Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/SkyOS (3rd nomination)


 * 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. Seems like this is a notable work after all and the text quality issues mentioned in the deletion nomination are being worked on Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 05:36, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

SkyOS
AfDs for this article: 
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I nominated this article for deletion considering the following facts:

(1) It was written like a promotional advertisement to the operating system and the person who created it. After some years after the last AfD, this article still has a lot of problems that evidence the apparent lack of notability and how POV it is.

It is enough to quote some parts to see why it is like an advert:

(1.a) Biased wording. "SkyOS is the result of over ten years of work by Robert Szeleney and volunteers."

The above statement was written alike "how hard was the 'good work' of the developer(s)". An editor unrelated to the subject of the article would have written something like "SkyOS was being developed by ... since/during ..." and cited a source, something this phrase does not have. Of course, it could be rewritten if the article would be notable, but again, here there is no sources.

(1.b) Promotional. "So much attention, in fact, that by the end of that same year, the SkyOS community had tripled in size, and Szeleney had hundreds of active beta testers downloading and testing his twice-monthly releases."

(1.c) Fanatic and "garage band" POV. "A young man at the university, Szeleney and several friends began the "Sky Operating System" as an experiment in OS design. As the years progressed and the other founding members of SkyOS became distant from the project, Szeleney continued work on the operating system in his spare time."

This looks like the same case of WP:GARAGEBAND but applied to developers of an obscure operating system as the crew and the software itself as the band.

(1.d) Written from the perspective of the main developer and anecdotal issues unrelated to the article. "Szeleney's full-time job was in automation programming, and he already had a fair understanding of operating system design. But he continued to use SkyOS as a learning device, releasing four versions under an open source license."

"Because of significant differences at the source level, Szeleney stopped thinking of what was under development as the fifth version of his operating system, and the name "SkyOS 5.0" was rebranded to simply "SkyOS". A more professional demeanor was taken throughout the project, and Szeleney even considered incorporating under the name "Djinnworks"."

Here (I guess the developer himself) wrote what was in his mind but as 3rd person to mask the fact he wrote those quotes himself, trying to show the reader as it was written by someone else.

(2) Almost every source cited is from the (defunct) website of the article's subject, so here we have self-published (WP:SELFPUBLISH) and primary (WP:PRIMARY) sources, therefore the neutrality and factual accuracy could be disputed.

As of 4 March 2019 there are 14 references, from which 12th is the only one independent to the subject and the remaining 13 sources are citations to (archived copies of) pages of skyos.org, the former official website of the operating system. The only independent source is a broken link (can be found in Internet Archive here) and it directed to a comment on a brief entry of OSNews, but not to the article itself, so it could be more questionable as reliable source.

(3) There are parts without any cited reliable source.

History does not have any independent and reliable source, and most of it does not even have any cited source. Subsection "Components", "SkyFS" and "Porting applications" among others also does not cite any sources.

(4) First and second AfDs were flooded by IPs and new-registered users who argued (or better said, voted) things in a way they did not provide any valid argument, such as:

(4.a) "It's a long-standing article (active since at least 2004) about a popular, actively-developed piece of software, and it gives relevant and non-biased information. It is by no means an advertisement. Take a look at the content, and even the page history: nothing here is an advertisement any more than the OS X page is an advertisement. And as to irrelevancy, try searching for articles containing "skyos". At least fifteen computer-related articles mention it ON WIKIPEDIA. I think a user with otherwise no history on Wikipedia has learned the procedures for deletion and is now wasting our time. Alex Forster, 68.32.200.186 (talk) 21:03, 2 March 2008 (UTC)"

This user argued that the article is notable because it was created long time ago, because it is supposedly popular (what is popular and how, I do not know, and also without citing references to that claim). Not valid arguments at all. Also saying that it is relevant, non-biased and not-an-advertisement does not magically make it that way. The user after diverted to something unrelated, that is another article (it does not matter if the other article is or not biased, the article discussed in the AfD was "SkyOS", not "OS X"). Finally argues that being mentioned in another Wikpedia articles makes it also notable, but let's consider that is frequent to POV-pushers to try to make their POV articles look like notable by adding links to it from another Wikipedia pages.

(4.b) "Strong Keep Removed the critism section because of complete wrong and therefore irrelevant information. (see articles dicussion page for more details) Robert Szeleney, 90.146.34.54 (talk) 19:35, 2 March 2008 (UTC)"

The main developer himself removed content, what was conflict of interest.

(4.c) "Keep I agree with Peter above me, this is not a form of advertising, if you think so then you need to deleted half the articles on wikipedia.... Liam Dawe — 82.46.55.243 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 23:09, 2 March 2008 (UTC)."

Lots of comments like this one above were made, who can be depicted as fanatic, without providing any valid argument.

(4.d) "Keep Seems to be a significant project with enough media coverage. Given the smarts they're showing, I predict that this will be a notable OS when released, so why delete an article we'll have to recreate later? (BTW, SkyOS is not open-source, and is intended to be a commercial product one day. Also, the article needs a bit of copyediting.) CWC 13:37, 10 March 2008 (UTC)"

Here we have a personal opinion and connection to the subject. It says that it is "significant" and has "enough media coverage", but where are the sources to confirm that claims? Also it WP:BALLed affirming it "will be a more notable". Not valid at all.

(4.e)

Finally let's quote the following statement who depicts well why popularity is not notability and the lack of valid sources. Being linked by website does not mean it is notable. "Comment: Wikipedia wiki-linking itself or "Google search results" are invalid forms of notability tests. Wikipedia requires reliable references from valid third parties. The only one approaching a notability test is the said Magazine cover you added. However, this lacks any details about the magazine or the contents, also making it invalid. If you have an real references, page numbers (etc), I suggest you add them to the article. Imacreditcard (talk) 16:41, 10 March 2008 (UTC)"

Also please take in mind the "Wikipedia effect": when a completely unknown subject without reliable sources becomes known after it gained an article in Wikipedia, so after that other websites began to talk about the subject on the basis of the Wikipedia coverage, which in turn begins to link to that other sites as the "independent sources".

Therefore, I consider the AfDs did not have any valid argument supporting to keep the article.

After the AfDs, the issues were not fixed at all.

Zerabat (talk) 18:59, 8 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. Zerabat (talk) 19:14, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 19:58, 8 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Delete All the sources are its own dead website. Reywas92Talk 22:12, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

*Delete Per nom, it is really a bullshit article! -- Editor-1 (talk) 04:43, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment I will look for some RS (brief search shows at least some "weird 25 OSs" kind of articles in usual tech sources). As of other article issues, TNT to stub-like state is cheap and - in this case - best way to go (assuming my search for sources is successful). Pavlor (talk) 09:04, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * By done this edit, the article is in better status and with the sources it has now, there is no problem to keep it. Editor-1 (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Best source I found so far is an article on root.cz (Czech tech news site, mainly Linux focused; has editorial staff and publishing company in background, so it may pass RS test), there are also more short news about SkyOS. English language sources are scarce. Several short news (and longer articles) are on OSNews.com, but I´m not sure, how to judge this one (claims to have editorial staff, but may be closer to a blog, it is not clear, how rigorous is editorial control over submissions from external contributors). Other than that, only a passing mention on The Register , or article on sites with unclear reliability , . So, we have one RS webpage with one solid article and few short news (root.cz) and one maybe (or not) RS with plenty of content about SkyOS (OSNews.com). This could be enough for me to rewrite the article starting with TNT, but notability is clearly borderline (even by my quite low standards). Pavlor (talk) 19:41, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Other sources: short article on zdnet.com, 6 slides on Der Standard webpage (apparently the OS has Austrian roots). Pavlor (talk) 09:16, 12 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep and improve. Deletion is not clean up, which means your whole Afd is flawed. It is clearly notable. As regarding point 4, Bilby voted keep at the time, so it wasn't as much as IP,SPA fest as you say. I think if can drastically reduce it in size, a wee article that is cleanly sourced will emerge.   scope_creep Talk  09:36, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I started basic rewrite (well, trimming most promotional parts; at half of original article size now), but this article requires a complete rewrite. I will continue by adding proper references, if I find the time (probably not before the end of this week). For now, I will probably only put best sources I found in the "further reading" section, so the article is not entirely without sources. As of notability, I will look into some archived pages (byte.com comes in my mind), at least some coverage would certainly help in this regard. Pavlor (talk) 10:05, 10 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep Not many high quality sources available, but enough - in my point of view - to establish notability. As the OS is dead now, there is no danger this article will serve as a vehicle for promotion. I will rewrite the article (probably during weekend). Pavlor (talk) 09:24, 12 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Comment Basic article rewrite done. Someone should "anglicize" text I wrote and rewrite the lead. There is not much more I can do to improve the article. Respectfully asking fellow editors, and , if this rewrite is sufficient to change their decision. Pavlor (talk) 09:06, 15 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Keep. It looks like the promotional statements have been deleted or re-phrased. The ZDNet and NewsForge references are suitable for establishing notability. Most of the OSNews authors seem to be random people, but Eugenia Loli is the former editor-in-chief of OSNews. While her statements are brief and inadequate for estabilishing notability on their own, they are suitable for providing supporting information. I am unable to read the content of the Czech and German web pages. I shall try Google translate later. Axl ¤ [Talk] 11:13, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * The Der Standard reference (in German) looks like a good source that helps to establish notability. The Root.cz references (in Czech) are rather brief. They are suitable for sourcing information, but they don't really support notability. Axl ¤ [Talk] 12:35, 15 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Comment. Source 8 (https://www.root.cz/zpravicky/vyrazne-upravy-v-systemu-skyos/) it's just a translated copy of a OSNews stub (https://www.osnews.com/story/15151/skyos-gets-desktop-compositing-people-files-more/) without adding to or changing it anything at all, so here should be cited the original source. Now the text follows Wikipedia guidelines and its statements are sourced, so in the current state the article should pass the notability threshold. If there is not any other issue, this should be closed as keep. --Zerabat (talk) 18:04, 15 April 2019 (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.