 16:55, 7 September 2011 (UTC) -- samj in out  16:55, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Please note the comment above is the opening comment by the nominator, not a !vote by an independent editor. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:02, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment Two other editors had already requested the article be deleted on its talk page so I have referred them to this AfD. -- samj in out 17:04, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Weak delete I can't see any distance between this and cloud computing. It might change in the future, but I don't think we're there yet, and more importantly, neither are any good sources. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:31, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Withdrawn on account of the large deletions carried out by the nominator, just prior to nomination. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:02, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Note that I cited the (many) policy violations in the process of trimming back the article, and it was only once I realised there was no meat to it that I nominated it for deletion. -- samj in out 22:58, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Back in July I had the same experience as Sam, working on the article to improve it, realizing there was little there to work on and then proposing on the talk page that we delete it. Based on my own experience, I suggest we assume Sam's good faith in this. Joja  lozzo  23:11, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * GF would be a lot easier to assume in such cases if the nominator made such a process clear in the nomination. You may be right (as mentioned, I haven't since had time to read these sources), but Caesar's wife looks a right slapper when these things are hidden. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:21, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete - due to lack of secondary sources. I'm not sure it should be merged either. Wait until there's a text book about it - the originator of the article is probably working on one but it needs to be published before we have an article here. Joja  lozzo  18:59, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Comment Before !voting, editors might wish to check this version, as it was this morning at four times the size and with nineteen references, before it was drastically trimmed by the AfD nominator. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:02, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Non-voting, pro-delete comment - even in that bulked up version, there were no secondary sources and the primary sources aren't particularly reliable - mostly conference proceedings. Joja  lozzo  19:51, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Please don't double-!vote. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:11, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Even if you claim on my talk page that this is a breach of policy, still don't double-!vote. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:02, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep – Every reference was removed from the article by the nominator. Per user Andy Dingley, refer to this version: this version to make an objective assessment of the topic's notability. This version has accessible content via the internet, which serves to collectively qualify and establish the notability of the topic. The sources pass General notability guidelines to qualify inclusion of the article on Wikipedia, particularly (per General notability guidelines): "Significant coverage" means that sources address the subject directly in detail, so no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention but it need not be the main topic of the source material." and ""Reliable" means sources need editorial integrity to allow verifiable evaluation of notability, per the reliable source guideline. Sources may encompass published works in all forms and media, and in any language. Availability of secondary sources covering the subject is a good test for notability." Northamerica1000 (talk) 00:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment Every reference removed was accompanied by policy violated (WP:SPS, WP:RS, WP:PAYWALL, etc.) so can you please identify specifically which sources "pass" the WP:GNG? Specifically:
 * Authors blog — fails WP:RS
 * Author's business? — fails WP:RS (and WP:COI, see also WP:ADVERT).
 * Gartner note — fails WP:V (per WP:PAYWALL)
 * Agenda item for conference panel moderated by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Irrelevant paper — fails WP:PAYWALL anyway
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for talk given at commercial conference by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Presentation for talk given at a commercial conference — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for conference panel attended by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Possibly relevant paper, refers to different term and fails WP:RS (per WP:PAYWALL
 * Use of cloud in traditional engineering is unrelated to subject — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Presentation for talk given at a commercial conference — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for conference panel moderated by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * Agenda item for conference panel moderated by author — irrelevant, fails WP:RS
 * If you're saying that I stripped the article in order to get it deleted then you are both mistaken, but once I had cleaned it up I realised there was so little to it that it may as well be deleted/merged. -- samj in out 08:06, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This debate has been included in the list of Technology-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 00:44, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * <small class="delsort-notice">Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  — • Gene93k (talk) 00:44, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Where's the policy that says all references must meet WP:RS?
 * We require some RS so as formally to demonstrate notability. We do not require all refs to meet the same standard. In this case, conference papers are likely to be highly illustrative and valuable additions to an article and so should be included, but we may still exclude them from the list of RS because of their lack of independence. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:38, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I contend that none of the sources meet WP:RS. -- <u style="text-decoration:none; font-family: papyrus;">samj <sub style="color:maroon;">in <sup style="color:green;">out 11:15, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Then that can be reason to AfD the article. It is not reason to remove the refs, then to AfD the stripped-out article. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:37, 8 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Procedural Keep - I've voting keep on the basis of a flawed nomination, which infers there is some big principle violated called "WP:PAYWALL." Here is how WP:PAYWALL actually reads: "Access to sources: Verifiability in this context means anyone should be able to check that material in a Wikipedia article has been published by a reliable source. The principle of verifiability implies nothing about ease of access to sources: some online sources may require payment, while some print sources may be available only in university libraries. WikiProject Resource Exchange may be able to assist in obtaining source material." Carrite (talk) 14:52, 8 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete - I say that as someone some of whose work in Cloud Infrastructure has gone live this week. Implementing a Cloud Infrastructure is just another very large distributed system problem: you have users to authenticate; they ask for resources over a remote API, you give them to them (VMs, messaging services, database services etc), you bill them. Nothing that profound, just hard to get working. Oh, and you have to design it to scale to thousands of machines and be resilient to failure but again, not that new. We don't call this "Cloud Engineering", we call it "test driven development of datacentre-scale applications". Now, the users of these systems have to design applications that have to be agile, to work in a world of change. Again, "test-driven development of distributed applications hosted in a cloud environment". Not Cloud Engineering. That said, I do strongly believe that future applications will be different. They may be datacentre scale [My other computer is a datcentre], [The Datacenter as a Computer]. There are fundamental changes in architecture here, but I don't think we'd (currently) call it cloud engineering. Datacentre-scale is a better way. (That said, MS Azure does expose some of this architecture to paying customers). Then there are the applications that run in an amazon-style infrastructure, but are more built around traditional applications deployed in an IaaS world. And I suppose there are the half-way houses: VMs using infrastructure services: key-value stores, messaging, etc. It's certainly a new environment to code in. But to call it "Cloud Engineering?". It seems like Wikipedia is being used to create a term here, rather than document the existing state of the world. As evidence of this, I will cite one discipline that Cloud Engineering claims to encompass: Web Engineering. Look at that article? The web has been around for 20+ years, application servers are at least 15+ years old, and yet still that term Web Engineering isn't in widespread use. Maybe once the Web Engineering article is out of start-grade we can worry about Cloud Engineering -or whatever it is called by then- but for now, it's just repeating opinions and gartner-group buzzwords. SteveLoughran (talk) 21:41, 10 September 2011 (UTC)


 * As an aside, I looked at the original author's contributions, and they not only fall under the category of self-promotion, he's gone through a large amount of the software engineering and cloud computing articles to insert x-refs to an article on a topic that nobody else has encountered. If you search for "cloud engineering" then there's almost nothing on the topic; this article comes first and second comes a [|presentation] which introduces the datacentre-scale topics I mentioned earlier, and indeed, cites the same classic google reports. I fear that Tony is not only trying to get more citations for is ACM article on wikipedia than it gets in the rest of the computing industry (two citations; not read it myself yet to have an opinion on it), he's trying to create a new concept by way of wikipedia -indeed, a whole new category- and then take credit for it. This not only not how the ACM works, it's not how the academic side of the computing industry works. I don't cite my papers or books -neither should anyone else. If your work is seminal enough, someone else will do it for you. Now I'm going to have to d/l and read the article and strip out all citations that aren't appropriate.


 * returning to the topic of this AfD, I think I will start an article on datacentre-scale computing. That will cover many of the issues, but I won't cite my work, and I will use the terminology that other people use. No cloud hype in the title. SteveLoughran (talk) 07:49, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment: The author also created an article about themselves, which has been deleted (albeit some time ago): Articles_for_deletion/Tony_Shan. -- <u style="text-decoration:none; font-family: papyrus;">samj <sub style="color:maroon;">in <sup style="color:green;">out 09:41, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Steve, thanks for commenting, as I trust your judgement on this.
 * To go back to my previous delete comment, is this a delete because the discipline doesn't exist yet, or because it can't ever exist? IMHO, I know what "cloud engineering" is. I can draw you its boundaries, but I don't know whether any workers in the field have yet created material that falls within it. It looks here as if there's a COI / SPS / puffery problem more than anything: one person is jumping the gun to self-promote (see also Web 3.0) before there's an established corpusfor us to pick over and document. As before, I suspect deletion is currently the way to go.
 * Do you though feel that there is not yet a discipline for cloud engineering, or that there really never will be one? I still feel that there will be one, once it's established. The cloud is important, so I hope someone will be taking an engineering approach to it, not just letting the PHBs and the charlatans split the money between themselves. Wikiprecedent is that articles once deleted are hard to re-create when ripe - WP isn't a WP:RS, but AfD is bizarrely seen as RS by some vocal deletionists for proving non-notability in the future. I'd thus have no problem here with a content-free stub under Cloud engineering, even if it said no more than "Cloud engineering is the application of robust software engineeering approaches to the Cloud. No-one has yet worked out the details for doing this, and the nearest we've come is web- & datacentre engineering."
 * I agree that web != cloud. I would disagree though that cloud is no more than a datacentre, and that it can be managed similarly. IMHO, a cloud has to be implemented over multiple sites of available resource, and it has to be free of single-point failures affecting any one datacentre. Many of the service-purchase issues are the same between them, but single-host clouds are not clouds - they can break.
 * As to the WP aspects of this, I'm a lot happier voting delete on a large bad article I can see than on a pre-stripped one. No offence to those involved in this article, but that's a technique popular for deleting articles by gradual cuts that's used way too often by some other unscrupulous editors. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Another good analogy is Internet engineering (which you'll see is a redlink, as it should be) — the web engineering article is just a repository for original research and a spam trap, as this article would certainly become. Note that I have rattled off the disciplines mentioned here in the cloud computing article, and would suggest that when/if that section outgrows its host we move it to a separate page. -- <u style="text-decoration:none; font-family: papyrus;">samj <sub style="color:maroon;">in <sup style="color:green;">out 15:39, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

I had a look at the paywall references that I could get at through IEEE and ACM access. [12] is a tutorial, not even peer-reviewed to conference standards; it gets cited by some of the other papers by Shan and a colleague. [13] and [15] are pretty much the same 2 page abstract reformatted for different events. There's nothing seminal in any of them. If you want something good, look at the paper Above the Clouds. SteveLoughran (talk) 10:01, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Keep Uncertain I have almost never said "bad faith nomination", but this one justifies it.  Removing all of the valid 3rd party  references from an article and then listing it for AfD is outrageous and prejudicial. Such a tactic can delete anything. The nom repeatedly cites WP:PAYWALL, which basically says the exact opposite of what he thinks he does: all published RSs are acceptable, print or online, paid or free access. Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia, not a guide to the free internet only. In computer engineering, as in most academic fields, almost all RSs are paid access--unfortunate as that may be, both for us and the world in general. While we wait for open access, we should do what we can to summarize the information from such sources. Many of the sources are from IEEE, so there is no justification for the nom calling them not RSs.   The article does need a rewrite; I agree there was an excesive degree of self-promotion, but that can be solved by editing.  One delete !voter above says to wait until there is a textbooks about it--that is not the WP standard of notability, but something much more restrictive .   DGG ( talk ) 06:26, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Withdraw: This was a bad faith article by an editor with a record of abusing Wikipedia to promote himself and his work, and a good faith effort to clean up after him (albeit with a misunderstanding of how WP:PAYWALL works — I read "Verifiability in this context means anyone should be able to check that material in a Wikipedia article has been published by a reliable source" and assumed it meant I should be able to verify the claims without having to pay for the privilege). I had originally intended to just clean up the article, but when I did there was only this worth keeping (and even then, see User:SteveLoughran's comments above as to why even that's not appropriate). -- <u style="text-decoration:none; font-family: papyrus;">samj <sub style="color:maroon;">in <sup style="color:green;">out 08:06, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I have struck out some of what I said earlier; I sincerely apologize for it. It was apparently just an attempt to deal by deletion what should have been dealt with by editing, combined with annoyance out at an excessive promotional list of references which should have been similarly edited, not deleted. I over-reacted to that  removal of references. I too have known the feeling that after a good deal of work on a promotional article, there's nothing left, & it does incline a person to deletion.    But I admit to some confusion about how we are to deal with concepts like this. We've recently had an instance of people inserting a group of randomly combined words, and calling them concepts.  If this is equivalent to some other concept the articles should be merged, at this point probably in a separate discussion..   I'm not expert in the subject, or I'd give it a try.  I've changed by !vote to "Uncertain".    DGG ( talk ) 15:34, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * 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.