Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wouter van Oortmerssen


 * 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. § FreeRangeFrog croak 00:03, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Wouter van Oortmerssen

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Lacks reliable independent secondary sources to establish notability as required by WP:GNG and fails to state a reason the subject should be notable in lieu of sources under WP:ANYBIO. All but one of the sources offered are WP:PRIMARY and thus unhelpful; the one that isn't primary is an WP:SPS blog post and equally unhelpful. As an WP:ACADEMIC, he might qualify based on his scholarly work but a search of Google scholar turned up only a few minor papers with only a few citations. (Generally speaking, a significant paper is one with >1000 citations; this subject's top paper only received 6 citations, which is basically nothing.) Googling failed to turn up anything useful on the web or in books. His main claim to fame appears to be the creation of some toy programming languages and a game engine, all of apparently similarly questionable notability. It's possible I missed something but I don't think so.

Also, please see related AfD at Articles for deletion/FALSE. Msnicki (talk) 18:37, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete&mdash;I'm seeing claims that he is a "legend" in the Amiga community, but that doesn't seem to have translated into coverage in WP:RS. Lesser Cartographies (talk) 21:48, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of video game-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 01:39, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Netherlands-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 01:39, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
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 * Delete no clear notability, and written as a personal autobio.  DGG ( talk ) 02:05, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete. No evidence of passing WP:PROF nor WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:03, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep 37 hits in Scholar. Fully, either his articles, cited by his peers, or articles citing him or his work. No fluff, no trivial mentions. Compare that with OpenTTD, an open-source programming language. 50 hits on Scholar, many of them trivial mentions of the use of OpenTTD to test other things. Both are related to the bastard child that none of the academics who contribute to WP want to even admit exists-computer games. But one of them is done for FUN. O, please. Must we? Games for fun? And the other is Wikipedia's favorite son, open source. We are open source, after all. You do the math. It was obvious to me before I hit a single link. Anarchangel (talk) 02:34, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Upon reflection, I recall that archness and sarcasm are less productive than other tones. Do not have the energy to fix it, though, today. Anarchangel (talk) 02:41, 21 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm confused. How do you get 37 hits?  When I click the Google scholar link above, it reports "About 33 results (0.12 sec; Showing 33 matches)".  The top 3 results are "Cube" with 3 citations, "The Cube Engine" with 2 citations and "Concurrent tree space transformation in the aardappel programming language" with 6 citations (consistent with what I said in my nomination).  Do you see something different when you click?  Are you arguing that 6 citations should be enough under WP:SCHOLAR?  And what is your point about 50 hits for OpenTTD?  Are you arguing WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS?  I'm completely at loss to understand your !vote.  Can you help me, please?  Msnicki (talk) 03:10, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Google searches are the weakest evidence, only a little better than assertions. This is partly why. It is possible to get different results for a search. I may also have been in error with the 37, but I do not think so. At any rate, I now see 33 results and the same top three as you. The subject has very much caught the imagination of his niche community with his frequent reworking of code in innovative and imaginative formats, and to a lesser extent, with the unusual names for his code. He has caught an awful lot of fan press with the former and latter together. The Scholar results are more the result of his code than its funky names, I should imagine, and there are nearly as many scholarly works dealing with him and his work as there are for an entire open source coding system, including all the instances where people are making tests of other code or hardware etc, and using OpenTTD as a standard. These mentions of TTD would be trivial, as the focus of the test is a result unrelated to OpenTTD. I surely hope that explanation is sufficient, as I would not be capable of explaining it more clearly. Anarchangel (talk) 00:23, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I also don't fully understand what Anarchangel is trying to communicate, though I understand van Oortmerssen wrote something game-related ten years ago, and Archangel thinks Wikipedia contributors are academics with a bias against games. While one could argue with that, it's beside the point. Checking Google Scholar, I found no papers by van Oortmerssen in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings. There are a few references to a webpages titled "Cube", "Cube 2", or "Cube Engine" at his website "cubeengine.com" (e.g., see detect_cheat.pdf in some conference proceedings and less formal writings. Most of the results returned by Google Scholar do not mention van Oortmerssen at all; Google tries to guess what results might interest a person, it doesn't search for actual occurrences of a search term. Other results returned included van Oortmerssen's PhD thesis, and credits in a few books that printed a funny photo of Richard Stallman, taken by van Oortmerssen. ––Agyle (talk) 01:55, 23 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete, did not find evidence of notability in multiple independent reliable sources, nor does his work meet academic biography guidelines (WP:PROF). This 2001 OSNews interview, cited in the article, counts for something; it begins "Wouter van Oortmerssen is a living legend in the Amiga community". Perhaps there is other coverage we don't have access to in old Amiga magazines or something, but unless properly documented, I would not presume notability. If someone really wants to work on this biography, they should try contacting him to see if he can suggest publications that covered his work; some people keep clippings of that sort of thing. ––Agyle (talk) 01:55, 23 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete — The OSNews interview is almost but not quite enough to establish notability. I checked GBooks, which didn't turn up anything either (they have some old computing magazines, I was hoping to hit some Amiga-centric ones). There just doesn't seem to be enough raw material here to write an actual biography, rather than a list of trivia. If someone can expand the article with material from old Amiga mags, I might change my mind. Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 16:36, 23 July 2014 (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.