Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Taco Hoekwater


 * 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   delete.  kur  ykh   05:04, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Taco Hoekwater

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

Software developer with no claim of notability and no reliable sources. Pax:Vobiscum (talk) 12:03, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions.  -- --Darkwind (talk) 12:44, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions.  -- --Darkwind (talk) 12:44, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep. He's one of the most important developers in the TeX world today. The article shows this and has reliable sources (the interview). Disclosure: I'm a friend of Taco.--Oneiros (talk) 13:05, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * From Verifiability: "Articles should be based on reliable, third-party (independent), published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". A single webpage just isn't enough. If there are no properly published sources it doesn't matter how important he is. Pax:Vobiscum (talk) 13:51, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * It will be difficult to find sources outside the TeX world, if you think all sources from there (articles, web pages) are not independent.--Oneiros (talk) 14:11, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * If we consider software developers under WP:AUTH, how should this proved here?--Oneiros (talk) 14:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't mind sources from the TeX world at all, but it has to be something a lot more substantial than a web interview. An online journal would be perfectly acceptable, but the interview currently used could hardly be called a published source. As mentioned below (in the Till Tantau AfD), even if he is notable there can't be an article if there are no proper sources. Pax:Vobiscum (talk) 17:04, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * There are these two articles in TUGboat: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-2/tb92hagen-euler.pdf and http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb28-3/tb90hoekwater-luatex.pdf Rivanvx (talk) 23:38, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Articles written by the subject himself do not establish notability because they are not third-party reliable sources. Cunard (talk) 05:14, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

 Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 18:49, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Weak delete. People don't realize what a liability wiki bio is for a private individual until some shits gets added to it and persists for months. Taco is well known in the TeX community, but that community can read the interview with him on tug.org without this 2-liner pointing to it. In the past, I had created a bio for Werner Lemberg, but later deleted it after I concluded I was the only editor watching or updating it&mdash; that was also based on a single interview on tug.org as semi-independent coverage about him. As far as the wikirulz are concerned, that kind of interview is too closely related to his work. The TeX papers he authored aren't a criteria for inclusion, unless they are widely cited, which is not the case here. Pcap ping  23:49, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Merge to ConTeXt. Clearly relevant to the scope of that article, and insufficient sourced material for a stand-alone bio.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:22, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete per the lack of reliable sources. This article fails Notability (people) and Verifiability because the unreliable sources are insufficient. Though I would oppose a merge of content sourced to a wiki and other sources of that nature, I would be all right with a "delete and redirect to ConTeXt". Cunard (talk) 05:10, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so consensus may be reached.


 * Delete per lack of reliable sources, and I disagree that a merge or redirect would be appropriate. Andrew Lenahan -  St ar bli nd  02:38, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Strong Keep: I'm not sure whether lack of reliable third-party sources mentioned by several people means that he's probably not import enough to deserve attention from outside of TeX world or that bibliography might be wrong or at least not confirmed strongly enough. So I'll try to explain both. Argumentation for Hans Hagen would be very similar to this one.
 * Importance: My first question would be: is TeX notable at all? The answer doesn't seem so obvious. It's a fact that Wikipedia uses it for writing equations, but I dare to claim that hardly a promile of people uses it or maybe even knows about it. It's importance is hardly comparable with Office. Maybe we should remove all the articles about TeX for the lack of notability? Assuming that TeX is still important enough – who are its main players? It is a bold statement of me, I know, but I claim that if we could somehow rank developers according to their brightness, innovation and influence (and take Leslie Lamport and Hans Hagen out of the game for a moment), Taco would rank #2, just after Donald Knuth (though still a giant leap after him). I probably need to explain that a bit further.
 * Nowadays there are four TeX engines worth mentioning:
 * TeX by Donald Knuth – (the original, if nothing else important for historical reasons)
 * pdfTeX by Hàn Thế Thành – most probably the most widely used at the moment, but development has officially been discontinued in favor of LuaTeX
 * XeTeX by Jonathan Kew - the first Unicode-aware engine that made a huge revolution; matured and widely adopted by LaTeX audience
 * LuaTeX by Taco Hoekwater - the next generation of pdfTeX, completely rewritten and "revolutionary" (yes, sorry, I know that this is a forbidden word if it was an article and not a discussion, but I can afford that word since it's just a discussion; maybe I need to explain that in TeX that's more than 30 years old now many things are very hard to do, so some breakthroughs really deserve that adjective); still only halfway of its development, widely adopted by ConTeXt users due to development of ConTeXt MKIV.
 * (I probably left out the implied eTeX and abandoned Omega/Aleph out.) Both Hàn and Jonathan Kew started the "revolution"; they are both much less active in development, also because both engines have almost reached the level of matureness; Taco took the "revolution" a step higher and after the 80.000$ grant has been given, he was able to devote almost his full-time for development that has run for a few years now.
 * Additionally, there are two graphical engines:
 * MetaFont by Donald Knuth
 * MetaPost by John Hobby (discontinued) and Taco Hoekwater who took over all the recent development
 * The following are the strongest user groups that also donate most money to projects:
 * TUG (global) lead by Karl Berry
 * DANTE (German)
 * NTG (Dutch) lead by Taco Hoekwater
 * GUST (Polish)
 * CSTUG (Czech)
 * (There are some others like Italian, French, Indian, UK, Korean etc., but they hardly participate in funding international projects)
 * The following conferences/meetings are most influential:
 * TUG meetings (global)
 * EuroTeX (European) — organized by Taco at least once
 * DANTE meetings (Germany)
 * BachoTeX meetings (Poland)
 * ConTeXt meetings — started by Taco and planned to be organized by him every two years; size comparable to any other meeting (this year's TUG might be bigger due to the fact that Knuth is paying a visit)
 * NTG meetings (Netherlands)
 * other local: Asian, French, Italian, Czecho-Slovak
 * The importance of ConTeXt might be smaller than that of LaTeX (slightly less users), but despite that, he's the #2 developer of ConTeXt
 * The only remaining means to compare influence in TeX world might be taking into account development of packages, fonts and maintainance of distributions such as MikTeX or TeX Live. I could start listing many other software developers with equally "unnotable" influence that exist in Wikipedia.
 * Checking the facts: Now for the accuracy of info listed on the page and analysing where it may be proven (even if that's only the primar source).
 * year and place of birth: no reliable sources cited, but he might be willing to send copy of id if that's the only valid way to prove it
 * main developer of LuaTeX: may be checked in SVN repository for commit logs; same is true for MetaPost
 * first user of ConTeXt: interview, probably also mailing list archives featuring the third user
 * MetaPost was originally written by John Hobby: may be checked in many sources, probably MetaPost manual to start with; further development by him may be checked in SVN commit log
 * to implement some features needed in ConTeXt and by Polish MetaType1 font developers: see interview, but I can also point to some discussions on the mailing list if needed
 * library called MPlib: may be checked in MetaPost SVN repository as well
 * improve efficiency and gain speed in ConTeXt: I can try to send some timings
 * which is known for a heavy use of MetaPost graphics: see http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/metafun-s.pdf
 * president of the Dutch language-oriented TeX users group (NTG) since 2009: properly cited
 * editor of the user group's magazine MAPS: cited, also this (Taco Hoekwater, Redactioneel)
 * first and main organizer of ConTeXt User Meetings: properly cited with link on meeting homepage where the whole paragraph may be double-checked
 * Development and packages: if any information is not clear or improperly cited (it should only contain primary sources that confirm the information; no independent secondary sources describing it in one whole article, I admit), I can try to fix it
 * I would be greateful if any further comments and votes for deletion could also point out whether the article about him fails in the first (he's not important) or second point (cannot be confirmed that information written in article holds for sure and which part of information is questionable). Thanks. I'm sorry for being so long, but I had no idea how to explain it in a shorter way. --Mojca Miklavec (talk) 03:28, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The article is being deleted not because he is unimportant; it is being deleted because the subject lacks sufficient coverage in reliable sources. When information cannot be confirmed for an article about a living person, the article fails two core Wikipedia policies Verifiability and Biographies of living persons and will have to be deleted. Cunard (talk) 03:36, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The fact that we don't have articles about Hàn Thế Thành, Jonathan Kew, Karl Berry, or John Hobby, all of who are notable in the TeX world, should be a strong indicator that real world notability in some field does not imply wikinotability for various reasons explains above by Cunard. I should add that the biography of Till Tantau, who wrote PGF/TikZ, has also been deleted recently. Pcap ping  08:20, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
 * The fact that the only TeXnicians which have clear wikinotability are Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport only shows that WP:BIO is buggy (because e.g. all players of San Juan Jabloteh are notable, while software developers in general are not) and Wikipedia is becoming irrelevant (of course the official view is that reality is buggy and Wikipedia is right). And it also shows that WP:ATD is ignored by most editors.--Oneiros (talk) 14:42, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
 * As response to Oneiros. Let me first say that I know literally nothing about footbal players. I clicked on a random link, for example Kevaughn Connell. There is an non-independent link (some so called "inseder" footbal site) that lists his date of birth, height and matches where he has played. Nothing else about his biography or whatsoever, not even a link like Taco's or Hans' interview where they do tell a bit about their own history. Absolutely zero about other facts about his bibliography. A google search on "Hans Hagen ConTeXt" returns almost 60.000 results (well, there are plenty of repetitions like multiple copies of mailing list archives etc.), while a google search on "Kevaughn Connell football" only returns 4.000 hits (though there certainly are some of existing links that would meet the criteria for "reliable third-party sources"). Related to football, another comment about a player that probably does deserve a place on Wikipedia, Zlatko Zahovič. I haven't seen even the slightest trace of any link to support his biography (though most of what's written is probably true, but nobody has ever complained about "citation needed"). I do agree with Nuujinn that athletes usually deserve more public attention than software developers, but they do make a living out of their fame without necessary bringing any progress to the world, while sofware developers are usually pretty well-hidden behind their product while doing some influential work. I'll be honest - I'm not able to name any of Microsoft developers (apart from Bill Gates), any Mac developer (apart from Steve Jobs, but I didn't even know his name when I already owned a Mac), and almost no names of any developer of any commercial or opensource software which I use every day and which does have a big influence on my work and productivity. Despite the fact that developers were much more important for my life than any athlete I can think of. --Mojca Miklavec (talk) 10:42, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment I didn't say "deserve", I said "have". Other stuff exists, and if you have found an article that you feel is not correctly sourced or the subject of which is not notable, please, be bold--nominate it for deletion, or edit it to make it better. -- Nuujinn (talk) 13:41, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment I just want to say that I started writting this biography because I see that Taco is "important" person in ConTeXt world. I tried to put notably sources for that article. If the article does not contains reliable sources, sorry: improve it. Don't delete. I prefer having a little information about a notably person in real world than nothing. But the wikipedia policy is what it's. If you apply, finally, it remains only tech web articles, oh not, it's another reason for deleting ;-). It does that more and more people left editing in wikipedia. --Xan2 (talk) 09:41, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom. Oneiros, I am sympathetic, but the fact is that athletes do in fact have more notability than software developers, especially those who work on FOSS projects. He may be very important to the TeX community, but that doesn't make him notable in the general sense. -- Nuujinn (talk) 22:52, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete Sorry, although I use TeX regularly, that doesn't change the fact that these people are mostly known within their community, not beyond it. I think most TeX users may only know Knuth's part but not the others.. TeX itself is well-known but the developers behind it generally aren't. - Simeon (talk) 10:06, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
 * This is almost equivalent to the statement (which is also true for me) that "I use wikipedia regularly, but have no idea about its founder." I bet that the vast majority of wikipedia users (both readers, but also writers) has no idea about who created it and doesn't care about that at all. I wonder if number of wikipedia readers who know the name of founder reaches a promile. However this doesn't make the founder unimportant. To the contrary: if there was no founder, there would be no Wikipedia (or whatever other product you may think of). Similarly, I have no idea who founded the company that created car that I drive, the computer I used, ... Most people probably have no idea who invented the lightbulb even if everyone agrees it's important and uses it literally all the time. But that doesn't make its inventor unimportant. (lots of irony: Who cares about Steve Jobs? It's Apple products that people worship, not Steve Jobs, istn't it?) When you say that you use TeX, you probably mean LaTeX and you probably do know Leslie Lamport at least and agree that he might be important. ConTeXt community and userbase is definitely smaller than the one of LaTeX. But I dare to claim that more than 10% (if not one half) knows about its author (Does anyone dare to make the same claim for the author of Wikipedia compared to the number of its readers?) I would accept the argument that TeX or ConTeXt is not important when compared to Office giants. But saying that even if A (author) is (vitally) important for C (context) and C is important W (world), but A is not important for W is violating the rules of logic. Several thousand people know Hans' and Taco's name (based on the fact that the number of subscribers of mailing list is 700 and that those care to read some 30 mails per day). That number may be small, but if the number of ConTeXt users is not much more than that, this implies that almost every user knows him. If number of ConTeXt users is much higher, say for a factor of 100, that means that ConTeXt is more widespread and important than we thought which increases program's significance (and author's significance as well). I agree with Oneiros that the rules for Software developers might need to be adapted. There is constant media attention about Firefox, but hardly any about people behind it. If these particular people were not there, we would all still be using IE. --Mojca Miklavec (talk) 13:43, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You're making some very good points and I agree with most of them. Inventors/creators/founders are very important indeed but the question is whether a separate article is warranted. In this case, I'm not so sure. Leslie Lamport would certainly also have an article even if LaTeX (I indeed meant LaTeX) never existed, due to his scientific contributions. Steve Jobs and Apple have almost become synonymous and he's also known for Pixar and other things. - Simeon (talk) 23:51, 17 May 2010 (UTC) See the history of this for example.--Xan2 (talk) 09:46, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Delete. Not seeing significant coverage of this guy by independent, reliable sources. Yilloslime T C  23:42, 17 May 2010 (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.